Here are a few notable findings from Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study. When looking at the results consider that 71% of those surveyed have less than 2 years of experience using social media for business. Therefore these results are only definitive for the time-being. As consumer use of social media constantly evolves, we can expect business’ usage will too. After all, companies are made up of people.

It makes sense that those spending the most time seeking business-relevant information in social are in departments specific to communication. What doesn’t add up is that Customer Service is among the least likely to use social for business related information but the same department is the second-leading force driving corporate social media initiatives (as shown below.) This may indicate that customer service employees are using social to satisfy job requirements, but aren’t applying insights gained to larger business objectives.

Although social’s inherent goal is interaction, the figure below shows business people don’t find interaction especially useful. The most popular sources do not require active participation, indicating that business people want instant access to information and seek answers to their questions in a way that doesn’t require a dialogue.

Those companies that have been successful with social media (e.g. Dell, Starbucks, BestBuy) started small. They took educated risks, applied key learning and steadily grew their involvement in social media. A mistake many companies are making today is that they are confusing starting small with dabbling. Stretching resources too thin is a danger to every aspect of business. But the risk is especially high in social media as it requires continuous involvement and adjusting strategy. The faux sense of affordability may be contributing to companies becoming over zealous with their social efforts. The finding below shows that the average company is currently planning, developing or running seven different social media initiatives.

If your company sells consumer goods, what metrics do you typically employ to determine the success of a given initiative? I doubt the answer is foot traffic to physical stores. Based on the chart below, the majority of businesses are measuring virtual foot traffic as the primary indicator of success. We have readily available access of traffic statistics. Yes, traffic can be an indicator of success, but is it the most important indicator? More isn’t always more. Are visitors potential customers, what point are they in their purchase decision, how did they get there? Traffic alone is a weak metric.

Brands aren’t a tangible thing. We can’t easily point to any one given metric to prove how an initiative impacted brand awareness or perception. As brand meaning changes from consumer to consumer, your company will have to determine a custom solution to help measure brand-improving related initiatives. This solution may very well differ in each social channel.

The “more is more” fallacy continues with businesses involvement in Q&A sites. As the figure below shows, the majority of companies participate in forums that are most popular. At the same time, respondents admit that measuring the impact of their participation in Q&A sites is easiest among small niche sites (as show in the next figure)

There are many more insights to be derived from this study, which is available for download:

(http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study)

Related articles:

• Why B2B Companies Should Be Using Social Media (thenextweb.com)
• Twitter and Foursquare Become the New Loyalty Program at Tasti D-Lite (mashable.com)
• Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @Twelpforce (techcrunch.com)