Digital Landfill

Many thanks to our readers participating in my business utilization of social networking survey. 

A total of 336 social media "activists" participated in just 2 business days.

To recap, the survey was targeted at current LinkedIn, Facebook, and InformationZen participants, as well as readers of this blog.  The intent was to focus on business use of social media tools outside the firewall. 

Participants in the survey broke out as follows: 29% were from end user organizations; 46% were from organizations on the "sell" side; and 20% from analyst, consulting, and marketing organizations. I will be reporting on the results over the next few weeks.

We looked first at participation in three types of public tools:

1. Facebook, given the primary role it plays in personal networking;
2. LinkedIn, given the primary role it plays in business networking; and
3. InformationZen, as a representative of social networks focused on a particular issue or industry.

Participation in these networks was as follows:

1. Facebook = 73%
2. LinkedIn = 95%
3. InformationZen = 27%

We asked an open question on the most valuable aspect of each of these networks, and captured these answers in a word cloud.  The positioning largely reinforces the categorization above of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zen as, respectively, personal, business, and industry networks, without a lot of intersection in perceived value.

Facebook word cloud -- greatest source of value

LinkedIn word cloud -- greatest source of value

 

InformationZen word cloud -- greatest source of value

Business and organizational users are clear in terms of where they perceived BUSINESS value. Only 16% find Facebook "Useful-Very Useful-Critical" to achieving their business objectives. This compares to 73% for LinkedIn.

As the host of an industry centric social network (InformationZen), my belief is that all three are suboptimal as true business networking tools.

is the next evolution of the Facebook Platform - enabling organizations to integrate the power of the Facebook Platform into broader content sites. This enables users to seamlessly "connect" their Facebook account and information with other content sites. It lets the owners of content sites provide their users with Facebook tools to connect and find their friends, and share information about their actions on content sites with their friends on Facebook.

A weakness of this approach is the inability at this point for Facebook users to differentiate their personal and professional networks. True business networking will not expand on the Facebook platform as long as: a) I can't differentiate between activity streams of my family and friends and purely professional networks; and b) Facebook is dominated by all sorts of nutty things like Farmville and the rising plague of e-mail chain letters masquerading as status updates (e.g., "What color is your bra strap?")

Sites like InformationZen (built on a Ning platform) hosted by organizations like AIIM will always suffer from an inability to leverage all the rest of the content available on the "real" site on their Ning site. Nng sites also seem plagued by a growing threat from spammers and pornographers given some of unrelated sites that are also built on the Ning platform.

LinkedIn has a very powerful potential play but right now seems largely unaware of this potential. LinkedIn clearly has powerful recruitment and professional development possibilities. Its group functionality is acceptable, but is increasingly used by many participants as a marketing rather than networking vehicle. What is missing is a true focus by organizers of groups on the quality of the networking that occurs within the groups. 

Organizations like AIIM that are interested in meaningful business-centric social networking will never put their full effort behind their LinkedIn groups as long as they have no control over these networks and as long as they can't leverage their core content assets against these groups. However, IF LinkedIn were to make the activity stream for a group and its subgroups available to the owner of that group (like the on LinkedIn), groups like AIIM could then embed this stream in their sites. 

This would create an enormous win-win both for groups like AIIM and for LinkedIn. 71% of the business social networking participants in our sample agree that LinkedIn could ultimately be this platform.

[Note to LinkedIn. There is no charge for this game-changing idea. Call me.]

More on our survey results in the next week.