With the speed at which digital media and social media are moving, most organizations don’t have a digital strategy.  Understandably, they don’t even have a budget that takes digital and social media into consideration.

Because their budgets were created for yesterday, not today, there is a financial disconnect.  What I mean is their budgets are broken into different silos for established departments and past initiatives that can block the leaders from seeing new, more effective ways of accomplishing the organizations goals.  

While most organizations have line items for marketing, sales, conferences, training, publications, website enhancements, and IT infrastructure, they were likely created with an Information Age mentality.  That is to say, that information is to be pushed out through broadcast methods, static websites, unwieldy enterprise “efficiency” tools.  

The time has come to bust the budgeting buckets and reorganize them to take advantage of the Interconnected Age:  Do you really need to spend $20,000 on a mail-out survey?  How can you justify spending $150,000 on a quarterly magazine without knowing if anyone is actually reading it?

Most central offices think they need to sit in the Ivory Tower writing their internal operational manuals and capturing best practices.  Why not create internal wikis that allow those people doing great work to share and collaboratively write the manuals for you?  

Instead of staffing and maintaining a large customer service center, why not create a user community and let your customers help each other? 

When you start to understand the possibilities of digital and social media, you’ll begin to see that it’s not that you don’t have the money, but it’s that you don’t have the money organized in the right buckets.