I’ve seen more and more local success by adopting social media to local SMEs, although what they do are rather tactical and advertising focused, they started to see more and more value from social media. According to a recent study by Small Business Success Index, small businesses has doubled their social media adoption from 12% in 2008 to 24% in 2009.

Many Small Biz just want to “be on it”

Leading ways small businesses are using social media include:

• 75% have a company page on a social networking site.
• 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers.
• 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn.
• 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next 12 months.

They don’t like to spend time on it

Small businesses have a number of concerns about social media, including:

• 50% say it takes more time than expected.
• 17% say social media lets people criticize their company on the internet.
• Only 6% say social media use has hurt the company more than helped it.

Other Findings

• Company web sites are a top technology investment in the next two years, with small businesses either adding new features/functionality to their existing Web sites or building one from scratch.
• The ability to showcase their products and services online to attract new customers is second in the hierarchy of technology investments small business owners plan to make in the next two years.
• Social media investments rank third in small business investments to be made in the next two years.

As I mentioned on my other post “Movie Industry should love Twitter“, Twitter is a great tool for movie makers to spread the awareness about their new movies. On my recent studies, I found out something interesting.

I’ve run a search with my listening tool to see the number of mentions of 3 recent movies (Harry Potter 6, The Hangover, and Transformers) on social media in the past 30 days.

Here’s the result:

Now, take a look at the first day revenue of these movies (in million).

The 2 graphs are not exactly the same in shape, but they are quite close. Although I didn’t analyze the content of the social media mentions of these movies, and have no idea whether they were talking negative or positive about them, do you think it’s safe to predict product launches by looking at their “word of mouse”?

It’s not a surprise that Internet usage grows in Hong Kong over time, what’s interesting is that according to a study by HK Internet Project, the number of male Internet users dropped by 2% from 2007-2008.

In 2008, Hong Kong has slightly more female than male with sex ratio of 0.96male/female. And in 2009, estimated sex ratio will be 0.94male/female.

As the growth of social media, Internet is no longer for geeks, and many female internet users are very active on social networks, will the number of male internet users continue to drop in 2009 while more and more female start to engage online?