Abrams Research has released a survey about social media research. I have a few questions about the validity of the research. It appears that 200 people who use social media were contacted. Here’s what Abrams Research had to say about their collection methods, “Abrams Research surveyed over 200 social media leaders from across the U.S. and Canada during Social Media Week 2009 – including founders, bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs and members of the Twitterati.” This survey is biased to a group of elite social media leaders. However, the survey did ask some interesting questions.
The first question I found interesting was:
4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media? (Respondents were asked to choose one; these were the most popular choices, ranked accordingly)
1. Zappos (online shopping site)
2. Obama (campaign and presidency)
3. CNN
4. Comcast (“Comcast Cares”)
5. Jetblue
6. Dell
7. Burger King
8. NPR
9. New York Times
10. Ford
Dell would be at my top of the list, interesting to see so many media sites, and that Ford has made an entry. My question would be how do people use social media? What goals and what's their engagement strategy? You might also see a bias towards Twitter here because of Zappos and Comcast. Journalists may also have skewed the results towards media using social media.
The second:
2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?
Twitter 39.6%
Linkedin 21.3%
YouTube 18.8%
Facebook 15.3%
Digg 3.0%
MySpace 2.0%
Again I wonder if people are recommending Twitter because it is a big part of their lives, but might not yet be as relevant for every business. I'd personally probably put Twitter and Linkedin at the top of the list. But it would be interesting to see the results if the survey were split out by industry. Check out the full results and accompanying quotes from survey responds at Abrams Research.
