Read/Write Web has an article about a recent follow up study done by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Market Research.  In this study  they sent a questionnaire to 500 companies that were defined as "fastest growing" by Inc. Magazine surveying how much they use various technologies (Social Networking, Wikis, Podcasting, etc...)

My favorite quote of the whole article was this one...

According to the study's authors, "26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of its strategic plan."

Social networking is the most familiar of the technologies. In 2007, wikis were the least familiar but they have since leapfrogged over podcasting.

Honestly this paragraph alone is a big reason why I chose to make this post.

The folks who go around parroting buzz words like "Social Networking" and saying how "important" they are to the future of the company are the exact wrong audience to be cultivating.  All this proves is that the term has been bandied about enough for the most useless of marketers to know it and then use it in casual conversation to make themselves look "hip". 

It doesn't mean they are actually using the technology, it certainly doesn't mean they understand the technology and quite frankly it doesn't even mean they're discussing the technology (since "buzzword" laden conversations are usually the ones people have at parties not boardrooms)

This is sort of a follow up to my last post in that the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of what is offered as "proof" by the Web 2.0 crowd is anything but.  This survey, like most questionnaires, doesn't provide a single verified conclusion.  Yet the people offering the study are leading the reader to a conclusion by tying it to "the 500 fastest growing companies"

(they actually only had 290 respondents by the way so even that's a bit of a fib)

This isn't a rant against the technology itself but against the pundits who hold it up as a way to turn a profit.  Show me even one company that has actually managed to show a correlation between marketing to places like Facebook and seeing an actual return on that investment and I'll be impressed (again, results I've seen seem to contradict the possibility of that). 

But don't treat empty buzz words or the people who use them as proof of anything because I personally just don't buy it.