Spendings on conversational marketing will most likely increase.

Joe Jaffe, who just released his new book „join the conversation“ (and very successfully bumrushed the charts on amazon) also conducted a study (together with the Society for New Communications Research and TWI Surveys) on how marketers might shift their budgets to conversational findings.

Here is an excerpt from his blog (the whole study is here):

• Nearly 57% of respondents report that in 5 years time, what they spend on conversational marketing will be greater than that of traditional marketing.  Another roughly 24% believed it would be the same as traditional marketing
• 70% are currently spending 2.5% or less of their communications budgets on conversational marketing, but two-thirds plan to increase their investment in conversation within the next twelve months
• Respondents noted that the primary obstacles currently preventing them from investing more in conversational marketing include: “Manpower restraints” – 51.1% “Fear of loss of control” – 46.9% “Inadequate metrics” – 45.4% “Culture of their organizations” – 43.5% “Difficulty with internal sell-through” – 35.8%

The rest you can find in his new book. I should get mine soon, amazon already notified me, that it shipped yesterday. (I helped Joe bumrush the charts on Sunday … )