Nora Barnes (director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass, Dartmouth) and Eric Mattson have a new survey report out on social computing — The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media. They compare how universities and companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media — blogging, social networking (whch I take to mean sites like Facebook and MySpace), message boards, online video, podcasting, and wikis. In a nutshell

Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

I cannot wait to see their detailed analysis.

Picking through their numbers so far, two things jump out. First, universities are almost as likely to use social networks as search engines when evaluating potential students (26% vs 21%).

Admission offices can find out all kinds of information about their prospects by googling them on the web. Tracking and tracing their social networks is close behind. Hum, I wonder what enterprises are going to be doing, both when reviewing job candidates and business partnerships, and when tracking performance. I can see it now — a new generation of “socially conscious” HR and business applications.

Second, we’ve been talking about blogs and wikis in almost the same breadth (thanks in part to Don Tapscott and Wikinomics and “how mass collaboration changes everything”). But not so fast. While blogging is more widely used in universities than in corporations (33% vs 19%), wikis are more widely deployed in corporations than in universities (17% vs. 3%). So we ought to take another breadth, turn down the hypemeter, and better understand how these different modes of collaboration are used in practice.

Here’s my vote. It’s all about the difference between self-publishing and supporting a business process. Blogging’s easy — I’m standing at my virtual Hyde Park corner (as in this blog), using my own time. Others who want to invest their time can read what I have to say. (Thank you, my readers!) But putting up a wiki is all about sharing information that’s part of a business process — I post, you modify, and our colleagues elsewhere in the world add their two cents. The outcome is a group project, the results of our “collective intelligence.” It’s a bit like co-authoring a report or developing a project plan for a group or . . . . you get the point — we share in the results through an interactive process.

Oh, one other thing. Business processes are tough to implement. They happen not by accident but by design. When the bloom is off the rose, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to make wikis really useful within the enterprise.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March!

For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested.

Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity).

An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.