Social Media Study Findings ...

Bill Ives has blogged about the findings Prescient Digital Media study about social computing ... There are some findings of the study which one could look at ...

One, there is the finding about the reason that organizations are looking at social computing for ... as Bill says:

Employee Collaboration - 77%
Knowledge Management - 71%
Employee Engagement - 53%
Executive Communications - 35%

What we need to look at here is that a large number of organizations are looking at social computing for employee collaboration and knowledge management. What this means is that to a large number of organizations, KM is separate from the idea of facilitating employee collaboration. This means that a large number of organizations see KM as essentially document repositories, and not as a means for sharing knowledge, no matter the means for sharing knowledge.

Another aspect, as Bill puts it, is:

Despite the common wisdom that executive involvement greatly aids adoption, the study found relatively little executive involvement as 57% of executives have never contributed content or have done so infrequently (less than once per month) and only 11% of organizations have executives that contribute content on a daily basis.

This seems to be expected because more and more, it is people at junior or middle management levels who seem to be taking to social computing more than senior managers, which leads to the idea that social computing is not a fad, but would probably be around for some time to come, though the shape of social computing may change over a period of time. David Gurteen has put up a poll about this, where again, a large number of people who have responded seem to think that social computing is not a fad.