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Cohn & Wolfe Milan Digital Practice Leader, Lorenzo Petracco, with EVP of Digital in the Americas, Brooke Hovey

This post is co-authored by Lorenzo Petracco

Besides Fashion Week, big things are happening in Milan. As an official partner of Milan Social Media Week, the Cohn & Wolfe Milan office got to work commissioning an original research study in collaboration with AstraRicerche (an Italian research firm) and the University of Udine to measure how companies operating in Italy approach social and digital media from a structural point of view.
By surveying more than 100 managers of small, medium and big companies operating in Italy, we wanted to study how companies are organizing themselves internally to meet the challenges of the digital age—what are the mean budgets, available resources and who calls the shots when approving plans are some of the questions we posed.

The results were really not that surprising in that they confirm some of our empirical observations.
While budget and resources remain somewhat scarse (76% have 0-1.5 dedicated personnel to social/digital programs with 55% surveyed allotting 10% of their total communications budget), Italian companies are beginning to grasp the importance of social and digital media and are re-organizing themselves internally to more efficiently manage and sell-in digital programming to top management. While marketing and communications have a more pronounced role in the ownership and management of digital initiatives, there remains an opportunity to engage additional, more nascent functions within the context of digital such as customer service as well as the CEO who is 13% likely to be approving digital proposals directly.

Have a look at this infographic which highlights some additional interesting findings:

 
To present the findings we had Brooke Hovey, Texas-native and EVP of Digital in the Americas, skip over the pond to host “Companies 2.0,” an event we put on at Social Media Week Milan to a packed crowd of over 100. Accompanying us were Enrico Finzi (AstraRicerche), Professor Luca Brusati (University of Udine), and Anna Adriani (Global Communication Director) and Amy Harp (Global Digital and Direct Channel) from illycaffè presenting the social media organizational model the company has chosen to adopt.  There's a clip from the event below.

While it may be some time before companies operating in Italy execute and support digital and social media programs with the same fervency as their American counterparts, the mindset of the digitally-integrated, social media-savvy organization is very much alive on the Mediterranean boot.