Underappreciated social networking tools

Underappreciated social networking tools

Our survey of 332 business and organization document, records, and information management social activists indicates -- not surprisingly -- that the public social tools most useful to achieving organizational objectives are LinkedIn (54.2% of those using describing it as "very useful" or "critical"), Twitter (39.8%), and LinkedIn groups (36.9%).

In the underappreciated but effective category are InformationZen (http://www.informationzen.org) and Slideshare (http://www.Slideshare.com/jmancini77). 29.0% of Zen users describe it as "very useful" or "critical" and 28.6% of Slideshare users do similarly. The problem is that these tools are only used by about 30% of the participants in the survey.

The Zen result highlights a particular challenge for many "specialist" social sites. Once someone is there, they tend to value the experience. But getting a critical mass of participation in niche groups is a challenge. 

On the other hand, there is a large critical mass on LinkedIn groups (like our AIIM Network with 8,000 members), but the content on many LinkedIn groups is increasingly marketing centric, at times bordering on spam. The natural potential organizers of LinkedIn groups (e.g., associations!) often give it minimal support because there is no way to integrate LinkedIn to the vast content that exists on their "regular" sites.

As I've said before, making the activity feed for LinkedIn groups and subgroups to the owners of the groups would be a really smart strategic move for LinkedIn. It would combine the benefits of niche expertise with critical mass.

Other posts on this survey that may be of interest.

• 30% use Twitter for BUSINESS networking at least once per day
• LinkedIn could be the ultimate business social platform winner. COULD be.

BTW, it's snowing a ton once again in DC on top of the 30 inches from last weekend. Our apologies for any AIIM gaps in service along the way. DC was not made for snow!

[Note: The survey was targeted at current LinkedIn, Facebook, and InformationZen participants, as well as readers of the Digital Landfill blog.  The intent was to focus on business use of social media tools outside the firewall by users, suppliers, and consultants in the information management space.  The survey was conducted in February 2010 and had 332 respondents. Feel free to reuse any statistics with the attribution "AIIM, http://www.aiim.org"]

Comments

[Social Networking Software]

"making the activity feed for LinkedIn groups and subgroups to the owners of the groups would be a really smart strategic move for LinkedIn. It would combine the benefits of niche expertise with critical mass."

Well put! We can only hope that someone listens if enough people put this idea forward. Great article.

[Larry]

John- you said:

"The survey was conducted in February 2010 and had 332 respondents. Feel free to reuse any statistics with the attribution "AIIM, http://www.aiim.org"]"

As stated in my comment on the original post, I think it's important that anyone who uses the statistics also point out that it was targeted at what you referred to as "social media activists", NOT the general business public.

As for the current post, one way to avoid the poisoning of the pool in groups like those on Linked in is for the "owners" to a take an active role in approving members and sending out an initial message to all of them setting some ground rules for posts and informing them to leave their "...increasingly marketing centric, at times bordering on spam..." at the door and NOT post them in the Group.

Group owners have the ability to influence participants activity without censoring them, and they also have the ability to remove posts they feel are not appropriate for the venue. Sometimes, the owners should exercise these rights as a means of encouraging more valuable exchanges between member participants.

[John Mancini]

This idea seems so easy and straightforward I can't understand why they aren't pursuing it.

[Business Intelligence Tools]

This is an informative article, and it is a great idea, Linkedin have an active users forum, and they are good at responding to suggestions for updates and improvements. So all you who agree with this should pop on over there and add your voice to it. Help shape it going forward.

[Social Network Design]

Facebook and LinkedIn are good social networking tools and I have used both in business. I created a page in Facebook about my small chocolate business. But my wife and I are now planning to create our own social medium. We're consulting some experts in social network designing for the user interface and features of the website. We decided to give it a try since we've already seen some business success stories. We want to establish our own network of target market.