An interesting little report came out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently – a “statistically significant, longitudinal (study) on the usage of social media in corporations.” However, it wasn’t just any corporations – the study focused on the Inc. 500, which is comprised of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. One particularly interesting headline result – 39% of the Inc. 500 is blogging, which is a 20% increase over the previous year. In contrast, other research indicates only 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently has “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products“, a bump of 3.6% over the same time period. As the following chart shows, the Inc. 500 is also showing rapid growth in the adoption of social networking, online video, wikis, and podcasting:

It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands:

• Sue and fire Employee Bloggers (e.g. Delta Air Lines Inc)
• RSS Feeds of existing content (e.g. Intel Corporation)
• Internal Wikis and Weblogs (e.g. DrKW)
• Executive Bloggers off-Site (e.g. guest blogging)
• Host Consumer Blogs (e.g. most media companies, Google)
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for Employee Blogging (e.g. Apple Computer, Inc)
• Group Blogs on-Site (e.g. Yahoo! Search Blog)
• Executive Bloggers on-Site (e.g. SAP Executive Blogs)
• Public Wikis (e.g. Intuit)
• Encourage Employee Blogs (e.g. Scoble)
• Host and Employee Blogs (e.g. Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft Corporation)
• Carpetbombing (e.g. commenting anonymously in blogs)

Note: I don’t think “sue and fire employee bloggers” is a good category to be in .