So not that it's terribly surprising, but the headcount for in-house (corporate) social media teams seems to be growing â€" very quickly â€" despite the economy. Two years ago, even in the biggest companies, you had, at best, a collection of quarter-timers, loosely coming together around launches and campaigns.

Thereafter, part-time social media/community/online strategists started to take foot, now, shit, most companies have *at least* one dedicated person, with many, many companies having far more.

The other observation worth noting here are the organizational models, (err, model), which seems to in a lot of companies boil down to a very lean, very skilled cross-functional strategic team that establishes standards, protocols and practices that are then pushed out to a much larger set of business unit practitioners and regional teams for local implementation. It's just interesting to see familiar patterns of corporate organization and structure finally taking hold around a new discipline, a sign of the industry's maturation?