Massachusetts Inc. 500 Have 14% Social Media Adoption

When attending the Boston Social Media club meeting on Thursday night I chatted with an attendee who thought that Boston area companies were not at the same stage of social media and blogging adoption as in other cities across the US.

I wrote an article about the conversation, “Boston Companies Don't Have The Zing For Social Media, Yet.” I had disagreed with the attendee, and so I decided to conduct some digging into the question. Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson recently published a study about the social media adoption of the Inc. 500. I wrote an article about that study, “Study Reveals The Inc. 500 Believes The Hype And Practices Corporate Blogging”.

I asked Nora if she would be kind enough to let me know how many of the companies in the New England area have adopted social media, here’s what Nora found. There were seven Massachusetts companies in the Inc 500 in the study (Not all of the companies were polled in the Inc 500), four of those Massachusetts companies don’t use any form of social media, two use messages boards, and one has a blog with some social media in place.

According to Nora Barnes, this means

“that we technically have 1 out of 7 that has a blog, that's 14% which would still be right on the mark between the Fortune 500 with 8-9% and the Inc. 500 with 19%.”

Also Nora Barnes had one Connecticut company and one Rhode Island in the survey, the CT company has a blog, but the Rhode Island company does not conduct any social media.

Well 14% is not bad compared to the national average of 19%. We really need to compare Massachusetts with New York, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I’d also like to conduct the same research with the Fortune 500, as the attendee thought the adoption issue was with large companies who could afford to invest in social media technologies.