Prescient Releases The Social Intranet Study
By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-10-31
Prescient Digital Media will be officially releasing their report on the Social Intranet Study at the Intranet Global Forum conference in NYC, Nov 9-10. I had a chance to look at a preliminary copy and there are some interesting findings. The study examines social media use on corporate intranets, and the magnitude, use and popularity of social media by employees and executives. It is based on a survey conducted between late May and early June 2011 by Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media, in association with the IABC Research Foundation. The findings indicate that there is rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.
There were over 1,401 global participants in small, medium and large organizations in all types of industries. The pool had 43% of organizations based in the United States and 28% in Canada with the rest evenly distributed elsewhere. While the sizes of organizations varied, they all had intranet access. Most of these were mature intranets with only 7% implemented in the past year and 31% of the intranets were over 10 years old.
Blogs were the most common 2.0 or social media tool as 75% have intranet blogs; 26% have deployed blogs enterprise wide; only 4% have no plans or interest in deploying blogs. Next were discussion forums as 65% have intranet discussion forums; 26% had enterprise wide use; 7% have no plans or interest. Other tools followed with IM at 63% on the intranet, wikis at 61%, RSS at 56%, tagging at 51%, social networking at 43%, microblogging at 42%, podcasts at 39%, content ratings at 29%, social bookmarking at 23%, and mashups at 10%. Remember these numbers refer to use through the enterprise intranet, not use on the Web.
Portal Solutions (e.g. SharePoint or WebSphere) are the most popular technology platforms at 34%, while 27% of intranets are powered by Content Management Systems (e.g. Sitecore or Ektron). Other platforms include: 20% are custom built solutions, 14% use a hybrid solution, and 4% use a social media platform. Despite this pervasive use there is little expenditure involved for most as only 28% have spent $100,000 or more and 38% have spent less than $10,000.
The response to social media tools is mixed so far with 28% of executives rate their overall satisfaction as good or very good and 35% rate these tools as poor or very poor. Similar number hold for employees with 28% rating their overall satisfaction as good or very good and 31% rate these tools as poor or very poor. I think there may be a correlation between expenditure and satisfaction. If you are investing very little in the effort you are likely just putting something up to see if works. The ‘build it and they will come approach" will most likely lead to poor returns. As I have written a number of times, social media needs to be integrated into work process to really be successful (see for example, Putting Social Media to Work)
This is a great study with 45 pages of rich data beyond what I provided in this summary. I recommend you take a look.
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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
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