A recent IBM survey shows that business executives are starting to become keenly aware of the growing importance of social media as a driver of new business. In an article reviewing the survey, Network World reports that CEOs are shifting their focus from phone and email to social media as their main communication vehicle.

While today just 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, that figure is expected to jump to 57 percent over the next five years, according to IBM, which polled 1,700 business execs worldwide.

Similarly, while social media is ranked by CEOs as their least utilized customer interaction method today, they expect it to become their second most highly utilized customer engagement method within the next five years, according to the survey.

Bad Day to Fly: Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld is getting raked over the coals because he boarded a cross-country flight that rendered him incommunicado for several hours on May 18.

That was the fateful day that Facebook went public and all hell broke loose thanks to a string of technical glitches that marred the social media giant’s first day of trading on the Nasdaq exchange.

Many investors are livid about Nasdaq’s mishandling of Facebook’s IPO, saying they lost huge sums of money because they were left in the dark about how many shares they had bought or sold and at what price. Consequently, lawsuits are expected to start flying any day now.

A Matter of Degrees: Résumé padders get caught and fired from their jobs every day, but seldom does such a thing happen in the C-suite of a company as big and visible as Yahoo.

The Internet giant, while still one of the most visited sites on the Web, has been on the ropes for several years, mainly due to stiff competition from the likes of Google and Facebook. The latest news that Yahoo had to sack its recently hired CEO, Scott Thompson, because his résumé contained false information about his education, certainly won’t help the company’s effort to climb back into the fight.

PETE FEHRENBACH is a senior associate editor at Smart Business. His cover story in the June issue of Smart Business Atlanta features Service Foods CEO Keith Kantor.