This week there seems to be a lot of reports, research and studies about marketers and social media. Here’s a sampling:

According to a new survey of 180 chief marketing officers at brands with revenues ranging from $250 million to over $10 billion, 55 percent of the CMOs at leading brands surveyed say they’re not too interested (22 percent), or not interested at all (33 percent), in incorporating the social networking sites into their marketing strategies. And just 10 percent of the CMO survey respondents say they already are using social networking sites in their marketing plans.

The report, out by Epsilon and conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, goes on to note that Internet forums (52 percent), webcasts and podcasts (47 percent), email (47 percent), blogs (37 percent), and Webinars (52 percent) outscored Facebook and MySpace (35 percent), in terms of being social media elements that marketing executives said they are very interested or somewhat interested in using.

The Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) recently released the results of its social media membership survey, which shows that most marketers are still in the early or experimental phases of adopting and measuring social media.

MENG, which has more than 2,000 executive-level members worldwide, conducted the survey last month and found that 67 percent of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes. Additionally, more than 87 percent of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts, according to the findings.

More than 67 percent of those surveyed say they will increase their social media advertising budget in 2009, however, nearly 80 percent say social media is not a fully integrated component of their marketing programs.

The MENG Social Media Practices survey results are available at www.MENGonline.com.

And despite some high-profile social media success stories, the social network ad market is suffering. In fact, eMarketer significantly lowered its forecast for US social network ad spending.

“In 2008, companies will spend $1.2 billion on US social network advertising, down 14 perecent from our previous estimate of $1.4 billion, published in May 2008,” says Debra Aho Williamson. “Even in 2009, spending will rise barely $100 million to $1.3 billion.” Read the entire report.

And finally, Williamson, offers up her predictions about social media marketing for 2009.

“E-commerce will be a growing revenue stream for social network sites. Expect both MySpace and Facebook to enhance their self-serve advertising systems to allow consumers and businesses to buy and sell real-world goods and services.

With US ad revenue growth slowing, smaller and niche social networks will have a tough time gaining traction and several may close up shop or be acquired by larger players. In addition, marketers that have built standalone social networks tied to their brands will either close them or migrate them to existing social network platforms where they can reach a broader audience.”

She adds that Facebook, “already a de facto business networking site because of the number of businesspeople who use it, will develop ad programs aimed at B2B companies. This will directly affect LinkedIn.”

She also predicts that Twitter will be acquired. “The company that buys it will use the Twitter infrastructure to offer targeted marketing and analytics to advertisers.”

Check out all of eMarketer’s analyst predictions for the coming year.