Everybody is getting into the social media act, but few are actually capturing information that can be shared more deeply with — and acted upon by — the enterprise.

Forrester analyst Doug Williams points to a recently published survey of 181 consumer product strategy professionals that finds the use of social technologies by product strategy professionals is strong but not pervasive, and “there are lots of unanswered questions out there.”

For one, the use of social media as a marketing channel is quite pervasive. Forrester finds that 83 percent of respondents indicate that their company uses social media to engage with consumers in some way, Williams reports. However, “fewer than half indicate that their product teams are currently using social media to influence product design, creation, or strategy.”

So we can conclude that in many instances, the use of social media for marketing purposes is still informal, ad hoc, and perhaps driven by an enthusiast, rather than being baked into corporate processes. The challenge as we move into the next phase of social media is to enhance internal operations.

Williams also observes from his study that although more than two-thirds of product strategists have dedicated social managers or teams, “fewer than one-fifth have formal policies in place for sharing data from social technologies with product teams.”

Again, there seem to be individuals working the front lines, engaging one-to-one (or many-to-many) with customers and prospective customers, but the information they are gathering has still not reached back into the rest of the organization. Therein lies the next great challenge for social media efforts.

“The data indicates that for many product strategy professionals, it is still early days — they don’t yet know how to leverage those technologies in their job,” Williams points out.  He urges social networking advocates to focus on helping these individuals understand the opportunities that social media-generated information provides.