Research » GNIUS

The Rise of the Networked Enterprise

Posted by Andrew Cringle at 11:13 am Social Media Tagged with: Enterprise 2.0, Internal Communications, Research, Strategy

Mar 012011

Whilst organisations continue to invest in the internal adoption of social technologies, it is becoming clear that, so far, only a few have worked out how to make the most of these new opportunities. McKinsey’s latest survey into the use of web 2.0 tools within organisations has identified the emergence of this new class of company – ‘The Networked Enterprise’.

Almost two-thirds of the businesses surveyed by McKinsey are now using social technologies to some degree, benefiting from quicker access to knowledge and internal experts, greater communication and operational efficiencies, increased employee satisfaction and greater levels of speed to market and subsequent success for product/service innovations.

However, as with any new technology, the rate of adoption and the ability to generate significant improvements varies enormously. McKinsey’s report identifies four major types of organisation -

Developing -The vast majority (79%) of organisations are still learning how best to deploy the new technologies. They are realising only modest improvements in business performance and have yet to develop significant usage or integrate tools into daily work flows, as a result they see little change in levels of communication, collaboration or information sharing.

Internally Networked Organisations – Some organisations (13%) focus primarily on using social tools within their company, resulting in higher levels of employee participation and greater integration into work-flows. The major benefits come from significantly more flexible internal processes; information shared more easily and less hierarchically, greater collaboration across silos and a more project-based approach to tasks.

Externally Networked Organisations - These companies (5%) achieve substantial benefits from using web 2.0 tools to connect with customers and business partners. They see benefits in marketing effectiveness and revenues but much less improvement in operational efficiencies and internal sharing and collaboration.

Fully Networked Enterprises – These are the elite organisations (just 3%) that are successfully integrating web 2.0 technologies throughout their operations; connecting the internal efforts of their employees and extending the company’s reach out to customers, partners and suppliers. As a result these organisations are seeing both sales growth through increased market share and higher margins through increased operational efficiency.

The benefits of the fully networked approach not only deliver competitive advantages now but provide the means for businesses to extend that advantage; lessons learned in one market, region or function can be quickly shared and adopted throughout the organisation, leading to faster innovation, greater organisational effectiveness and better products/services.

Key Steps to Becoming Fully Networked

The creation of effective networks, both internal and external, is quickly becoming an organisational necessity. If they aren’t already, senior managers everywhere need to be thinking about how they can enable their business…

Integrate the use of Web 2.0 into employees’ day-to-day work activities
Drive up levels of adoption and usage
Break down barriers to organisational change
Apply Web 2.0 technologies to interactions with customers, business partners and employees.

The ‘Networked Enterprises’ already have an advantage, the challenge for everyone else is to join them quickly or risk being left further behind.

Internal Communications’ Developments for 2011

Posted by Andrew Cringle at 5:42 pm Social Media Tagged with: Enterprise 2.0, Internal Communications, Intranets, Research

Jan 062011

The way people communicate within organisations continues to change. The role of Internal Communications is becoming less about broadcasting the company message and more about encouraging those conversations and collaborations that will most effectively deliver the business’ goals.

The Intranet Design Annual 2011 from the Nielsen Norman Group offers some interesting insights into the way organisations are expanding, changing and re-imagining their internal communications activities, delivering greater value, to more of their members, more regularly. Having seen many of these developments first hand in our client discussions, we’ve picked out a few of the trends we expect to see more of in 2011.

More Companies Can Now Have Better Intranets

More and more companies are now able to develop high quality intranets. This is partly due to the wider recognition of the value of investing in intranets and partly due to the availability of better tools for building intranets. The easier it is to make the implementation work, the more resources that are left for design and usability. This is especially important in smaller organizations, which found it costly and time consuming to make things work with clunkier technology.

However, quality intranets remain a long-term commitment. Many organisations supplement their intranet teams with outside resources — such as design firms and consultants — for their redesign projects, only to cut back resources after launch. Long-term usability requires ongoing commitment, both for continuous design improvement, and for things such as search quality initiatives, consistency and style guide enforcement, and training new users and content contributors.

Mobile Intranets

Mobile access to intranet sites continues to grow in importance. Significantly those sites with fewer features have much better usability than full-featured websites; focus on specific features that are important to employees on the go instead of trying to squeeze the entire intranet onto a tiny screen.

One major difference between mobile intranets and mobile websites is that an intranet team can optimize for the relatively small set of company-issued mobile devices.

Managing Knowledge

As well as providing searchable access to the organisation’s knowledge archive, many intranets are now actively encouraging members to share their expertise more widely and are using social media tools to provide the means for users to identify and connect with people, knowledge and resources across the organisation.

Knowledge sharing. Providing searchable archives for case studies, reports, creative samples, and other existing information can help people with similar problems avoid having to start building their solutions from scratch. Sometimes, knowledge sharing can be as simple as a Q&A tool to connect employees with questions to colleagues with answers.
Innovation management. Managing and encouraging innovation by offering users tools for taking ideas and improvements from conception to completion.
Comments. The simplest way to inspire user-contributed intranet content is to let employees comment on existing information, ranging from news stories to knowledge bank resources. Systems that force people to create content from scratch every time inhibit user participation, commenting features reduce the fear of the blank screen.
Ratings. Giving a grade requires even less work than writing a comment, and thus rating systems can further broaden user participation. Sites that use ratings can list top-rated resources first in menus or give them added weight in search listings.
Participation rewards. User participation increases when contributors are visibly rewarded, such as by adding points or badges to their profiles. Because there’s real business value to features like knowledge sharing and innovation management within an enterprise, some intranets went beyond the symbolic value of visible recognition and offered real prizes to employees who gathered sufficient participation points.

Continued Trends

These are fairly established practices that are likely to be implemented more and more widely in the coming months-

A wide spectrum of technology solutions: there’s no single way to build a great intranet.
Structures based on organisational tasks and activities rather than legacy silos.
News as a main homepage feature, but with increasing emphasis on the usefulness of news stories.
Better employee profile pages. In addition to offering information beyond plain contact listings, profiles are coupled with a more structured way of finding employees with specific expertise.
Blogs by both executives and regular employees.
Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets).
The use of pre-designed page layouts and a CMS to establish and maintain content consistency.
Training for site managers and people in charge of individual areas, in recognition of that fact that user experiences derive from people and not just technology.
Increased use of video on intranets, including features that let employees create and share video content.

Ofcom CMR 2010 – Social Media

Posted by Andrew Cringle at 5:31 pm Social Media Tagged with: communication, Research, Strategy

Sep 272010

Some further thoughts culled from Ofcom’s recently released Communications Market Report 2010. This time focusing on the use of social media sites.

Social networking now accounts for a quarter of all time spent online

In April 2007 social networking and blogs accounted for 9% of UK users’ total Internet time, according to audience data from UKOM/Nielsen. By April 2010, this had risen to 23%.

Use of social networking has continued to grow rapidly among all age groups.

Younger people are more likely to access social networking sites, but it is by no means exclusively a young person’s activity;

61% of 15- 34s claim to use social networking sites, compared to 40% of all adults aged 16+.
Nearly half (48%) of 35-54s use social networking sites, as do 20% of 55-64s (up 7% over the past year).

However, usage patterns vary substantially between age groups.

89% of 15-24s who access social networking sites do so weekly, but just 50% of 55-64s with a profile do so.

All demographics have seen an annual rise of at least ten percentage points in the number of people claiming to have social networking profiles.

ABC1s (46%, up from 35%)
C2s (39% up from 29%)
DEs (30%, up from 19%).
Women (42%) were slightly more likely than men (39%) to claim to access these sites.

Despite the growth of social networking among older age groups, and the high penetration among younger age groups, its take-up still lags behind total Internet take-up, with around 45% of those who have Internet access at home saying that no one in their household accesses social networking sites.

A fifth of 16-24s’ time spent social networking is on mobile devices

Social networking sites have taken advantage of the growing popularity of the mobile Internet and the increasing take-up of smart-phones. Most sites now have mobile-friendly versions and specific applications (apps) for smart-phones. The importance of mobile social networking is highlighted by Facebook, which claims that more than 100 million users access its site through mobile devices, and that such users are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.

Data from Ofcom’s consumer’s digital day research show that using mobile devices to access social networking sites is particularly popular among younger adults (Figure 4.6). A fifth (20%) of the time they spend social networking is via a mobile device. This compares to the average of 15% for all adults who use social networking sites. The proportion of time spent social networking on mobile devices drops off rapidly among over-45s, at under 4%.

Google, Microsoft and Facebook are the most popular Internet brands

Google has the highest reach of any online brand in the UK, with 87% of active users (someone who used an Internet-enabled computer in May 2010) visiting a Google site in May 2010. This equates to 56% of the total UK population. MSN and Facebook were the next most popular brands, reaching 70% and 64% of all active users (45% and 41% of the population) respectively.

Facebook users spend more time social networking than users of other sites

While Google is the leading brand in terms of reach, Facebook leads in terms of average time spent per person. Facebook users spend substantially more time on the site than users of other social networking sites; 6 hours 30 minutes in April 2010 (an average of 13 minutes a day), down since a peak in November 2009 of 8 hours 39 minutes (17 minutes a day). Bebo was the next most intensively used site, with users spending an average of just under an hour on the site in April 2010. For most other sites the figure was around half an hour or less.

Audiences for many user-generated content sites continue to grow.

According to data from UKOM/Nielsen, many UGC sites’ audiences are growing steadily, although annual growth rates are falling. Photobox (30%), Wikipedia (19%), Blogger (16%) and WordPress.com (6%) all experienced solid growth in the year to May 2010.

YouTube remains the most popular video-sharing site, with nearly 17.5 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of more than two million in a year. But it is increasingly difficult to categorise YouTube purely as a UGC site, since it hosts a significant amount of professionally produced content made available by film studios, broadcasters, record labels and other content providers. For example, in November 2009 Channel 4 made its 4OD catch-up and archive service available through YouTube, and in December 2009 Five made similar content from its Demand Five service available on the video-sharing site.

But…apart from photo sharing and social networking, most internet users have little interest in UGC.

Ofcom research into user-generated content shows that social networking and photo-sharing are very popular. But most other activities are minority pursuits that do not arouse much interest in the wider population of people with Internet access.

49% upload photos to a website, 9% more expressed interest in doing this in the future.
44% claim to have set up a social network profile (double the level of 2007) 5% expressing an interest.
Commenting on blogs grew from 19% to 27%.
The number of people expressing interest in setting up their own website fell from 17% to 12%.

All activities except social networking and photo-sharing generated relatively low levels of interest (at least 64% of internet users indicated that they were ‘not interested’).

Young people were most likely to have engaged in user-generated content activities online.

A quarter (26%) of 16-24 year olds claimed to have made a short video and uploaded it to a website,
Only 2% of people aged 55+ with internet access make the same claim.

In general, the older an Internet user is, the less likely they are to have experience of a given UGC activity. However, the exception to this rule appears to be contributing to collaborative websites such as Wikipedia; 25-34 year olds were as likely to have done this as 16-24 year-olds (17%).

Ofcom Communications Market Report 2010

Posted by Andrew Cringle at 5:49 pm Social Media Tagged with: communication, Research, Strategy

Sep 202010

Ofcom recently released its Communications Market Report 2010.

With 379 pages of data and analysis about media consumption habits in the UK it offers plenty of interesting insights into the way people use communication technologies today. In this post, and another to follow on social media, we’ve picked out a few interesting bits worth thinking about.

UK consumers are spending almost half of their waking hours watching TV, using their smartphones and other communications devices.

In total people spent 8 hours and 48 minutes a day using various media content and communications services if counted separately, however simultaneous consumption allows them to fit all this into just seven hours and 5 minutes a day!

Figure 1.14 shows the various media and communications activities undertaken each hour of the day. Radio was most popular in the morning but declined by the evening when TV accounted for over half (52%) of all media activities.

Text communications and voice communications both account for a fair proportion of media activity throughout the day, only declining during the evening’s peak television time.

Print media made up an average of 6% of all media activity between 10:00 and 22:00, before peaking at 12% of all media activity at 23:00.

Over half the time people spend on media and communications activity makes use of a TV or radio set.

However, the research confirms that use is influenced by access and the disproportionately high access young people have to a range of digital communications devices and technologies has a bearing on the way they use a wide range of communications services.

For example, computer, mobile phone and hand-held devices all had higher levels of use among younger age groups. Almost three-fifths (58%) of all 16-24 year old media engagement was through one of these devices, compared to 18% for people aged over 55. By contrast, use of the more established devices and media, such as TV sets, radio sets, and print, generally increased with age.

Two-fifths of people’s time on a computer is spent communicating with other people (though the pattern of use differs by age);

37% of activity done on a computer by over-55s is communication-based. Most of this is emailing, which makes up 28% of all computer activity among this age group. An additional 8% of their computer activity is social networking, and 1% is instant messaging.
For 16-24s, over half their computer time is spent communicating with other people. They are more likely to use social networking (23% of all computer activity) and instant messaging (14%). Emailing is a smaller activity among this age group, making up 14% of their computer activity. Audio and video activities on the computer is also highest among this group.

Internet take-up is edging towards three-quarters of UK households

Almost all homes with computers are now connected to the internet. PC ownership is likely to be the biggest constraint on increases in household internet take-up in the immediate future.

The type of internet connection that a consumer has determines the type of content they can consume, with many forms of content requiring a broadband connection. Differences between fixed and mobile broadband connections, particularly with regard to bandwidth-intensive activities like video streaming, are also relevant, since mobile broadband connections are more susceptible to capacity constraints.

Consumers are accessing the internet across more and more devices.

Alongside the growth in internet connections, the range of internet-connected devices has grown rapidly in recent years. This means that many consumers now have a number of different ways to access web-based content. Apart from PCs and laptops, examples include:

Mobile phones – such as smartphones (like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian devices), or ‘feature phones’ which offer a more limited internet browsing experience.
Games consoles – advanced games consoles such as the Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii allow users to browse the internet and consume web-delivered video content as well as playing games online.
Portable media players – devices such as the Apple iPod Touch and Archos 5 Internet Tablet have been joined by newer devices such as the Apple iPad, Dell Streak and various e-reader devices which all enable users to access internet content;
Other devices – such as internet TVs (for example, certain Sony Bravia and Samsung 6 Series models) and internet radios that combine online content with broadcast content.

Ofcom media literacy research shows that accessing websites through a computer or laptop is widespread, with 67% of adults claiming that they do this; compared to 28% of adults who claim to use a mobile phone to access websites, 10% who claim to use a games console, and 6% a portable media device.

IPA TouchPoints Survey

Posted by Andrew Cringle at 7:08 pm Social Media Tagged with: Digital, Research, Social Media, Strategy

Aug 182010

The third IPA TouchPoints Hub Survey has recently been released, describing a week in the life of a representative sample of the GB adult population during late 2009/early 2010.

As well as revealing that people watch 3.7 hours of television per day, listen to the radio for 2.1 hours and access the Internet for 1.8 hours per day – the survey is full of interesting insights into the way Internet use and social media are becoming increasingly important to people’s lives.

Digital trends

75% of adults use the Internet in a week now, rising from 53% in TouchPoints2.
Daily Internet usage has increased 38% in the same period, up from 1.3 hours to 1.8 hours. This increase is greatest in the evening and primarily driven by the growth in social networking.
Growth in Internet use is across all age groups but greatest for 15-24s (+43%).
Internet use in general has a slight male bias and is more heavily biased towards ABC1s. It also has a quite marked regional bias towards London and the South East with the rest of the country being much lighter Internet users of all types.
Email accounts for a 20% share of all Internet activity, next largest activity is using the Internet for work which takes a 16% share.
Although, still at the 1-2% share levels, the time spent consuming media online has also grown substantially; listening to radio/podcasts is up by 166%, looking at newspaper websites by 61% and watching online television by 216%.
16% of all adults and 34% of 15-24s use their mobile phones to access the Internet each week.

Social media trends

The time spent social networking has risen by 113%, increasing its share of Internet activity to 11%.
37% of adults use social networks each week — this group is particularly skewed towards 15-24s, and those either still studying or working full-time and also has a slight female and ABC1 bias.
The incidence of social networking also has a strong regional bias towards London and the South East: with the notable exception of the North West, the rest of the country are much lighter social networkers.
Social networking takes place throughout the whole day but peak time for people to social network is between 6.30pm and 10pm in the evening.
35% of all adults claim to use Facebook each week — up from 16% in 2008. For 15-24s Facebook’s weekly reach is 79% – up from 39% in 2008.
Only 4% of adults claim to use Twitter once a week or more whilst the comparative weekly reach figure for Linkedin is 1.4%.

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UK Social Media Census 2011