Early this year Melcrum, a privately held research and training company, conducted a survey of global use of social media among internal communications professionals. More than 2,600 people responded from 1,800 organizations.

We frequently hear from people about not only their confusion over how to best use social media, but about their uncertainty around its success. The findings of this survey show that people are pretty much evenly split over whether they think social media is an effective tool for internal communication.

Key findings were:

• The level of social media expertise and experience among the profession is poor with more training needed.
• More than half of global internal communicators say their organizations do not have a social media policy in place. Those that do cite guideline inconsistency as the biggest problem.
• Social media has changed the roles and responsibilities of global internal communicators. Practitioners are rapidly changing focus from controlling communication to influencing colleagues.
• Leaders are embracing “two-way employee communication” but still rely on email and e-newsletters.
• The adoption of social media tools and platforms has significantly narrowed the communication gap between leaders and employees but increased the fear of loss of control and power at the top of organizations.
• Global internal communication teams stick to the basics when measuring the success of social media initiatives using website data and analysis or intranet traffic figures.
• Gaining budget, overcoming IT restrictions and management fearing a loss of control and reputational damage are the biggest barriers preventing communicators from implementing social media tools within their organizations.

Additional detail on their findings can be found on their recent press release. It makes for interesting reading. Join the discussion about the research on this blog; we’d be interested to know what you think.