By Krishna De
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-04-28
Are technology firms adopting social media' is one of the areas that the recent Eurocom Worldwide 2011 Annual Technology Confidence Survey explored. The survey found that 38% of technology firms examine social media profiles to determine potential employees' suitability for a job - the results in 2010 were similar. (Eurocom Worldwide is a global alliance of independent, privately owned Public Relations agencies.)
The survey of 664 senior level executives in technology companies across more than 30 countries worldwide (5% of the respondents were from Ireland) was conducted during January and February 2011 and highlights corporate adoption of social media.Some of the interesting statistics include:
- 33% of the respondents said their company had a blog, 47% of the companies surveyed had no company blog - yet an amazing 20% of the respondents did not know which certainly suggests that more needs to be done to ensure that internal communications teams have more work to do to ensure that their people know how the company is promoting their business
- those that have a blog they commented that the primary reasons were to improve interaction with customers and the public (62%), raise the company profile and demonstrate thought leadership (49%), boost search engine optimisation (34%) and participate in industry debate (31%)
- and the reasons that they did not have a blog were primarily due to seeing blogging as too time consuming (33%), they did not see the value in blogging (29%), had never thought about it (18%) and the fear of negative reaction (10%).
- of social networking sites adopted by the organisations who took part in the research, the most popular was Facebook (51%), Twitter (46%), LinkedIn (43%) and YouTube (36%).
This is significantly different to the recent survey by BtoBonline who reported in their recent research that adoption of social media marketing tools amongst their 577 respondents was LinkedIn (72%), Facebook (71%), Twitter (67%) and YouTube (48%).
When it came to the executives themselves being asked if they personally had a profile on a social networking site, 27% had a LinkedIn profile and 22% were using Twitter.
The adoption of social media monitoring platforms to manage their companies reputation also has some way to go with just 36% having a formal process other than Google Alerts to monitor online conversations.
As to how frequently their social media channels are updated, the companies taking part in the research commented that Twitter and Facebook were most frequently posted to (26% and 21% update these channels each day).
And what about the projected investment in social media in the next 12 months? 38% of the executives reported that they expect to spend more in social media communications and 39% expected it to remain the same.
If you are looking to connect with executives in this sector, you will also be interested in how they get their industry news - 76% rely on online media news and 30% rely on their social media connections. and how do they read their news? 87% do so on a lap top with the mobile phone being the next most popular platform amongst 54% respondents.
And is social media providing value for money as part of a marketing communications plan? 35% of the respondents to the Eurocom survey thought so - with Public Relations and Internet Marketing being the two other areas ranked higher.
For more information about the survey if you are in Ireland, contact Simpson Financial & Technology PR - thanks to Kerri Crowley, who shared the data with me.
So what can we conclude? It seems as though we still have some way to go before social media is integrated into business processes in technology companies - but if you are company who is doing so already, make sure that you are measuring the return on investment and adapt your social media marketing plan to ensure that you do so for competitive advantage. But what do you think?
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