Sometimes news takes a while to sink in – I reported on a Prediction – Social Media Spend to grow by +600% by 2014 – Forrester on April 24th.   A lot more coverage is popping up now supporting news that  47% Of USA CMO’s will Increase SMM Budgets according to a Forrester report on the USA Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014

- 71% of USA CMO’s say their budgets have decreased. But 47% of total USA CMO’s will increase their spend on social media marketing.

The Forrester Analyst who authored the Marketing Forecast, Shar VanBoskirk has a blog post in about it:

We expect marketer spend on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to reach nearly $55 billion by 2014.

This growth is due to marketers seeking lower cost, more accountable channels which are also widely used by their customers.

In fact, Marketing spend on Social Media is estimated to increase by 716 Million dollars this year to 3.1 Billion Dollars in 2014!   Consider what that means.

We know that Social Media’s main cost isn’t the tools, it’s time and energy.  Tools are fairly inexpensive, and everyone can be a content creator, right?    But Metrics and Meaning have yet to be in place, as I covered in Forrester Wave™: Social Media Listening Platforms, Q1 2009.

This information suggests the needed information and more spend is beginning to fall in place, THIS YEAR, during the Global Recession/Depression, and that Marketing  spend on Social Media is increasing faster than any other category (at ~34% a year).   What if that is a conservative estimate?   What if, in 2014, the true spend on Social Media is closer to 5 Billion Dollars?   What should we do now?

The Forrester Forecast also predicts the amount of total budget  spent on Interactive, as a percentage of Total marketing spend, will double in 2014 from what it is today – if today it’s ~10%, by 2014, it will be 20%.

While the news has been out for 3 months – it’s now making headlines in MarketingVox, Mashable, to name a few, because there’s a propagation delay between market conditions and the willingness to spend money  – and I think, now, CMO’s are more willing to chance Social Media, because so much less expensive than any other form of online marketing – and it may scale, which was one of the main complaints.

Also, Metrics are evolving quickly and we’re likely to see much more growth in this area in 2010-2011 (see At Buddy Media Tweetup and Twitter Mangement System Launch where companies like Buddy Media are integrating Twitter Metrics into Marketing Dashboard).