Interview with Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes

Last week Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research released a detailed study of the adoption and usage of social media by the Inc. 500. There research revealed that social media adoption among the companies is much higher than many predicted and certainly much higher than the Fortune 500.

The information in the study was generated a lot of questions and Eric and Nora were nice enough to take some time to answer a few of my questions.

First of all I must say that I the information in your study was fascinating and eye-opening to me. What one thing stood out for you from the results that you were not expecting or most surprised about?

The two things that surprised us the most were the adoption rate of and attitude towards social media. Based on some previous research into blogs among the Fortune 500, social media seemed to be penetrating slowly into the corporate world. Our research shows that such slow adoption isn’t the norm. The fast adoption rate among our respondents and the importance that they are placing on social media in their marketing/business strategies means that we haven’t seen anything yet.

In putting together the study you asked about six social media tactics (message boards, blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, and wikis). How did you decide on these six?

With great difficulty.

The defining lines around so many of the social media are blurry. We debated a number of technologies (e.g. tagging) that didn’t make the list this time around. In the end, we were guided by the Wikipedia definition of social media, our knowledge of the space and our guts.

As a follow-up to this, how did you define social networking for your study?

As we said before, when in doubt, we fell back on Wikipedia.

One result that was particular surprising to me was around what types of social media tactics are the Inc 500 companies currently using. Blogging gets a lot of press, but a lot more companies are interacting with their customers through message boards/bulleting boards than through blogs. Did you get a sense of why this is?

We weren’t specifically looking at this issue so I don’t have a definitive answer. I can’t speak for Nora but, in this case, I would guess that it’s a function of age in two different ways. In the first sense, online forums/message/bulletin boards have simply been around a lot longer and thus have a higher adoption rate. Second, with regard to the hype around blogs, it’s because they are simply newer and more exciting than the older technology.

Did the study provide any insight into where the message boards/bulletin boards interactions are taking place?

No. Maybe next study.

What does say about blogging that so few Inc 500 companies is actively engaged in it?

I think your question represents a bit of echo chamber thinking since you’re a social media user. Nora and I regularly have to pull each other out of the same cycle.

Think about it for a moment.

All six of the social media we looked at are seeing double-digit usage among the Inc. 500. That is huge.

Yes, there are still a lot of companies not using social media (which is a HUGE opportunity) but as technology adoption rates go, social media is doing just fine.

Lastly, I am intrigued that social media plays such an important role in the business/marketing strategy of these companies. Did anyone mention how they measure the success of their social media campaigns?

Yes. We did ask the Inc. 500 about how they measure success. The results of that question and the rest of the study will be published in several journals over the next year. If your readers would like to be notified about our further research and writings on social media, they can join our email announcement list by emailing Nora ( nbarnes@umassd.edu) or myself (eric@ericmattson.com).