A study conducted by the Center for Marketing Researchat the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the Inc 500 (a list offastest growing companies in US) reveals interesting trends on usage ofSocial Media. The 148 companies who responded were asked the samedetailed questions concerning their usage and measurement of socialmedia that were asked of the Inc. 500 approximately one year and twoyears earlier. Questions probed the familiarity of respondents with sixprominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, socialnetworking, message boards and wikis). In order to maintain theintegrity of all comparisons, all those tools studied in the first twostudies were included in this followup research. In 2009, several newtools were added including the popular microblogging service Twitterand other popular social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook, andMySpace.
Here are some graphs pulled out from the report:
You could get the report (pdf) from the CMR website.
Three things that stand out for us:
1. Twitter has arrived with a bang in 2009.
2.Soon, there will be very few companies NOT using any of the socialmedia. Does this automatically means barriers will reduce for use ofsocial media for learning as well?
3. An amazingly high near 80% of respondents feel social media is useful for their business/marketing strategy.
