The Conference Board kicked off its 2009 Social Media Seminars at The Levin Institute in New York City yesterday. (You can check out our Twitter handle @destinationCRM as we live-twittered the event.)

The morning started off with a brief introduction from The Conference Board CEO Jonathan Spector and a quick polling of the audience about their personal and professional use of social media:

The group of 94 attendees were largely from well-established companies, over half of which were from organizations with more than 5,000 employees:

• 1 to 500 employees (24 percent)
• 501 to 1,000 employees (4 percent)
• 1,001 to 5,000 employees (19 percent)
• more than 5,000 employees (53 percent)

Which social media applications do you use in your personal life?

• Twitter (8 percent)
• Facebook (68 percent)
• blogs (3 percent)
• Youtube (14 percent)
• Other (8 percent)

Which statement best describes your firm’s use of social media?

• for external and internal purposes (22 percent)
• for external purposes (29 percent)
• for internal puposes (0 percent)
• we’re just starting or not at all (49 percent)

Who is championing the use of social media in your firm?

• CEO (17 percent)
• CIO (3 percent): further affirmation that social media is viewed as a business imperative rather than one driven by technology.
• Business unit head (28 percent)
• CMO (27 percent)
• CHRO, human resources (8 percent)
• Other (17 percent)

What are the greatest barriers to your firm’s use of social media?

• technology platform issues (12 percent)
• disagreement on governance or guiding principles (54 percent)
• disagreement about who does or should “own” social media (13 percent)
• inabililty to measure and demonstrate ROI (21 percent)

Which best describes how you’re measuring return on your social media investment?

• not measuring (39 percent)
• have some metrics in place but don’t consider our measurement adequate (56 percent)
• robust metrics in place that appear to give reliabel feedback (5 percent)