Social Media and the Inc 500 - The Mattson & Ganim Barnes Report

February 2, 2007 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

ImageThe good news: Research shows awareness and use of social media (Message boards, social networking, online video, blogging, wikis and podcasting) is significant and apparently on the rise.

The rest of the story: More needs to be done to tighten the analysis and understand the extent and applications for which the use of social media is institutionalized.

Eric Mattson (consultant and blogger) and Nora Ganim Barnes Ph.D. (Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director for Marketing Research at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) released a study titled "The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500."An announcement of the study and some comments on it are also found on Eric's blog.

The data here is especially useful as its the first "push" survey (a sample was selected and polled) vs. earlier surveys such as the one by Gilbane which was a "pull" survey promoted from their blog. Based on the pull sample, the Gilbane results on questions like "Does your company use blog or wiki technology? (60% yes)" isn't a valid representation of enterprise as a whole. However, the Gilbane survey provides us with a fairly accurate view of how companies use blogs and wikis (see image below):

Image

In the image above, you can see that internal use cases like Project Collaboration lead externally facing use cases like PR and Customer Communication. In a further survey, I would like to see these categories refined, as use cases like Project Collaboration and Internal Dissemination overlap, and both are a subset of Knowledge Management.

The Inc. 500 report states that 36% of Inc. 500 organizations are familiar with blogging, 16% with wikis. Further, a smaller portion, 19% and 11% respectively, actually use these forms of media. Based on my experience, I'd say these values, as a representation of the number of Inc. 500 type organizations with internal or market facing production, pilot or "play" deployments of blog or wiki technologies, fall well below the actual truth. In our paying customer base alone, we have 15% of the Global 500 and 30% of the top 15 Pharmaceutical firms. Based on this data, it is clear to me that the report's 19% and 11% penetration figures represent a lower bound.

As this research is ongoing, Eric Mattson asked for feedback and ideas on the report. Here are a few points aimed at refining and improving the data:

- Tightly define the survey target: Choose individuals with job roles who can speak comprehensively regarding the real internal as well as the externally facing PR functions of the organization. For a question like "How familiar are you with the following types of social media?" the response you get from a Product Manager may be quite different than the response from a Director of IT. An HR manager may not know that one operations team has used a blog to report system changes for the last 14 months, but the VP of Knowledge Management most likely will.

- Tightly define the question: For the question "Which of the following types of social media does your company use?" one of the technology categories is "Social Networking." I would be hard pressed to identify a large organization where at least 1 person is not using a social networking tool. Give me a phone and with a little bit of hunting, I will make that number 100% (I will start by calling regional sales managers. That said, I would have a very hard time finding any organization which has deployed a social networking platform.

- Research and show trending information: Given the new-kid-on-the-block status of social media, its a safe bet to say that the 42% familiarity with Social Networking at the time of this study is higher than a year prior, but the growth rate itself is still ambiguous. With a tightly defined survey target and questions that unambiguously assess the actual deployment of these technologies, it is then possible to run surveys every 6 months to determine trending. Ask questions like "How many teams use a blog or wiki to report project activity or document requirements? How many people are on those teams?" or "How many blogs are deployed in pilot? And how many are in Production and supporting institutionalized processes?" With this information, you can make a fair evaluation and trend assessment of the extent to which these technologies are deployed and create value for their users.

I look forward to the next round and am glad to see this effort become collaborative as it opens itself up to feedback from the blogosphere!

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