Digital Landfill

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 (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 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"]