IBM Business Partner Social Media Survey!
Driving new revenue!
We just received results from our online survey of 1,000 of our partners, and we found some interesting results. 45% of our partners -- which are primarily small and medium businesses -- are beginning to experiment with social media to generate new revenue streams. Not just to communicate but to actually drive new revenue!
Seeking Education!
The other interesting item was that 74% said that they would seek education in social media because, while they knew it was an effective sales tool, they are still uncertain of how to apply it.
While the majority agreed that there's a proliferation of social media outlets and there's a potential to capitalize on social networking to boost sales, many are still not yet engaging in social media as part of their business strategy.
What's the reason why they have not deployed more readily?
Our survey showed that Privacy concerns, lack of time, and confusion on how to measure the results were the top three most often-mentioned reasons for a lack of interest in using social computing for business purposes.
One partner wrote: “ With Twitter, there's no worthwhile business information that can be expressed in 140 characters or less.” This reminds me of early days of the Internet and skepticism we saw then.!
Our announcement today from IBM announces a new Social Media Interactive Series to help our business partners in this quest!
