No Recession in Sight for the Social Web

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research has a great post about why social applications will thrive in a recession. This is definitely encouraging new for me considering that I make my living from this industry. One of the primary reasons for this space’s continued growth is the low budget required for application development. Significant ad campaigns cost millions whereas social applications range from $10K to $200K depending on complexity.

The other primary driver of social applications is that they are measurable. Companies can track the number of users interacting with their application and can track the number of conversions to their existing web properties. According to Procter & Gamble, beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads. That’s impressive news and that means that social applications will be one of the primary advertisement channels of choice during a downturn.

I can speak from someone who interacts daily with clients looking for applications in this space, I have only seen growth over the past few months. My guess is that most of the readers of this site are experiencing the same thing. Even as the economy perks up over the next couple years I would guess that we will see a continued movement toward online advertising since it is much more effectively measured than traditional advertising. If you work in the digital space, have you seen any slowing in spending by businesses?