IBM: Managers struggle with social media

Do you make use of social media on the job? The answer is yes if you are reading this blog. And perhaps you have a page on LinkedIn or Facebook, and perhaps you tweet or follow companies including Aeroflex, Agilent Technologies, and Tektronix or products like NI LabVIEW on Twitter. You can follow me as well.

National Instruments offers “The Top Five Reasons to Give a Tweet and Use Social Media“: get help, get ahead, get heard, get connected, and get famous. But a new study from IBM of 1,160 business and IT professionals suggests that managers are not getting the social-media message.

According to the study, “The Business of Social Business: What Works and How It’s Done,” IBM finds that while 46% of companies are increasing their social technology investments in 2012, only 22% believed that middle managers are prepared to incorporate social tools and approaches into their daily practices.

“Businesses are struggling to make sense of the vast amount of data generated from social networks,” said Kevin Custis, vice president and global leader social business and mobility services for IBM Global Business Services, in a prepared statement. “To transform a vision into a reality, executive leadership must guide middle management on the value of being a social business, and build company-wide support for the use of social practices across organizational functions.”

In response to the study, IBM contends that organizations should provide an infrastructure for engagement—”…setting up forums, team rooms, and collaborative spaces. Once in place, social practices should be integrated into day-to-day work activities.” Blog posts, the company contends, “…can positively accentuate project management tasks.”

And most importantly, “…management must teach employees how to collaborate effectively with individuals outside of the organization’s boundaries, using social business methods and tools.”

IBM predicts that the effective use of social technologies will enable organizations to “…integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices, and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees' sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions.”

Social media certainly represents a growing force. IBM cites a Forrester Research study (“Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration“) that predicts that the market opportunity for social enterprise apps will grow at a rate of 61% percent through 2016.