As an addendum to an earlier post on social business, this chart from the second annual MIT and Deloitte Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project survey on how businesses use social media suggests that the concept of social business is being adopted aggressively across all industries. How well and how strategically it is being adopted is still an open question.
In all 12 of the major industry sectors covered by the survey, the percentage of respondents who said social software or social business was “important to their organization today” increased from the previous year’s survey. No industry sector declined and none remained flat.
Interestingly, the industry sector with the strongest year over year increase in the survey was energy and utilities, moving from 7% of respondents ranking social business as “important” in 2011 to 29.1% in 2012. That exponential increase may be linked with the increasing adoption of smart grid technologies that allow utilities to more easily interact with their customers. A 2012 research report by Navigant Research predicted that by the end of 2017, the number of utility customers using social media to engage with the utility companies would rise from 57 million in 2011 to 624 million.
Unsurprisingly, for the second year in a row, the technology/media/telecommunications sector respondents were most likely to rate social business as important to their organization with 87% saying that social business was important or somewhat important to their organizations in 2012. A bit more surprising was that the education (82%) and professional services sectors (76%) followed closely behind.
Another finding from the survey was that while companies in most industries are generating social data from their initiatives, few businesses were analyzing the data or integrating it into their organization’s systems and processes.
The new study from MIT and Deloitte will be released in July.
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