Thanks to many of you for participating in the survey on social media use before the AUTM annual meeting, which
I blogged about back in February. As promised, here are the results.
We had 108 tech transfer professionals respond (about 2.5 times the responses to our 2011 survey). Below is an overview of the findings, and you can get a lot more detail — including recommendations for maximizing social media’s positive impact for TTOs — in our white paper “The State of Social Media in Tech Transfer: 2013 Survey Results and Recommendations,” available free at
http://bit.ly/10BoTiA
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75% of respondents have used social media for at least 6 months. Of the 25% who do not currently use social media, many of these organizations plan to start using it within the next 12 months. Just over 5% of all respondents indicated that they do not plan to use social media in their tech transfer work, frequently citing uncertainty of social media’s value as the reason their TTO does not use social media.
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Building the brand of the TTO or overall organization is the most common objective for social media, with 38% responding that this was their primary objective. Marketing technologies, research, and/or capabilities was a close second at 31%.
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LinkedIn was clearly the favored networking-oriented social media tool. Nearly 85% of the respondents use LI, with more than half using it regularly. Twitter and Facebook are also used commonly, with about half of respondents using each of these tools.
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Interest in content-driven social media tools was mixed. While some organizations are using tools such as blogs and video sharing (YouTube/Vimeo), many respondents have no plans for incorporating this type of social media.
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When asked to characterize social media’s impact on their TTO, respondents offered a variety of insights. Positive outcomes generally related to:
- Gaining knowledge/market intelligence
- Establishing/maintaining connections
- Having a presence
- Achieving secondary goals (e.g., training, staff recruiting, publicizing events)
Concerns about social media mostly related to:
- The lack of a tangible return on investment (ROI)
- The amount of time required to implement a social media strategy
- Issues surrounding staff usage.
Again, the white paper provides specifics regarding this feedback, along with insights about how successes may have been achieved and strategies for mitigating the negative impact. We hope to empower readers to replicate positive outcomes at their own TTO:
http://bit.ly/10BoTiA
So in summary:
- TTOs are using social media, and usage has increased fairly dramatically during the past 2 years.
- Many TTOs are finding social media effective, and most current users plan to keep using it.
- They’re mostly using the tools that have the greatest relevance, the least risk, and the lowest content-creation requirements -- that is, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Most non-users of social media do not believe its potential impact for their organization is significant, citing a lack of deals attributable to social media and discounting the importance of “brand building.”
- More often than not, respondents indicated that their TTO had experienced a positive impact from using social media.