Insightful study (it's a PDF file) of social media is impacting influence patterns. Significant connections to managing internal and external talent relationships...

From the report:

The Society for New Communications Research set out to conduct an examination of how influence patterns are changing and how communications professionals are addressing those changes by adopting social media. The goals were to discover how organizations:

• Define new influencers;
• Communicate and create relationships with them;
• Use social media to create influence;
• Measure the effects of these efforts.

Let's still see about the findings. In the organizations surveyed:

37% were public relations / marketing communications working within an agency
35% were in-house public relations and corporate communications
22% were public relations and marketing communications consultants
4% worked for media companies
2% were advertising and/or brand marketing.

Their use of social media:

Perception of tool's effectiveness in achieving campaign's goals:

Criteria thought to be most important in assessing social media initiative:

Most important metric in measuring effectiveness in communicating with "new influencers":

Blogger/Podcaster effectiveness metric:

Metrics used to define the influencers important to you:

Here's the interesting one for me; it speaks to using different campaigns not only for different levels and functions but sectors as well.

Industries, customers, employees, suppliers, etc. most likely to be influenced by social media?

Again, get this study here.