Yesterday morning I spoke at the Intranet 2.0 Forum which Melcrum organized in London. The conference focused on internal communications, the use of intranets and possible applications of "social media" like wikis, blogs, RSS feeds etc...

I was the second speaker and came right after Jane McConnell who is the founder of Netstrategy/JMC, a consulting company specializing in all things related to intranets.

Jane & I met years ago at another conference when I was still "evangelizing" for IBM. I must say I had (and still have) the impression that things are not really moving forward in the context of serious business applications of social media and mentioned this to Jane. She went straight onto a full rebuttal of my "feeling" with a great presentation based on her yearly research among companies across the globe.

Some highlights of her Annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey:

• 72% of respondents are implementing or playing with social media internally.
• The "intranet" will be the "way of working" in about 12 months for over 50% of the organizations questioned.
• 38 respondents on 51 see "the organizational culture is not ready" as a barrier for the implementation of social media within the company.
• 46 respondents of 62 stated that getting expert views on a subject is the top application of internal blogging.
• 50 of the 62 state that wikis are used primarily for experience & knowledge sharing.

My take on these very interesting insights is that - yes, intranets & social media are on the agenda of communicators but no, they are not in synch with communications & business objectives.

From the roughly half of the people in the room who showed hands when Jane asked if they had wikis in the enterprise, only a couple showed hands when I asked them if the wikis they had where implemented in the context of a clear objective instead of a test run somewhere on a server as it regularly happens...

Whatever the future might bring, I need to compare field notes with Jane more often. For those of you who want to participate in the 2008 survey, please get in touch with Jane, she'll appreciate your input.

I'll write more about this conference in the next coming days.... Keep tuned.