On the back of Forrester’s latest update to its Technographic ladder, Gartner is hot on the analyst company’s heels this week with a study about business use of social media.

Playing on the advice that an integrated approach is the way forward, Gartner suggests that IT departments will struggle to successfully deploy social media until they develop a more “calculated approach”. In fact, the findings show that a massive 70% of IT-led social media initiatives within a business will fail, and that the majority of IT teams will struggle to make the switch from traditional technology platforms such as email, web conferencing and instant messaging, to implementing community-based communications systems like microblogs.

The scale of the issue is such that Gartner also predicts that social networking will replace email completely for one in five businesses across the world by 2012. Its suggestion is that organisations that allow business departments to lead the way in terms of social media, rather than IT, will have a significantly higher success rate of around 50%.

Though taking responsibility and deciding who’s going to lead the charge is important, it’s also vital that internal teams work together to ensure that any social media activity is kept consistent, relevant and useful for all of those involved. If teams can’t sort out internal communications together, anything externally is doomed from the beginning.