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.

Why do buzzy professionals listen to podcasts ?

I asked Patrick Wong, a 39 years young senior design engineer who works for ASML in Veldhoven that question.

(This is a long blogpost - want to print this immediately, click here.) 

• How many podcasts do you subscribe to and what kind of podcasts are they (topics) ?

I am currently subscribed to about 25 podcasts. I listen mostly to science and news background podcast. Practical advantage of these is that they are pure audio (no video) so I can listen to them in the car. All in all this means I listen regularly to about half of the 25 podcasts I am subscribed to. These can be divided into a number of categories like software tips and tricks, Apple related, National Geographic, photography, news and background or science related...

• What are the major advantages you experience with podcasting ?

You can listen to them when you like and you don't have to hear the same news 5 times a day or you can listen to something again if you want to... for example when someone mentions an interesting book in a Podcast and you didn't have the time to write down the details when you were listening to it the first time. By downloading podcasts you can archive them for future reference, you can share/forward interesting episodes to others or even link to them on your own website.

For me they are also a kind of short highlights on certain topics (e.g. what's new in science or what goes on in the US according to Katie Couric) : an efficient way to stay up to speed on what goes on in a certain area of interest. Focussing on special subjects can also function as a knowledge repository or as tutorials, in my case How To's in Photoshop.

On the "user side" it is very convenient that you can enjoy features like automatic download from iTunes, automatic sync with iPod... All in all very convenient to use and most of them are free of charge.

Other advantages are that you can listen to podcasts while you are on the road to spend such time more efficiently. There are no geographic boundaries like with TV and you can subscribe to Podcasts from everywhere. Finally, audio can be combined with other content like video or text for for example language courses...

• When do you listen to your podcasts ? How much time do they take (in average) ?

I mostly listen in my car on the way to or from work. Some are short (1-10 minutes), others are longer, up to 70 minutes. On average they are approximately half an hour long. Adding them all up on a weekly basis (some are daily podcasts, others weekly) I end up with about 50 minutes of listening material a day.

• Do you sometimes react (by posting a blog comment, ending an email) to a podcast ?

I don't regularly react to Podcasts. It is a bit as with print articles where I will sometimes write a reaction but this isn't a regular habit, only when I think I have something valuable to contribute will I react. Because science topics are either highly specialized or very brief I generally just don't have enough knowledge to make comments about the subject matter. Sometimes I will forward a link of a Podcast to someone I think will find it interesting (e.g. I just listened to one in which they talk about the presumed impact of salt on high blood pressure, something we have been talking about at work) or it can be that I link one on my website.

• On what device do you listen to your podcasts (MP3 player, portable PC/Mac, PSP, car radio etc...)

I simply connect my iPod to the car radio. The ones with video I watch on my Mac but very irregularly due to a lack of time really. Occassionally I will listen to my iPod connected to the stereo. This can be convenient if I want to listen to something together with someone else.

Some of Patrick's favorite podcasts:

• Software tips and tricks : About Filemaker, Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom and Final Cut
• Apple related : Macworld, Apple Gazette, Inside Mac
• National Geographic : best of, video shorts, NG World talk, Wild Chronicles
• Photography : tips and tricks, Magnum Stories
• News and background : Klara Rondas, Wetstraat watcher, Eye to Eye with Katie Couric, UChannel Podcast
• Science related : Sciam Podcast, Nature Podcast, New Scientist Podcast and Science Magazine Podcast

Disclaimer: Patrick Wong works for ASML, a client of Leads United. This interview was done by email and slightly adapted in format for blog publishing & reading.

According to a study by Awareness, a social media company in the US - about 54% of enterprise size companies are using so called Web2.0 technology. The adoption of blogs, wikis etc... even rises to 74% when looking at companies with less than 500 employees. The report is based on 112 completed surveys.

From all the Web2.0 technologies used, blogs rank first in adoption with 87% of the respondents saying they have used them in an enterprise context. Some other findings include that 96% of the respondents say that all of their Web2.0 initiatives have been successful and 91% claim that using social media for internal purposes has improved communications and collaboration.

The report goes on with interesting insights in the use of different kind of social media and the importance of security, deployment and so on. The major obstacles to the adoption of these tools are limited internal resources, internal budget and - last but not least - security considerations.

While the report gives a very good insight on what is happening in the enterprise world in the US, I would love to see the same kind of study done in Europe. Just over the last week I visited several companies, large and smaller ones and come to the conclusion that we all have a very long way to go.

At the same time, questions from clients are more precise, more elaborate than before showing that the interest in using social media for business communications and collaboration is clearly there.

How about you ? Do you think the time is right to start thinking about deploying social media, or is it too early for your organization ? Let me know.