IntranetBlogs

I conducted a workshop recently consisting of 17 communication, intranet and IT knowledge workers. The age range was late 20s to late 30s. All were well qualified and educated professionals located in Australia. At the beginning of the workshop I asked the following questions:

• How many of them had a Facebook account - 8 people, Who has heard of Facebook - everyone
• How many had a MySpace account - 0, Who has heard of it - everyone
• Who uses instant messaging (including work) - 12
• Who has a LinkedIn profile - 2, Who has heard of LinkedIn - 5 (including the 2 who had profiles)
• Who is actively using Twitter - 2 (though 4 others had set up an account but were not using it)
• Who wrote a blog regularly (including work blogs) - 1 (me)
• Who has posted a question or responded to a question in an online discussion group within the last 3 months (including any work discussions) - 2
• Who has viewed a video on Youtube - everyone, who has added a video to Youtube - 1 
• Who has ever posted a comment about a news story or a blog  - 4
• Who has used Wikipedia at some stage - everyone, Who has ever contributed to Wikipedia - no-one
• Who considers email as their main way of electronically communicating with work colleagues - everyone!

While the above is far from scientific, I must admit I was not surprised at the relatively low level of content contribution to social media from a seemingly ideal demographic. My experience is that while people are happy to consume content there is a lot less enthusiasm towards contributing content. Even from my own circle of friends & family, most from an older demographic I must admit (lets just call them gen x!), there is only one other person who has a blog and uses Twitter regularly. A few of them have Facebook accounts which they use mainly to stalk their kids!

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Use of social media within an enterprise

While I think that many people are aware of the popular social media tools and are consumers of content (ie. viewers of Youtube and readers of blogs), I think using these tools to contribute content as a normal part of business is an exception (Facebook appears to be widely used, but not for business - Note: I see Facebook recently passed Google over Christmas as the most popular internet destination).

Data from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) supports this idea (Note: The WIC provides intranet feebdack from nearly 11,000 intranet end users from 30 organisations in 12 countries) . The chart below shows the average response to the question, How often do you use the intranet to discuss work topics (eg. using discussion forums or blogs).

 
  
As can be seen 29 of the 30 organisations (listed on the left of the chart using 8 digit codes) to participate in the WIC all rank less than 'Infrequently'.

It's a similar result for the question, 'How often do you use the intranet to publish content?'.

 

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How highly do employees value social media and interactivity?

The chart below shows the correlation between how valuable employees think an intranet is and the various qualities of the intranet.

 
 
  
Web 2.0 type tasks such as being able to discuss work topics, provide feedback or comments and collaborate online are at the lower end of the scale.

Another question asking how important various characteristics were in contributing to a valuable intranet showed a similar trend, with staff being able to contribute and interact rated the second least important quality (out of seven).

  
While I believe that social media tools are widely available in the workplace, the adoption and use of these tools into business as usual is taking a little longer.

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 So what is the point of this bad news!?

This purpose of this post is to paint a realistic picture of how social media tools are being used within organisations in order to highlight the fact that more work is needed before active use of social media tools becomes mainstream. Social media tools that encourage interactivity and collaboration between employees have real potential to add significant value to organisations, to enhance knowledge workers productivity & efficiency and to improve employee engagement. 

Anyone that has posted a question to a LinkedIn discussion forum, discovered a relevant news story through Twitter, or viewed a video on YouTube will understand the value of social media.

To accelerate the adoption of social media in the workplace, there is an opportunity for intranet and communication professionals to take the lead within their organisations and set the example for how to use these tools to benefit the business.

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Part 2 of this post will explain some practical ways for people to use social media to enhance their productivity at work.