Post-lunch I attended a session on market research trends on enterprise social software. The presenters have recently done a 600 respondent survey on the use of enterprise social software tools; the respondents were information workers.

Craig from Sector Intelligence

Key issues for purchasing ESS services:
– to improve internal employee communication (75%)
– to improve communication / collaboration with suppliers and customers (47%)

The key tools being used:
– RSS, blogs and wikis
– a big proportion of these were being used as long as they were “free”.

They looked at deployment scope … organization-wide, department-level, and in pilot.
– podcasts (55% organization, 22% departmental)
– RSS (44% organization … )
– … for the others, organization-wide kept going down and the others were going up.

How well do these meet expectations?
– across all of the tools, 50-60% of people thought that they were working at expectation, and about 30% below or well below expectations.

Main conclusions:
– it’s still early days.
– need to explore further
– need to look more at the impact over the long-term

More research is planned, eg, a vendor study, a subject matter expert study, focus on cultural and structural changes within organizations.

Mike from TeamReid
Mike Reid from TeamReid talked about the different ways that different groups in the organization were using social software.

Senior executives:
– senior staff blogs
– wikis for communities of practice
– blogs and wikis to discuss proprietary issues
– for planning and managing projects

Library staff:
– online research guides
– new book lists
– committee work
– RSS to push information to other departments

Sales people:
– LinkedIn for lead generation
– wikis for writing proposals
– RSS to track client activity
– internal blogs for competitive intelligence gathering

Marketing:
– attorney podcasts to highlight accomplishments (helps with winning business)
– inform users of new developments via RSS

IT Department:
– bug list in a wiki
– blog to track outages and upgrades
– developer wikis for documenting processes

Key message: Every department can do their bulk standard things using enterprise social software tools.