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In a recent survey of Social Media Today readers, more than 60% of respondents described themselves as marketing or PR professionals, either on the client or the agency side.
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They are more likely to work for a small business or sole proprietorship, although about 23% of respondents reported working for a company of more than 500 employees. We've seen this apparent underweighting of large companies in other surveys - it may reflect a greater willingness among members of smaller companies to respond to surveys about their company.
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Nearly 78% of respondents said they are involved in decision-making for acquiring hardware, software or technology services for their company. Well over half of the people who said they work for large companies also reported being involved in tech spending.
These are some of the results of a recent survey conducted among SMT members. It wasn't a scientific survey, so the results cannot be said to reflect the entire SMT membership - only the self-selected individuals who responded to the email survey. But we got surveys back from 147 people, more than 6% of the people we emailed - and we're grateful to all of the involved readers who responded to our request.
A few more observations from the data:
- We thought we had offered job-description choices that would capture most of our sample: Marketing/PR (client side), Marketing/PR (agency/consultant), and Journalist. But the second-largest response was "Other." My guess is we would have captured a big chunk of them if we offered "Technologist" as an option. (If you took the survey and checked "Other," I'd love to have you describe your line of work in the comments.)
- Among the respondents who Autopost their blogs to SMT, 21% said their blog traffic had increased since they hitched their RSS feed to our wagon. The others all said they had not noticed any difference in traffic. The point here is that not one single respondent reported a decline in traffic since beginning to Autopost. (Some prominent bloggers have expressed concern that Autoposting here would hurt their traffic, but that does not seem to be the case.)
Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey, which will help us in building the community. Speaking of which, if you can think of anybody who might be interested in Social Media Today -- that person! the one you just thought of! -- this would be a good time to hit the Invite button.