How Socially Mature Is Your Organization?

We recently embarked on a Forrester-wide research project to benchmark the use of social technologies across enterprise organizations. Why is this important? Well, as you may know, we cover social technologies from a wide range of perspectives — from roles in marketing to IT to technology professionals. We find each of these roles differs in its general “social maturity” and that most companies are experiencing pockets of success, but few, if any, are successfully implementing it across the board. In fact, full maturity in this space could take years, but there are clear differences in how some ahead-of-the-curve companies are using social technologies for business results.

In fact, at this point it has been clearly established by many people (including us many times over) that social technologies as transformative tools that are changing the way companies do business. So we’re not talking as much about the opportunity social presents, but rather we are trying to determine the current reality of practitioners. It’s also clear that many companies have made tremendous strides in planning and organizing for the use of social technologies. However, the one question we consistently get is: “where is my organization compared to others in the use of social media?”  We want to benchmark these companies to see if we can answer questions like:

• How do you define “social maturity” and why is it important to get there?
• Which companies are ahead of the curve in implementing social technologies for both external use (i.e., for customers/consumers) and/or internal use (i.e., for employees/partners)?
• What have been the biggest drivers of success?
• What are the biggest challenges?
• What steps do most organizations need to take and why?

Here’s how you can help:

• If you work for an organization that markets products or services to consumers or businesses (i.e., “clients” in vendor speak), thenplease take this survey. We want to hear from anyone involved in social — whether marketing, PR, IT, legal, finance, HR, etc. For your efforts, we will share a free executive summary of the survey results.
• If you are vendor, agency, consultant, or even just a consumer interesting in sharing your thoughts, we can’t include you in the survey. But we do want to hear from you, so please feel free to comment on this blog or on our community sitewith your thoughts. We promise to keep the conversation going and we will be writing a blog post on some of the findings when the research is published.

We want to hear from you, so please, share your thoughts.

By Nigel Fenwick