I’m already late on this one, but hell, I was busy with our own startup. Today was a rather dull day, a bit down, sorta bored and there ain’t anything interesting in the Inbox. Nothing of those emails that you can show around with your team and laugh, smile; the back-pain also suddenly hit me for some reason. Even George Carlin – Modern Man, though good, wasn’t enough to bring me back to the usual life.

What more better time than to read something to inspire, to steal and to spawn. So, I dugg up one of Paul Graham’s recently popular article about the Startup Ideas they’d Like to Fund. If you’re startup-ing or thinking to innovate (pun intended), head over there and spend sometime.

Out of all his awesome ideas, some which really caught my fancy are:

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A recent survey conducted by Buzz Marketing, and sponsored by Marketing Profs and Trackur, shows that more than half of the BtoB marketers polled aren’t adequately prepared for an online crisis.

Although the sample universe was small, it is an indication of what BtoB marketers are thinking and doing.

• 60% say they have a good understanding of their current reputation
• 63% don’t have a blogging policy in place
• 53% place strategic importance on measuring and monitoring their reputation in 2008
• Only 42% have a strategic plan in place to manage their online reputation
• More than half (54%) are not monitoring traditional media using services like Burrells/Luce or Bacons
• 63% are monitoring social media and blogs with free online services
• Only 33% use a paid subscription service to monitor online content
• 54% say they are leveraging social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn
• 45% are monitoring their brand on these social networks
• 71% say they are not developing widgets that can be added to social sites

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As a social media agency, we get inquires every day from companies who are trying to figure out how social media marketing will impact their current marketing and business models. As you can imagine, the primary reasons these companies reach out to us is because either a) they have a specific project they need our expertise in, or b) the company has quickly realized the demands of social media marketing on staff and resources.

Lets face it: even though social media marketing is generally less expensive in the long-run than traditional mass-marketing, it still poses a rather large expense on a company in regards to staff and resources. For instance, a company trying to employ social media marketing without hiring an agency would require its entire marketing department to become up to speed in social media marketing, internal staff to be trained and/or new staff hired, and a generous amount of internal resources in order to effectively employ the social media tactics.

This being said, I found a very interesting podcast (below) on PodTech about one such company that has discovered this through its latest foray into social media: H&R Block. In the following podcast, Paula Drum (VP of marketing for H&R) shares how one of the big surprises to social media marketing was, “how much human capital they had to spend to make the programs work”.

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