The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth recently conducted a study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. The new study revisits the Center's study of Inc. 500 social media usage for the fourth consecutive year, purportedly making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of these new technologies.
The study compares adoption of social media among the 2010 Inc. 500 with previous years. The Inc. 500 is a list of the fastest-growing private US companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine.
In 2007, the Center's first study of this group and their use of social media was released and revealed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional Fortune 500 in its use of social media. As in the earlier studies, the 2010 study, under the direction of researcher Nora Ganim Barnes, is the result of a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010. The 2010 list was released in the September issue of the magazine. In this fourth iteration, 34 percent (171) of the Inc. 500 participated, making the research statistically valid at +/- 6 percent.
According to the report, social media has penetrated parts of the business world at a tremendous speed. It also indicates that corporate familiarity with and usage of social media within the Inc. 500 has continued to grow in the past 12 months. The respondents in this study, as in the previous studies, are diverse in industry, size and location. They include two of the top 10, four of the top 25, and 28 of the top 100 companies from the Inc. 500 list.
The 171 companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their usage and measurement of social media that were asked of the Inc. 500 in earlier years with minor exceptions. The original 2007 questions probed the familiarity of respondents with six prominent social media tools (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis). Changes over the years include dropping wikis (used more as a collaboration tool than a communications/engagement tool) and changing the social networking category into more specific platforms including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare.
Social media adoption varies among the Inc. 500 industries, the report has noted. Despite the fact that 83 percent of the companies use at least one of the social media tools studied, adoption is skewed by industry. Government services companies make up 12 percent of the 2010 Inc. 500, but 27 percent of those who do not use social media tools. Energy companies comprise 3% of the listed but 17% of the non-users. Financial Services companies follow the same pattern, holding 5% of list but 10% of the companies who have not yet adopted social media.
In addition to questions about current usage, the responding marketing executives were asked about their intention to adopt the social media technologies they were not currently using. They were also queried about their perceived level of success with tools they were using now. The research question concerning the importance of social media to each responding company's marketing strategy was also repeated this year in order to gain important trend data.
The study also includes questions on the use of social media tools for recruiting and evaluating employees as well as for communicating with stakeholders other than consumers. More detailed questions about the responding companies' corporate blogs and social media policies were also included.
According to the report, social networking continues to lead the way. The platform most familiar to the 2010 Inc. 500 is Facebook with 87 percent of respondents claiming to be 'very familiar' with it. Blogging remains an important tool for the Inc. 500. Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 has a corporate blog, up from 45 percent in 2009 and 39 percent in 2008. Further, the report noted that new communications tools are changing the way successful businesses operate. Forty-three percent of the 2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was 'very important' to their business/marketing strategy. That number increased to 56 percent in 2010. Additionally, social media is not only used for communication between business and consumers, but for communicating with vendors and partners as well, the report noted.
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