Charlene Li, author of Groundswell, who we interviewed recently, has given a talk on the future of social media.

Take a look at her slide show presentation. Charlene makes interesting points about how Twitter, for example, is being integrated into TV.

The marketing story of the past decade has been the growing fragmentation of marketing channels, and the need to find the right people in the right places at the right time.  There’s been a strong shift from blanket advertising towards targeted approaches through direct channels: mail, email, the Web and telephone, each with its own very specific characteristics, advantages and potential pitfalls.

Social networking sites and other user-driven media are yet another  channel that direct marketers are having to get to grips with. To help them figure it out, the Direct Marketing Association has launched its first quarterly social media report, identifying the marketing opportunities that exist within social media.

The report is produced by digital intelligence analysts StrategyEye, and covers the last quarter of 2008. It analyses how platforms like  Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are changing their business models, offering new types of content to attract advertisers and create new revenue streams for themselves.

The report also offers insights into how consumers are using social networking, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications.

Mark Brill, chairman of the DMA Mobile Marketing Council, says it’s a critical time for direct marketers to understand the marketing opportunities that social media present.

“It is a nascent industry, so confusion is commonplace as to how social networking and UGC websites are monetising their content, and how users interact with such media. These websites have great potential for highly-targeted marketing opportunities, so this report will help direct marketers to make informed decisions.”

The Report is available for download from the member research section of the DMA website.

A new report by Forrester says that half of marketers around the world are planning to increase their social media marketing spend. No great surprise there: the proliferation of blogging and social networking over the past few years is hard to ignore. But the report also reveals a lack of serious commitment, as well as confusion about objectives.

Forrester polled 145 companies with 250-plus staff. Of those whose marketers knew their budgets, three quarters said social media would take up less than $100,000 over the next year. But in most cases there is no social media budget as such – funds are generated “as needed”, or simply scraped together from wherever there’s a bit of slack.

The report’s author, Jeremiah Owyang, also says companies don’t have a coherent strategy towards social media, and are just trying out different approaches to see what works. He writes:

“If you continue to fund social applications only as experiments, you’re unlikely to be able to do enough to make an impact or to have a secure source of funding for the future.

“One way to put these efforts on a firmer footing is to concentrate on objectives and measure progress toward those objectives, rather than just experimenting to see what happens. … Without concentrating on measurable objectives, it will be difficult to justify further investment in the future.”

As one of the few marketing budget items increasing during the recession, social media marketing needs to be taken seriously and treated as a corporate asset, Owyang argues.

What’s needed are long-term programs, rather than short-term experiments, and for that there have to be dedicated resources in place, including both social media strategists and community managers.

The full report is available here.

A new piece of research by Nielsen shows that social networking is now more popular than email.

This will come to no surprise to anyone who works in an office or has teenage children. A preference for email is these days becoming the preserve of the middle-aged, just as a preference for talking on the telephone is the preserve of an older generation.

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow for faster communication to a much wider group of people. You may only have 140 characters in which to write a Twitter message, but you can relay it to hundreds or thousands of people.  As a tool for finding the person with the expertise to help you with a particular job, social networking sites are hard to beat.

Firms that attempt to ban employees using social networking sites look increasingly behind the times. Recently I spoke to the knowledge management expert Dave Pollard, who told me that young people in the workplace no longer cut themselves off from previous colleagues when they change jobs:

“They develop relationships that go on physically and virtually for a lifetime, and they draw on those trusted relationships over entire careers. So when organisations try and close down certain connectivity to make it available only within the intranet, they’re blocking people from getting information from most of the sources they find valuable.”

The way we work is changing – and businesses that fail to adapt will get left behind.