Caught an interesting snippet on eMarketer Wednesday. The headline:
The article goes on to summarize findings from several US and UK studies. Its bottom line: while almost 80% of executives deem social business strategy important, only one-third as many see it as a strategic priority (27%).
Here are the two tables presented in the article if you’re not inclined to read it.
The article ends with the admonition that choosing not to focus on a social strategy is risky, and that companies must start putting a plan into action.
Stop the train!
I looked at the data and drew an entirely different conclusion.
Three years ago 80% of executives would have said that they didn’t have a clue as to what social media was. In fact, pre-2010 data indicated that not only was SM not understood, but there was enormous caution around committing more than budgetary table scraps to experimenting with it. The CEO when I worked at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, was the only Fortune 500 CEO with a blog.
That a quarter of Enterprise executives deem SM to be a strategic priority means that we have indeed traveled a long distance in a dozen quarters. These corporate adoption rates are keeping pace with - or outperforming - the adoption rates of PCs, mobile devices and web investment by corporations over the past 15 - 30 years.
It is rare - especially in large organizations - to see executive attitudes change so materially in such a short period of time. To be sure, some will miss the boat (there’s a reason the descriptor “laggards” is used at the tail-end of adoption curves).
The conclusion is otherwise clear: social media is not a short term fad. It is here to stay. It is changing - and will continue to change - entire industries, the workings of the market, and the relationship of buyer to seller. There is no middleman: only you and your customer. And your customer can never be put on hold again.
Those red and black bars in the charts are only going to grow larger each quarter.
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