Well first up, half of the organizations who responded said that they encourage the use of social in relation to business - positive stuff. However, half of those are given no guidelines whatsoever as to how they should accomplish this, what is, and more importantly what isn't, acceptable when it comes to creating social content.
….and we're not just talking about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when we say social. Social is about instant messaging, presence indicators, activity streams, staff profiles, forums, video-conferencing and much more…
And it appears that organizations are understanding this, with good levels of social integration to a wide-range of areas such as project management, staff communication and content management, as well as the blindingly obvious marketing integration. The interesting thing about the marketing results, aren't that the marketing department are integrating social into their processes - we know that already - but that most of those that are going to do this have done it already, and predicted further uptake across the next 12 months is minimal.
Generally though, the desire to use social is very strong - 100% of Business to Consumer organizations plan to be using social within 2 years, doubling from 44% today.
There is a big difference between using social and integrating it into process, and indeed we found that only 21% are actually trying to do this with a whopping 64% using social and not integrating. Having said that, many are planning to start integrating over the coming 12 months - with the exception of Government to Business organizations who appear to be not interested in social at all - there could be several reasons for that but you'll have to download the report to hear my views on it!
Finally - we took a close look at the governance of social content and creation - and found some staggering - but not necessarily surprising - results: Over 3/4 are not recording any social content as an enterprise record. Whilst this might not be surprising, some of the other findings that show the volume of staff disciplinary hearings and dismissals as a result of inappropriate use of social would suggest that maybe they
should be recording this stuff!
As ever, there is a full deck of information, stats and analysis as part of the full report which can be downloaded for free at http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/social-processes-2012.