Social Media: IT Purchasing’s Rising Star
June 11th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyOver the past two months, PJA has been working with ITtoolbox on a survey of social media-savvy IT decision-makers and influencers. View a highlights presentation of the survey results. What we wanted to know was simple: how is social media influencing (if it all) the way purchasing decisions get made in global companies?
Two months, 400,000 emails and 2,104 completed surveys later, we have some surprising and very interesting findings. Here are some highlights:
• IT decision-makers and influencers spend an average of 3 ½ hours per week consuming or participating in social media, more than they do consuming editorial media or vendor content. Executive decision-makers have the highest usage profile among IT audiences. Using our new Social Media Index, which uses Business Manager consumption of social media to calculate a mean score of 100, we have calculated scores for IT audiences as follows:
o Executive Decision-Maker: 121
o IT Decision-Maker: 96.5
o Business Manager: 100
o IT Analyst: 121
o Developer: 111
• IT decision-makers and influencers reference vendor Web sites more (and trade magazines and editorial web sites slightly less) than user-generated content for making purchasing decisions, but trust user-generated content more than they do either of these traditional content sources.
• Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that social media content and user-generated tools have made for a more informed purchasing decision, and more than three-quarters believe they have made their lives more efficient.
• The single most valuable thing about social media for IT decision-makers and influencers is its objective feedback on products and services from multiple sources.
There’s a lot more to consume, if you’re up for it. Needless to say, we’ll be repeating and broadening the experiment in a few months’ time. Until then, connect with the press release and the highlights presentation.