After laying out oodles of cash for television time and impressive spots, what do you do next to help cement your success? This year, you probably did a couple things. You previewed the spot online to build buzz. You made sure your website supported the brand proposition on click through. And in most cases, you built in multi-channel social engagement during and after the game.

But if you’re a marketer at Chrysler, Audi, Mercedes Benz, Skechers or any of the movie studios advertising big new movies, you forgot to think about the guy on the sofa with a smartphone in his hands. Especially the one who was interested in your brand. That’s right – you spent millions to reach consumers in a high-impact environment but didn’t build a mobile site to let them take action right away on the interest your ad created. In fact, nearly half of Super Bowl advertisers didn’t have a mobile site.

To quantify what they missed:

• In 2010, Pew Internet found that in the 30-49 age cohort, 43% of Americans now access the internet on their smartphones. (A 12 point increase over 2009.)
• Among the 18-29 year olds, that number increases to 65%.

And to put it in perspective alongside Twitter:

• Of the 30-49 age cohort, only 7% use Twitter.
• Among 18-29 year olds, just 14%.

To be fair, social media strategies we saw this year had more to them than Twitter – Audi’s “estate sale” Facebook promotion, for example. But Audi’s other big social concept was based on driving use of a conceptual hashtag – and consequently was aimed at a tiny fraction of their audience. (Among 50 – 64 year olds – those likely to buy a big fat Audi A8 – only 6% used Twitter, as of December 2010.) I’m sure the agency would point out that small groups of highly influential individuals tend to profile well against both advanced social media use and likelihood to influence purchasers. I know I’d probably haul out that rationale, but I’m not sure I’d really be able to feel good about it.

And if you’re Chrysler, and you just spent millions on a spot that powerfully communicates a new positioning for a company attempting to rise from its own ashes – how do you justify not providing an immediate next step?

For anyone looking for Super Bowl advertisers with great mobile sites that really delivered on the next step, check out Kia, Hyundai, GoDaddy, and VW. And be sure not to miss SalesForce’s mobile microsite for Chatter, which let you start the signup process for a free trial in a beautifully simple way – and gives Salesforce what they needed to follow up with you through your work email, thus moving the conversation from your living room sofa to the office. The site’s not elegant, but it’s remarkably effective at furthering prospect engagement.

I know from personal experience how hard it can be for the agency to affect decisions about the website; in many cases, the client’s marketing organizations are structured to split ownership of site and campaign decision-making and budgeting. And site development roadmaps are often built with far longer lead times than campaigns. These are gaps best closed by senior client-side marketers. The data is there to justify it – is the will?

Robert Davis is SVP Digital Marketing at PJA advertising + marketing. This post was written with research support from Tessa Sandler.

So just how involved are you in social media? In our recent survey of 350 marketing professionals conducted in conjunction with our friends at the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, we found that around 90 percent of senior marketing professionals use professional and social networking tools.  On average, they spend 19 hours a week on social media sites. And 55 percent read and share content through social media channels daily.

Nineteen hours is a lot of time out of a busy week, but these markets think it’s worth it. Three-quarters of them believe that social media is important for professional success as a marketer. A quarter said it is very important, and for a variety of reasons. The top reasons include everything from staying connected professionally to creating buzz about their companies to conducting research to better understanding their customers. And of course, they want to stay current on hot topics.

And yet, for all this activity, marketers still are jittery when it comes to using social media to drive business results or marketing leads.  In the cases of using social media for boosting word of mouth and understanding customers, for example, marketers’ confidence in using social media lags behind their belief in the importance of using social media.

Marketers may be ahead of the game when it comes to how they use and access social media.  One-fifth of survey respondents participate in social media via a smart phone. Another 54 percent participate via a laptop or netbook, which is a greater than 2:1 ratio over desktops.  This laptop/netbook usage, fueled by the rise of location-based services, will help drive the laptop to eclipse the stationary desktop computer.

So as a marketer, you are out in full-force when it comes to social media, just as much as your younger social media counterparts, and even if you are still working out the business applications.  For those of us old enough to remember when the Internet was introduced as a commercial tool, it was we marketers who were on the leading edge of the adoption curve and brought it into the mainstream. Is it deja-vu all over again?

To take the survey yourself, click here.

Our focus this time: social media policy and how it affects social media use and decision-making in the workplace.

The topline: despite a 35% increase in social media consumption to 5.88 hours per week, more than half of respondents across IT, HR and finance either do not have a social media policy at their company or are unsure if they do.

That was pretty surprising to us, though it reflects what we’ve heard anecdotally from clients: ‘You can’t use Facebook or Twitter at work; well, unless you get a special dispensation. Or, you know, if someone in Legal lets you do it and you promise not to tell anyone else in Marketing.’

Imagine if Internet access was dispensed in a similarly slapdash way.

For companies without a clear policy, or no policy at all, it’s clear they’ve got to step up and guide employees on how to properly represent their company when engaging and how to make their own IP accessible in social channels. We’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when employees take social media into their own hands with no lines or limits drawn for them.

As our President Mike O’Toole noted in a quote I wrote for him (just kidding), “Based on these results it’s clear that you really need to bring social media and user-generated content into all the ways you communicate with your colleagues and customers to be effective. There’s a clear opportunity cost if you don’t have a simple, clear policy that balances self-monitoring with company regulations. And since marketers are the owners of where social practices are moving for companies, these policies really ought to be coming out of collaboration between Marketing and Legal, with Marketing leading the charge.”

And the need is there, because social media usage at home and at work (which are more and more blurring into the same thing) continues its relentless march upward:

*  IT professionals spend an average of 5.86 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 3.81 with editorial content and 3.41 with vendor content

*  HR professionals spend an average of 6.02 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 3.89 with editorial content and 3.10 with vendor content

*  Finance professionals spend an average of 5.50 hours per week engaging with social media content, versus 4.45 with editorial content and 2.75 with vendor content

Next post: what the 3,000 survey respondents told us about mobile usage. And their wish list for their next mobile device.