The SNCR Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year. Many of the best minds in PR, Marketing and Social Media present their research findings for the year, so I get a two-day immersion in the state of new communications. And I get to chat with them and ask them questions.
Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth presented the annual update of the study “The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies.” Quite a mouthful, but very interesting data.
The study shows that Fortune 500 are definitely on board with social media and that Twitter is the current darling of the big companies. 60% of the F500 have an active Twitter account – described in the study as an account that has a post within the last 30 days. ( Not quite what I would call an active Twitter account, being that it is a real-time microblogging service.) That’s up from 35% in 2009.
9 of the top 10 corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, General Electric, Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, AT&T, Ford and HP) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.
One other big move is that the bulk of the active companies are not in the top 100. In 2009 40% of the companies with an active account were in the F100. 2010 saw a wider spread of adoption: only 25% are in the F100 and the majority of active tweeters are now in the middle of the pack.
The industries most strongly represented among Fortune 500 Twitter accounts were
- specialty retail (23 companies)
- food, drug and CPG (22)
- insurance (20)
These are also the three top industries using Facebook.
The most interesting fact that I heard last week is that the engagement gap is still alive and well in corporate social media. Only 35% of these F500 Twitter accounts are using the @replies, RTs and engaging in converation with their followers.
The CMO council defined the engagement gap as “The difference between the influence of the Internet in consumer decision making and the amount of spending and effort on the part of corporations and organizations in trying to interact with and shape the thinking behind those decisions.”
So it would seem to me that companies have accepted that social media is here to stay. They know that their customers expect them to be on Facebook and Twitter. However, there is still a ways to go to really understand what this social media thing is all about. Only half of those F500 get the conversation and social idea. The rest are quite happily treating it as just another broadcast marketing channel.
It’s not too surprising then that social media training seems to be a hot item in many of these F500 companies for 2011.
These findings clearly demonstrate the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is clear. It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways, concludes the report.
