Serengeti has just published a new white paper: Measuring Social Media. Pick it up for free over at serengeticom.com and you’ll learn about how to measure social media and why it’s important.

Ok, we said it for you. Save your breath. Now come back with us to reality. You do have the budget because it is very likely that you are flushing valuable marketing dollars down an unproductive toilet somewhere in your current marketing programs. I personally dealt with a medium enterprise company that cut $100,000 in hard Yellow Page advertising this year. Rather than saying “Hey look, we saved $100k!” they played it smart and said “Hey look, we had budgeted these dollars and we were getting no real return. Let’s put these funds in a place where we can really make a bottom line impact.” A good portion of that went to long overdue social media programs.

They are not looking back. Why? Consider the following:

• 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 100,000,000 YouTube videos viewed every day
• 3,600,000,000 pictures stored on Flickr as of June ‘09
• 1,460% increase in visitors Twitter year over year for June ‘09
• 93% of social media users believe a company should have a social media presence
• 5,000,000,000 minutes spent on Facebook every day

You get the point right? Every day the numbers grow and the users of social media become more sophisticated. In addition, they buy products. They might even be interested in your products. If you’re not there for the opportunity you are costing your business valuable resources.

Whether you are in the social media game now or are considering getting into it, you need to do it right. The people are there and the numbers are growing. If you’re not then you may need to spruce up that resume a bit.

We’re hosting a dinner featuring Charlene Li, author of Groundswell, on Wednesday night at SES San Jose.  If you are flying into San Jose today or tomorrow for SES, find Serengeti’s Frank Reed on the trade show floor and give him your business card.  On Tuesday evening he’ll draw a winner for a free seat to this invitation only dinner.

Special treat:  Mike Grehan, the new VP and Global Content Director for Search Engine Watch, ClickZ and Search Engine Strategies will be on hand at the dinner to talk about the intersection of search and Social Media.