McKinsey: Web 2.0 Satisfies

Social media and blogs continue their meteoric rise among businesses. But are they paying off?

That’s the question McKinsey & Company asks in their yearly Web 2.0 survey. The apparent answer: Payday is on the way.

According to McKinsey’s survey of 3,249 executives, organizations are seeing benefits from the use of Web 2.0 tools. Marketing, for one, is singing its praises. Of 1,708 respondents using at least one Web 2.0 tool for customer-related purposes, 63% say it’s increasing marketing effectiveness.

The survey breaks out results across three pillars with different number of respondents for each pillar: internal purposes, customer-related purposes and working with external partners/suppliers. Some welcome news is that the executives are finding at least some correlation between Web 2.0 implementation and revenue growth across those pillars. (internal – 18%, customer-related – 24%, partners/suppliers – 16%)

But the most interesting statistic to me was the relatively high marks Web 2.0 tools received for improving satisfaction. Check it out: 41% reported improvements in employee satisfaction, 50% said there were benefits to customer satisfaction and 45% saw increased satisfaction among suppliers, partners and external experts.

The promise of improved collaboration through Web 2.0 is not dead, it seems. Satisfaction among staff, customers or otherwise is one of the harder stats to boost. If blogs and social media are helping improve this relatively elusive metric, then it’s doing its job.

Oh, and if you want to skip to the rest of the findings, here they are.