Last week I had the opportunity to interview Paula Drum, the VP of Marketing at H&R Block, at the Social Media Strategies Conference. Just like the last time I interviewed Paula, the conversation was rich and informative.

One topic that I found especially interesting was when Paula made recommendations on what to do in the face of reduced marketing budgets in an economic downturn. Based on her experience that traditional marketing program are more capital intensive, and social media marketing programs are more labor intensive - she recommends that you move some of the people resources which are going to free up because of the budget reductions to social media marketing programs. Now that they do not need to manage as many lead generation or brand building campaigns, have them engage in the social media world.

Of course, you could take this a step further and voluntarilly move some more budgets from traditional marketing programs to social media marketing programs. Your returns may very well justify that…