The Blog

Brendan Cooper, the friendly PR social media planner at global PR giant, Porter Novelli picked up on my introductory post about studying social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies yesterday and opined that:

“It sounds like a serious undertaking”.

True.

My thinking is that as social media is still fairly new in the UK and no one has attempted this before, it won’t be too difficult.

I’ve put some thought into the methodology I will be using and have decided on a fairly straightforward approach.

The Methodology
Studying 10 companies in the FTSE 100 at a time, I will be serving up tables showing whether or not each company uses social media tools like:

• RSS feeds
• blogs
• online video
• podcasts
• and social media platforms like:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • YouTube
  • del.icio.us
  • Flickr
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Bebo and any others etc etc

No Scoring or Weighting
I do not intend to provide any scoring or weighting against usage of each social media tool, preferring instead to create a table with a list of companies against a series of columns, with each column representing usage of a particular social media tool e.g. blogs or RSS.

The idea is to provide an at-a-glance look at how well FTSE 100 companies ‘get social media’.

But I’m Open To Suggestions
That is not to say that I am not open to assessing how well a company uses a particular social media tool. It’s just that I don’t think there will be more than a handful of companies that tick each box and for this reason, simply recognising that they use each particular tool will be sufficient.

If it turns out that certain social media tools are used with frightening regularity, then I will suggest a suitable scoring mechanism and ask for your feedback. Yes, this study will be a group effort!

Case Studies of Exceptional Performers Included
I will also include a case study of stand out companies, the aim being to laud best practice and constructively cajole poor performance.

It’s going to be … a lot of fun!

At the very least it will form a sensible point to start evaluating Social Capital.

“Social capital, referring to connections within and between social networks, is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health, sociology and natural resources management.” – Wikipedia

Stay tuned…

Image credit: Logic + Emotion

Related posts:

1. Social Media Usage amongst FTSE 100 companies – Companies 11 To 15: British American Tobacco to British Land
2. Social Media Usage amongst FTSE 100 companies – Companies 6 To 10: Antofagasta to Barclays
3. Social Media Usage amongst FTSE 100 companies – Companies 16 To 20: BHP Billiton to Cadbury ADR
4. Social Media Usage Amongst FTSE 100 Companies – Company Profile – Investec
5. Preliminary Results: Social Media Usage Amongst FTSE 100 Companies – Most Preferred Social Media and Multimedia Platforms