By way of Tony Hollingsworth who posted on Linked in, Jeremiah Owyang has an article out about where social media is today. Given that social media is 2.5 years and the tools I see out there, I would probably say it’s more like 2000 but he’s got a point. The day is still young in this. We are even seeing startups like Socialware provide software around managing governance and other challenges that come up with this wild west.
How young? Well, in our Nov 2010 report on the Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist, we surveyed 140 enterprise-class corporations and found out that the largest segment of respondents have only had formalized social media programs (beyond just experimentation) for 1-2 years. Fast forward to Feb, 2011 It starts to average just about 2.5, hence while we call 2010 the year of social business formation. It’s really early friends, in fact if your company has deployed social business in a formalized way today, you are early pioneers. In fact, I like to use the metaphor it’s like the Internet in 1997, companies are just starting to deploy their corporate websites in a formalized way –not just from the spare latitude under the IT guys desk –in many companies there are now internet groups that manage the corporate web properties, it’s a an official career.
Worth reading.
