Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I got spanked a while ago (in semi-private - doggone it, or we all could have chimed in) for making comparisons between the southern California wildfires and social media jumping firewalls into organizations. My reader was offended by the message that social media would creep into organizations, even if IT didn’t sanction it and the corollary about firewalls.

I was heartened this morning when I logged into my IT Toolbox account, (IT Toolbox is a social media group for IT decision makers) and read the results of a survey they just posted.

The Executive decision makers they surveyed ranked social media sources the most trusted information source for making purchasing decisions, paralleling consumers’ trust in WOM.

Now most of my research friends would tell you that anyone who joins a social network is likely to rate them more highly than those who don’t. Agreed. Next…
To see the level of trust in peers (vs. paid analyst research, for example) for these folks is not surprising at all to me. The majority of those surveyed were from companies with fewer than 1000 people, and probably couldn’t afford the expense of a Gartner or IDC subscription anyway… so whom do they turn to for information? Their peers - probably previously unknown to them.

Social media connections (my LinkedIN invitations come in much more often now) are providing real research tools for knowledge workers.

And (by the way - for those who might also think I’m completely heartless) my sister, who’s family was evacuated twice during the fire, never once complained about the corollary I drew. And (as I noted) just last week she invited me to be her friend in Facebook.

Now there’s some irony!

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