Over on Cymfony's Influence 2.0 blog, Jim Nail takes exception with the recent SCNR research that speculates spending on social media and conversational marketing will outpace that of traditional marketing by 2012. As I said in my comments to Paul Chaney's post on Social Media Today, I don't profess to be as smart as Jim, but my initial reaction is that he's both right and wrong. Right because there's certainly some over-inflation in the SNCR study (as giddy as I am to see it).

Where I disagree with Jim at a gut level is in the calculus about interactive marketing and how its trajectory informs the future for conversational marketing. I guess I see conversational marketing as infinitely more transformative and disruptive than either interactive marketing or online advertising, largely because it empowers consumers. Neither interactive (on its own) or online ads even come close to this; they, in fact, have done nothing but bug consumers. So, in IMHO, you can't use interactive as a benchmark, only as a rough milestone. I guess we'll see.