So just how involved are you in social media? In our recent survey of 350 marketing professionals conducted in conjunction with our friends at the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, we found that around 90 percent of senior marketing professionals use professional and social networking tools.  On average, they spend 19 hours a week on social media sites. And 55 percent read and share content through social media channels daily.

Nineteen hours is a lot of time out of a busy week, but these markets think it’s worth it. Three-quarters of them believe that social media is important for professional success as a marketer. A quarter said it is very important, and for a variety of reasons. The top reasons include everything from staying connected professionally to creating buzz about their companies to conducting research to better understanding their customers. And of course, they want to stay current on hot topics.

And yet, for all this activity, marketers still are jittery when it comes to using social media to drive business results or marketing leads.  In the cases of using social media for boosting word of mouth and understanding customers, for example, marketers’ confidence in using social media lags behind their belief in the importance of using social media.

Marketers may be ahead of the game when it comes to how they use and access social media.  One-fifth of survey respondents participate in social media via a smart phone. Another 54 percent participate via a laptop or netbook, which is a greater than 2:1 ratio over desktops.  This laptop/netbook usage, fueled by the rise of location-based services, will help drive the laptop to eclipse the stationary desktop computer.

So as a marketer, you are out in full-force when it comes to social media, just as much as your younger social media counterparts, and even if you are still working out the business applications.  For those of us old enough to remember when the Internet was introduced as a commercial tool, it was we marketers who were on the leading edge of the adoption curve and brought it into the mainstream. Is it deja-vu all over again?

To take the survey yourself, click here.

Still more than a year away from smartphones overtaking standard mobiles, at least according to Infonetics Research, IT, HR and Finance professionals are already busy writing the wish list for their next-generation smartphone.

In the meantime, they want vendors to give them apps and features that help them do their jobs better, not traditional online advertising brought over to an even smaller screen.

Why use a smartphone? Our respondents made clear that the leading benefit is the ability to respond to work issues in real time, wherever they are. Since two-thirds receive their mobile devices from their employers, that’s not so surprising, though admittedly it’s a bit sad. Work and life continue to blur into 21st century being.

Highlights of the survey include these tidbits:

* The top 3 benefits of mobile devices are the ability to respond to work issues in real time (30.6%), connectivity to e-mail (24.1%), and the ability to work at home (14.6%).

* Less than 30% of respondents felt that advertisers understand their use of mobile devices for professional purposes “well” or “very well.” Sounds like a big opportunity to me!

* Respondents use their mobile devices 2.35 hours a week to consumer user-generated content, 1.81 hours for editorial content, and 1.68 hours for vendor content.

* Top wish-list features for users’ next mobile device include larger screens (25.5%), faster performance (17.3%), and longer battery life (15.1%). Other choices in the top 20 included:

• More seamless integration with laptop/desktop computer
• Better wireless calendar syncing
• Better email solution
• Video calling/chat
• Higher screen resolution
• Ability to multitask applications / multi-thread processing
• Addressable file director
• Voice-activated GPS (wouldn’t that be lovely?)

Nearly 3,000 members of IT, HR, and finance communities at Toolbox.com participated in Wave VI, conducted in August 2010. George Krautzel, Mike O’Toole and I will discuss the results in more depth during the October 28 broadcast of PJA Radio at 3PM ET.

As you might imagine, every member replied, because what is an IT professional’s life if not a shuttling from one challenge to another?

The responses suggested their own taxonomy, but what surprised me was the way that all four categories — applications, integration, financial and cultural challenges — got equal billing. You might think these days that the down economy was all IT was thinking about, but not so. What’s interesting as well is the way that these responses sound similar themes whether they’re coming from a BI architect in a large California company or a local government IT director in La Coruna, Spain.

The Application Challenges

Among the applications that are keeping people late to dinner: Windows 7, SOA, PeopleSoft (“their documentation is not very helpful,” claims one IT information specialist), and SAP, according to a Senior IT Business Analyst in logistics and transportation: “We have a highly customized SAP solution. Keeping it running is always a challenge. Plus, we are planning to implement SCM, and are preparing to try and re-configure our current setup to use more standard SAP functionality.” Keeping up with all of the latest technology that is released on a constant basis is another problem, as is “the lack of vendors embracing open source software, browsers and other applications.”

The Integration Challenges

This sort of reply is common, from a government participant: “We are caught up in a data center migration for all our agencies to move to a centralized data center. We have hundreds of applications on various platforms in various versions of the platforms. It’s a logistical nightmare.” “Consolidating and integrating multiple finance data warehouses into a single, unified data warehouse” is something IT still struggles with (hope they’ve got their metadata in order first), as is streamlining processes.

The Financial Challenges

Money is tight, of course, as we crawl our way out of the Great Recession. For some IT it’s “getting management to fund new projects and technology updates,” for others it’s “maintaining information infrastructure under the current budget pressures.” Short money also wreaks havoc with “project prioritization,” though for companies as a whole, IT’s role in helping to “win business during the recession” is an anxiety, too. Finally, doing more with less continues to be a priority, or as one participant put a fine point on it, “getting more results with a big budget reduction.”

The Cultural Challenges

Finally, there is the undercurrent we all know too well in IT: looking like strategic players in the business while we try to sell the value of “implementing policy and standards, implementing change, keeping up with new developments, moving our enterprise to Agile, creating a reference architecture for the organization, convincing internal clients of best practices,” and perhaps most of all these days, “keeping team morale high.”

Hearing all these responses brought me back to a conversation I had this summer with a recently retired CIO in a farmhouse near St. Gimingnano in Tuscany. When I asked him what his days were like, he responded without hesitation:

“I was just trying to get through each day serving four different audiences:
* The management team, who are only really thinking about one thing, and you’re a fool if you assume they’re thinking about anything else: Will I make my bonus this year?
* The users, who only wonder why things don’t work and assure themselves they can do it better than you at less cost
* The IT staff, who just want to do cool technical shit
* The vendors, who claim they offer service but are usually more concerned with how much money they can extract from you.”

A jaundiced view? Undoubtedly, but it served to remind me that everything old is new in IT, just like it is everywhere else.