media aces

IABC, the International Association of Business Communicators, published on their Social Media Release blog the results of their last survey. This survey provides interesting hints about SOcial Media usage by communication professionals, especially regarding the raise of new tools like Twitter of Facebook.

Key Findings:

• Almost four-fifths (79 percent) of the respondents report that they use social media frequently to engage employees and foster productivity, outranking even email (75 percent).
• Company blogs are the most popular social media tool currently in use (47 percent), with discussion boards ranking the highest for future planned use (33 percent).
• Current use of social networking sites such as Twitter (21 percent), Yammer (20 percent), and Facebook (18 percent) is significant, but organizations are planning to use those tools even more in the future.

One of the most interesting results of this survey is that IABC members consider social media as a way to preserve their "engagement level", despite reduced communication and marketing budgets.

The IABC is an international association, with representatives in several countries, including France and UK.

Media Aces was born during a rendez-vous. A social media rendez-vous, as you can easily imagine. Yann and me first met on a TV show, someday  in february 2009. As every wednesday, I was doing interviews for Corporate Blogs, the online TV show produced and hosted by DecideursTV, a french web TV for professionals. Corporate Blogs is the place where french coporate bloggers come and explain how and why they started their blog. Several companies have joined so far: Poweo, BNP Paribas, Ben & Jerry, etc.

Yann was one of the people interviewed during those days. As head of the internet activity at Orange Business Services (OBS), he had been involved in OBS blogs since the beginning: the audience would clearly benefit from his views, knowing the role he plays within a major telecommunication company, coupled with a long experience of the Internet. 

It was just after the last sequence was recorded, that Yann and me got to the same conclusions: the need for a global european association, where all people involved in "corporate social media" - and not only corporate blogs - would meet and share their common intreste in social media technology, usages, benefits … and barriers. Media Aces was born.

Just for the pleasure of remembering the early stages of our initiative, and for the benefits of our French readers, here is the video of the interview.