According to Forrester, over half of global marketers will increase their social media marketing spend in spite of the global recession and, in a separate study, Marketers' budgets for online and web 2.0 initiatives in 2009 are almost 50% higher than their budgets for traditional media.

The research found that half of marketers said they would boost budgets. Areas that they highlighted for investment included social networks, blogs and user-generated content.

However, the majority of social media budgets are not predetermined -- 45% said they were generated on an "as needed" basis throughout the year; and 23% said that their funds were scraped together from wherever they could find them.

The research also highlighted that money being allocated to social media comes at the expense of other budgets -- the biggest proportion of respondents (35%) stated that social media spend came out of the corporate marketing coffers; while 24% of the sample said that it came from the advertising budget.