Do you use a listening platform? Maybe a social media monitoring tool? Or work with a social analytics vendor? All of the above? Well if you do, we need your help. Today we're kicking off the second annual report covering the many ways businesses use social media data. Our goal is to find out who uses social data, how they use it, and for which business purposes. To answer these questions, we've created a survey (available here and below) that will ask you about your experience with social listening tools.

Our survey last year created this report, and I'm eager to see how the market has changed over the last year. For example, last year we learned that most listening platform users conduct fairly basic tasks with the tool — such as brand or competitive tracking, or quick market research, as seen in the graph below. Now I want to see if, a year later, an increased percentage of companies use social data for more interactive tasks — such as sales or customer support.

This is a big annual project for us, and it's great fuel for my ongoing research, so please help us out and take this short (5-10 minute) survey on your use of social listening tools. In return, we will send you a free copy of the research — hopefully publishing in early October — with which you can benchmark your current work against the rest of the market, learn about new ways to use listening tools, and get an understanding of how to improve your social data practices.

We recently conducted a survey on the Forrester blog to learn about the news sources you use to get interactive marketing information and insight.  Among the responses we received, new media (online-only) news sources ranked high, which is no surprise since we asked on a blog dedicated to the needs of interactive marketing professionals. 

When it comes to news and information about interactive marketing, Mashable rules the roost for those who responded; 4 of 5 people listed Mashable as a media outlet they visit at least once a month.  Two other tech/media sites also ranked on top:  TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.  As for traditional media sources, The New York Times and Ad Age were tops for interactive marketing news among those who completed the survey.

Another interesting finding is how many different sources for interactive marketing news are used by survey respondents.  Almost 4 in 10 people say they regularly visit a news site other than the 17 we listed in our survey.  Top answers in the “Other” category include:

• Search Engine Land
• Sphinn
• cnet
• Marketing Profs
• eMarketer
• Econsultantcy

Technology innovation and business disruption are changing the software market today. Cloud computing is blurring the line between applications and services, and smart solutions are combining hardware with software into new, purpose-engineered solutions. We are happy to announce that we have launched our Forrester Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010, to predict and quantify the future of the software market and help IT vendors to tap into the insights from approximately 2,500 IT decision-makers across North America and Western Europe.

The survey will provide insights on the strategic direction and spending plans of enterprises from very small businesses to global enterprises, segmented by industry and country. In comparison with last year’s survey, we significantly boosted the sample size this year for the energy (oil and gas, utilities, and mining) and healthcare industries; we’ll be able to provide an in-depth analysis for these industries along with retail, financial services, high tech, and other industries.

Key themes for this year’s software survey include the following topics:

• Cloud computing. Besides a 360-degree overview on current and future adoption rates of software-as-a-service (SaaS) for different software applications, we are going much deeper this year and have asked IT decision-makers about their cloud strategy for application replacement as well as for different data and transaction types.
• Integrated information technology. Purpose-engineered solutions combining hardware with software are promising higher performance and faster implementation times. But do IT users really buy into single-vendor strategies?

Whether you are a CEO, CIO, IT employee, or working outside of IT, you have some level of understanding of your organization’s strategy. At least that’s what I believe. But how much do you understand? To find out we’re conducting research across the enterprise to see how well employees understand business strategy and whether they have any idea about the IT strategy or even the IT architecture strategy.

As a reader of this blog, I know you are an innovative thinker and business-savvy — I’m hoping you will please take five minutes now or later today to help out our research by taking part in this survey, no matter where you work or what your role is. Even if you cannot take the survey, you can still help by sharing a link to this post (http://bit.ly/cioblog29) with friends, colleagues, and associates who you think may be interested in the results.

 The survey examines a number of aspects of business and IT strategy, such as:

• How well defined and understood is the business & IT strategy?
• How well understood are the measures of strategy success?
• What time horizons are most common for strategic planning?
• Frequency of planning updates
• The perception of IT (from inside IT and from outside IT)
• The maturity of enterprise architecture planning
• Social technology strategy

I'll be writing future blog posts here based upon the data we gather as well as sending participants a summary of the results.