Social Media Activities as Commercial Tool will Double!

I was nosing around on the Internet and I ended up on the news item ´2010: Extreme much marketing in social media´. The news claimed that two to three marketers reserve a larger proportion of the marketing budget for social media activities. This is according to the research by the American marketing company Alterian. Alterion questioned marketers in the world to their plans in the area of marketing strategies. Almost 40% of the respondents who want to invest in social media said that they dedicate around 20% of the traditional budget for activities on social media. These figures are remarkable because only 16% of the consumers indicate to be influenced by commerce into social networking, as you can see in my earlier post (28 februari 2010).
The marketing activities on social media in 2010 will double, because currently 36% of the marketers use social media as a method for direct marketing. Another interesting point is that 42% of them do not uses ´clickstreamdata´ in their customer database processing. By this circumstance they cannot measure the impact of the online campaigns in social websites. It seems that many marketers are influences by the hype of social media as a commercial tool. The questioned marketers labeled social media also as a prerequisite for success.

What do you think? Is this invested money wasted or will consumers be more open to commercial activities trough social media over time?