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Study: ‘Communications Anarchy’ Reigns Among Global 100 with Multiple Social Media Approaches

by Joe McKendrick

February 24, 2010 at 11:29 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0

A new survey of the Global 100 companies finds that eight out of ten are immersing themselves in popular social media sites, and are quite active in these environments. A recent Burson-Marsteller study of the world’s largest companies found that 79% are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.

Twitter is the social media platform of choice — 65% have active accounts on the micro-blogging site. A majority, 54%, have a Facebook page, while 50% have a YouTube channel. Interestingly, only a third, 33%, have corporate blogs. About 20% use all four platforms.

It also appears that some companies are getting more comfortable using social media as they are interacting and engaging more and not just broadcasting corporate messages. Companies using Twitter are following an average of 731 people each and 38% of companies are responding to people’s tweets. Thirty-two percent have also “re-tweeted” or reposted comments user comments during the previous week.

Burson calls this rush to social media to better engage customers and markets “communications anarchy,” which it calls “the new norm.” “Social media has shifted control of the corporate message away from the organization and towards consumers and other stakeholders, and running away and hiding is no longer the safe option.”

There are wide variations in adoption across global regions. For example, more Asian companies have active blogs (50% vs. 34% in the U.S. and 25% in Europe) but much less activity on Twitter and Facebook. Asian companies currently appear to be more comfortable communicating with stakeholders via corporate blogs.

The study also notes that while companies are relatively less active on their corporate blogs than on the social media channels, there is a lot of commenting from stakeholders on active corporate blogs. For example, only 11% of U.S. corporate blogs had
posts in the past month, but 90% of the blogs with posts had comments from stakeholders. “While some corporate blogs have fallen into attrition, corporate blogs that are active and have a strong purpose and following provide a useful two-way dialogue for organizations and their stakeholders.”

The study also observes that “renegade” social media accounts are also prevalent — contributing to the “communications anarchy” the study’s authors allude to. Of the companies that are engaged on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, most have multiple accounts. For example, each active company has 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook pages, and 1.6 YouTube channels. Organizations with blogs also had multiple blogs — an average of 4.2 — but those blogs were often maintained on the corporate site in a cohesive way.

For companies with multiple Twitter accounts, most often one was a primary corporate account, the study found. The other accounts were started and managed by a local market office, represented a research or special-interest division at the company or was related to a corporate sponsorship event the company was engaged in. “Often it took a few views to determine which Twitter account was the primary corporate account — if there was one — and it was not always possible to affirmatively determine if there was a primary corporate account.”

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ffblogFebruary 24th, 2010 at 11:29 am

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