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The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is out with its latest survey of the Inc. 500′s use of social media, and once again small companies outpace large ones. Ninety-two percent of the Inc. 500 use at least one of the tools studied, which include blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Foursquare.

Interestingly, the use of blogs jumped among the Inc. 500 after four years of little or no groth. Forty-four percent of the 2012 Inc. 500 are blogging, compared to just 23% of the Fortune 500. The figure is a jump from the 37% of Inc. 500 companies that were blogging in 2011. Researchers Nora Ganim Barnes and Ava Lescault found that 63% of Inc. 500 CEOs contribute to blog content.

Also notable is the surge of interest in LinkedIn, which is being used by 81% of companies compared to 67% for Facebook and Twitter. Facebook was the big loser in this survey. Its usage dropped 7% from last year. Up-and-comers are Foursquare (28%) and Pinterest (18%).

Growth in social media investment showed signs of slowing in this survey. Only 44% of respondents says they’re looking to spend more on social media, down from 71% in the 2011 survey. Forty-one percent say their level of investment will remain, up from 25% last year.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said social media is “very necessary or “somewhat necessary” to the growth of their company. This is the sixth year The Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth has conducted the study.

There’s lots more on the summary page, including links to downloads of the full results.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, here’s further evidence that IT organizations need to take a more active role in supporting social business.

IBM just released a global survey of more than 360 marketing practitioners and one of the key findings is that marketers want to be better aligned with their IT organizations. You can see a 28-slide summary of the top findings here.

There’s a lot of data about the lousy tools most marketers have two analyze the flood of data they’re collecting, but the relevant point for tech pros is that “nearly 60% indicate that lack of IT alignment and integration are significant barriers to the adoption of technology.” Marketers say they work pretty well with IT organizations in general, but those at top-performing companies have better-than-average relationships.

The research breaks the respondent base into two categories: Top Performers and Rest of Population. It finds that the best marketers have higher-than-average involvement in products, price, placement and promotion than average. They’re also more likely to be involved in customer service, supply networks and multi-channel marketing. basically, they’re assuming a more central role in business strategy.

However, they’re mostly flying blind because analyzing results is a huge challenge. Among the the top problems are measuring effectiveness, juggling data coming in from multiple sources and managing complex business rules. Eighty-five percent of marketers say they need an integrated suite to manage multi-channel communications. And who better to help them get there than the technology pros?

Other interesting data: E-mail is kind of a mess. Two thirds of marketers don’t integrate e-mail data with other customer information or they integrate data manually, which doesn’t scale. Only 21% have mobile marketing campaigns and 80% handle mobile marketing on an ad hoc basis. We’re still very early stage with that channel.

Overall, there’s a lot of good news for marketing in this research. It establishes that companies that expand the role of marketing beyond mere messaging are seeing better business results. That’s a good thing, right?

Press release/summary of results

The State of Marketing: 2012 IBM Global Survey

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