This is just a little something that I found interesting and wanted to share with you. The graphic below is part of a great set of posts over at the Flowtown blog, where they have put together a hugely interesting series of graphics which bring together figuratively some of the statistics that have been published around social media.

In this particular one, whose figures come from Burson-Marsteller’s Global Fortune 100 Social Media Study the part I found particularly interesting, you will see at the top of the graphic. It reports that when it comes to European based companies in the Global Fortune 100, 86% of them use one of the 4 major social media tools identified (out of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and RSS) – that puts them right at the top of the global league. However, in contrast, when it comes to European companies employing all 4 of them, only 15% confirmed that they did, this time firmly at the bottom of the list.

What does this tell me? Well, purely at a top level (and what else could it be?) then I would have to summise that these companies appear to have a general understanding of what social media can do for them but are unwilling to fully commit with a fully integrated campaign. This may be unfair – after all, I consider that Facebook is more applicable to B2C companies, thereby skewing figures against B2B – however, such as it is.

One other element, not shown in the graphic but forming part of the original report, that also surprised me was that only 25% of the European companies ran a corporate blog – again, very low when you consider that business blogging is very much mainstream and the benefits have been consistently proven when they are well run. Maybe we should get in touch with one of our Business Briefings on Blogging to see if we can help!!

Anyway, here is the graphic sheet in question although, given its size you might like to pop over to Flowtown where you can find it blown up rather bigger than I can mange here.

Related posts:

1. The European Citizen Initiative using social media in the first and …
2. Social Media Strategy for software companies
3. How companies are using social media – CEO Forum Group