Report: IT Decision Makers lean on Social Media
New twitter friend Steven Groves sent me this helpful report from IT Toolbox (links at bottom go to PDF) that provides data to how decision makers and analysts in IT departments use social media in their day to day lives –including decision making. This is the second wave in their series, I saw the first one and also found it helpful.
Here’s some important findings: “IT decision-maker and influencer audiences spend more time consuming or participating in social media than they do consuming editorial media or vendor content.” No reason to be surprised here, why read irrelevant content when you can connect with trusted peers?
“Executive decision-makers spend nearly 4 hours per week consuming or participating in social media – the highest usage profile.” Compared to other members in the survey, I actually found this surprising, I was under the impression that these folks would spend less time online using these tools.
Now why do IT professionals learn and communicate with each other on forums, social networks, and blogs? Well first of all these tools are native to them, being the ‘geeks’ of the company (I was in IT at Exodus). Secondly, their world is moving fast and technologies are changing, and lastly there are infinite flavors of how technology can be re-arranged and implemented, so speaking to a wide base of peers is critical.
Although I used their last report in my role at my last company, I wish I had this specific survey when I was deploying social media at HDS (we were reaching to IT decision makers) it would have helped my program.
I know that the IT Toolbox is owned by Corporate Executive Board, who offer some similar services to my current employer, (yup, a competitor) but if there’s one thing I learned from working with Robert Scoble is that if you think of customers first (including sending them elsewhere) they’ll come back, it’s about trust.
For other analyst resources, see this compilation I created: List of Resources, Profiles, Indexes, Blogs, Companies and Information for the Analyst Industry.
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Interesting report, but do you think the data is skewed by the fact that it’s a sample of IT people who were already using an online forum - not only that, the sample was the 1% that took the time to reply to the email? That tells me that they would either be the 1% that participates most or that has the most time on their hands.
I would be interested in seeing how this compares to a more random sampling of IT pros.
Well aren’t all surveys somewhat skewed to ‘participants’ of some sort?
Good points, I linked to them, so they should see this and hopefully will respond.
Jeremiah:
i have to agree with Ryan that the survey was biased in that the sample audience were users of Social Media. The ones who don’t use it apparently did not respond. So we can say, from the ones who use social media,….. That hardly gives us satisfactory information.
Thanks for the List of Resources and keep up the good blogging.
I was watching a relevant webinar earlier held by Charlie Kreitzberg, CEO of Cognetics Corp.
So I, a relative newbie, am trying to understand this more in depth, if you could please shed some light.
Ok so there’s the external part of the social web, ’social media’, where its conversation based outreach and people helping each other, multimedia content, UGC, sorta aspect to the web which IT decision-makers are using, as opposed to just content from vendors. This social media is also how some of the marketing efforts a company carries out, through evangelists and blogs etc. Also there’s things like crowdsourcing which is helping the company innovate.
Then there’s the internal part of a company, the intranet, which now also has ties to social web.
This is how there can be more efficient dialog between employees and their voices can be heard, through social networks. Things like ‘predictive markets’ can be used to try to provide incentives for employees to help with forecasting. Also this is a way to innovate within the company.
At the same time an IT person is using forums and talking to people on facebook etc., he is also in a way representing the company he works for and thereby becomes part of the dialog with customers, just like any employee using the external part of the social web.
And the issue comes in when the company wonders how much money to allocate to social media because of the hard to measure metrics, but that’s going to change over time I’m assuming. Social media then is a strategy that has to be carefully carried out? I know it comes down honesty, and if you have a great company/product you can just be brutally honest and it will takes its toll with the crowd, and the efforts can be carried out by any employee really?
I’d love to be more involved with comments and such but I need to catch up in terms of understanding what this is all about.. hopefully i’m somewhere on the right track.
So to finish off, today I heard the following:
key values: employees are not empowered to take action and make decisions. IT people dont see value of social computing and see it as soft tech. usability is critical. lawyers hate web 2.0, cuz of policies etc, but marketers love it. older (more senior) employees don’t get it.
Because IT people don’t see it, there will be a split. New person: BIO will emerge. such as DIY apps for businesses: which has bus analyst and user centered designers.
There was also something about a guy with the last name Carr who wrote some big piece of HBR. In 2003, Carr said that IT is no longer a strategic differentiator. He said company should stop spending a lot and become fast followers.
Sorry for the long post, but i’d love to be more involved. Thanks again
http://www.mycatalyze.org/Blogs/CatalyzeBlogsCurrentWisdom/tabid/1006/BlogID/28/EntryId/899/Default.aspx
thats the link
Azam. Very thoughtful comments, and great observations, much of what you state is true.
Social Media is happening…what do you need to know? Many are past the “Why” stage and are moving on to the “How” stage.
What questions are you seeking to get answered?
Ryan (and others),
The point about bias is fair, and well-taken. The survey respondents are ITToolbox members, and are therefore already engaged in an online community. I would echo Jeremiah’s comments that there is bias inherent in any research sponsored by a media outlet or community of interest (I look at a lot of purchase process studies commissioned by trade publishers, and to a study they rank trade media as most influential).
But our hyphothesis heading into the first wave (fielded in May, 2007) was that traditional editorial brands would be the primary influencers of technology purchase decisions. We suspected that (among this engaged audience) that social media sources would be important but secondary influences. We were honestly surprised that survey respondents spent more time with (not to mention placed more trust in) social media vehicles than their traditional counterparts.
This finding was repeated in the second wave, though traditional media faired slightly better. The surprise in Wave two had to do with the dominant influence of social media–particularly online communities–throughout the purchase process. For all audience segments, online communities were the most important influence through consideration and purchase (search–no surprise–was most important during discovery). The implication is that survey respondents see online communities as extensions of their personal networks. If so, perhaps the result isn’t surprising at all. Peer referrals have always been trusted. It is just that online communities have given us a much larger set of peers to trust.
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