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Despite some promising figures a few weeks ago, it appears that many corporations still are not sure about Social Media.  According to findings by both Forrester Research and Avanade, business leaders acknowledge the growing role of Social Media in the future of business, but are waiting to see how to best utilize the medium.  Here are some key figures from the Avanade study that speak volumes:

• More than 75 percent of companies worldwide admit that social networking will come into the business undetected if not proactively managed.
• Approximately 60 percent of respondents say integrating social media technologies is not on the agenda.
• Only 18 percent of respondents have any kind of strategy in place to integrate these technologies within the company for employees.

And a graph illustrating the level of lack of planning and involvement:

Now some of this could be due to semantics.  The 2008 Tribalization of Business Study looked at all forms of Social Media in use by companies, including closed Social Networks like forums that foster inter-division collaboration.  The two most recent studies by Forrester and Avanade seemed to focus specifically on how companies could incorperate existing Social Media and Networking sites like like Next2Friends or Facebook.

There were some great takes on the data from the Blogosphere.  Ed Cone from CIO Insight had some great things to say on the Avanade report. BusinessFeet echoed the same.

Laurie Sullivan of MediaPost wrote extensively on the Forrester report.  A quote from her post is equally revealing:

“The research reveals that although 80% of marketers say the benefits of adopting emerging channels are worth the challenges of trialing, 60% struggle to build the case for interactive marketing, and 68% would rather wait to adopt interactive channels until after they are proven.”

To be sure, the tide is turning, perhaps not as fast as some of us in Social Media would like, but as more and more companies start to measure the right things, we’re certain that things will change.  Dialog benefits everyone, it makes for better products and happier customers.  Everyone wins!

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