Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research have published an interesting research project about the adoption and usage of social media by the Inc. 500, “an elite group of fast-growing private companies” in the US. In the report “The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500”, 121 companies responded to questions about six social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, wikis) and as many as 26% of respondents said that social media is “very important” to their business and marketing strategy.
42% of respondents claimed to be “very familiar” with social networking, followed by message/bulletin boards (38%), blogging (36%), online video (31%), podcasting (30%) and wikis (16%).
The percentage of companies that use social media is quite high in my opinion and I am certain that Swedish companies are far behind in the adoption of social media.
According to a recent calculation, only 8% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging, while 19% of the respondents in this survey use blogs.
Another comparison can be made with this survey of 805 mainly UK based companies (including agencies) performed by e-consultancy:
* 42% are planning to apply user-generated content (UGC) to their websites in the next 12 months; 23% are using it already.
* 35% are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months; 17% are using them already.
* 33% are planning to use podcasting in the next 12 months; 18% using it already.
* 35% are planning to use videocasting in the next 12 month; 17% using it already.
Tags: research, blogs, social media, sociala media, podcasting. Ping.