Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 57 of 75)

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March!

For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested.

Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity).

An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.

Here is a chart including the data from the poll described yesterday from 500 25-34 year old facebook users combined with the results from the same poll given to 500 18-24 year old facebook users. There is certainly a difference. But the most surprising results are the extremely low expectations about the use of blogs and wikis, and even social networking software. These findings, informal as they are, would make me very nervous if I were a start-up hoping to make it by capturing the facebook generation as they stream into the workforce.

Geoff and I and Leonor are at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference in Boston, and I’m sure we’ll have some things to report. In the meantime I used the new facebook polling feature to ask facebookers what they think about a few collaboration technologies and their importance in the workplace over on our main blog.

I joined facebook a few days ago to check it out and to get an idea about the approach’s relevance to enterprise applications. I need to use it some more before I reach any conclusions, but since I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference this week I decided to use the new facebook poll feature to see what the facebook crowd thinks about collaboration as they enter the workplace. The poll feature is limited (1 multiple choice question) but it provides direct access to the tens of millions of facebook users and you can choose from a couple of demographic options. Also, you can get the results very quickly – in my first poll I received 500 responses in about 9 hours!

I will blog about the results more later and will also include all the graphs, but in the meantime, everyone I mentioned the poll to at the conference has wanted the results, so here they are the basics:

Question: Which collaboration technologies will you use the most in your job in two years?

• SMS text messaging 6% (30)
• email will continue to dominate 66% (328)
• instant messaging 16% (53)
• facebook-like social networking tools for business 11% (53)
• blogs and/or wikis 2% (8)

Keep in mind that the 500 responses all came from the 25-34 age group who are presumably mostly in the workforce. I just started the same poll with the 18-24 age group and will provide those results for comparison later tonight. UPDATE: The combined poll results are now available.

Between the two age groups we will have some info direct from the generation that Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee and others are making predictions about (we refer to some of this here). This is of course a very informal poll, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had the results in time to provide Andrew and Tom Davenport for yesterday’s debate!