By Mike Mulvihill

Photo: Courtesy Optical Illusion 

First the good news – business loves social media.  A January 3 update to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research annual survey on the adoption and practice of social media by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., found that more businesses are experimenting and engaging with social media.  Among the survey respondents, 91 percent of companies report they incorporated at least one social media service or tool in 2009. Literacy and awareness was also on the rise with roughly 75 percent stating that they were now “very familiar” with social networking. Conversely, there was an impressive drop in Inc 500 companies that did not use social media at all, which plunged from 43 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2009.

Among smaller business, the trend lags. A November 2009 survey  produced for area Chambers of Commerce in North Dakota and Minnesota asked about their use of popular social media platforms for maintaining either Personal and Business connections.  For business leaders in four Midwestern markets, Facebook is the social media platform of choice. Facebook is the platform most frequently mentioned as the site used by respondents (70 percent personal use; 43 percent business use). LinkedIn was the platform next most frequently mentioned as the site used by respondents (23 percent personal use; 41 percent business use). Twitter (17 percent personal use; 19 percent business use) was about even with Blogs (15 percent personal use; 20% business use) as the third most frequently mentioned platform used by respondents  Three others in the survey lagged significantly in use by respondents – My Space, MSN Live Space and Wikis.

As Larry Weintraub covers in his Smart Marketing blog, these businesses have likely zeroed in on the four reasons to use Social Media for your business – Marketing, PR, Market Research and Customer Service.

Now, here’s the bad news.  Control is still a major issue, especially at larger companies. According to a nationwide survey conducted by Robert Half Technology, 54 percent of 1,400 companies surveyed completely restrict employees from visiting social networking sites. Another 19 percent restrict use for business purposes only.

Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don’t want employees logging on during work hours.

The Robert Half spokesperson said employers find social networking a waste of time. “It takes away from primary responsibility. When socializing on sites such as Facebook, we lose track of time.”

A secondary concern companies mentioned is the potential for employees leaking confidential information or sharing thoughts that may reflect badly on the company.  The spokesperson said that many of these companies are still trying to set boundaries.

 So while business increasing embraces the desire to “push out” info using social media, they still have not gotten over the fact that they have engage communities by trusting people to have conversations with customers, suppliers and their many other stakeholders.

 I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.