Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom recently released the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, along with the collaboration Tom Smith, Don Spetner and Barbara McDonald. The goal of the report was to investigate and analyze how organizations are integrating different online practices, such as social media content creation and social networking participation, into their business practices.
The press release focuses on hiring practices for PR specialists, leading to the conclusion that "social media skills are nearly as imporltant as traditional media relations skills" when hiring new PR personnel.
And the full report gives even more telling information.
Let's start with the who: 278 PR, marketing, and HR professionals representing both agencies and the client side from companies ranging from small to mid-sized to large (over $1b in annual revenues).
Now, the what. The most interesting findings were the answers to the following question: Which of the following activities does your organization currently employ as part of its web-based comunications? I'm including their original bar graph here (highlighting is mine):
Why is this interesting?
- Old-fashioned email marketing still tops the list, indicating that old habits die hard, and that new media still needs to be combined with old media in order to be effective.
- "Social networking adoption out ranks natural search engine optimization, with 70% utilizing them compared to 66% for SEO" The report juxtaposes this to stats from the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, in which only 15% of respondents reported a sense of credibility with social networking sites. So currently, even though most individuals don't value the credibility of social networking sites as reliable sources of information for a company, organizations are putting a higher priority to participation in social networking sites even than in SEO. The report concludes that there is a "disconnect between the online communications channels that matter most to people versus organizaations."
- Microblogging has topped blogging as a tool (62% versus 59%), most likely because of ease of use. I'd also give credit to an acknowledgement of the faster pace of information development, distribution and digestion. If an organization must choose between writing a thoughtful blog post and getting updates out immediately, microblogging services such as Twitter are definitely the more appropriate tool. However, the rate of adoption the study indicates only tops traditional blogs by a narrow margin; it will be interesting to see how these numbers change six months from now.
Another graph compared preferred tools of small and mid-sized companies versus large organizations:
The conclusion here?
This is very telling: small and mid-sized businesses are tending to focus on Twitter and social networking. Why? I have a few guesses:
- Twitter has a low barrier to entry; it's easy to learn.
- Twitter has a lower time investment than a blog or website. A marketing or PR staff person can devote 30 minutes a day to Twitter and create a viable online presence; the same isn't true for a blog or the content on a website.
- Twitter presence and strategy is easy to change. If a small company begins by Twittering links to special deals and discovers a lack of participation, it can easily switch strategy to include more conversation and linking or, say, promotion of free educational webinars. Because the speed of information is faster, Twitter audiences are forgiving and willing to shift with the company as the strategy changes.
- Social networking is based on what small businesses have been doing for years: going out and meeting people, chatting them up, making friends, and eventually getting referrals. That process hasn't changed; it's just moved online.
- Social networking is participatory, so the process of implementing a strategy has leeway to be learn-as-you-go, which is easier for nimble small businesses to implement. This is not to say the partcipation shouldn't be strategized, but rather, it can be viewed as an exploratory process with the social network as a type of giant focus group. Web site content, by contrast, can be expensive and slow to change according to user feedback.
The remainder of the report covers the requirements for new PR hires, along with a final interesting statistic: only 17% of respondents said they had not hired a social media specialist and had no plans to. That means that a whopping 83% of companies have just hired a social media specialist, are in the process of hiring one, or plan to hire one soon. The key takeaway here is that all companies, from small to large, feel the need to implement some kind of social media strategy, whether it be the easy-to-get-into microblogging or the more traditional corporate blog.
Participating in social media is no longer an option; it's simply a question of when, how and who.
