On Friday, the Houston Chronicle ran Companies in new age of networking. Jeff Rohrs sent me a link to the article asking me to do a little digging into the opening statement:
"As social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook assimilate into our lexicon as verbs, companies faced with reduced communication budgets are realizing the value of engaging their employees and customers through Web-based interactive media.
A June survey conducted by The Internal Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and Buck Consultants reported almost 80 percent of organizations frequently use social media, outranking even e-mail."
The rest of the article contains excerpts from an interview with Julie Freeman, president of the International Association of Business Communications (IABC) talking about how ans why companies should participate in social networking. Which of course begs the question, if 80% of companies are already using it, then why the need to talk about the basics of social media? Simple, because they don't!
So, where is the problem? Well, the original press release from the IABC, Two Out of Three Communication Professionals Don't Think Twitter's Popularity Will Last, makes a lot more sense. Furthermore, the full report, Employee Engagement Survey, provides some interesting information on the current and future plans of how companies plan to use social media tools in communicating with internal employees.
Unfortunately, the Houston Chronicle is the latest to get caught up in the feeding frenzy around social media and email bashing. In doing so, they failed to grasp the incredible significance of an asterisk.
Reading this chart, you must take the little notation next to the channel that says (n=xx) into consideration. This tells you how many people answered the question and form the basis for the percentage in the chart. For social media, there is an additional asterisk saying that this was not listed as an option in the survey. However, 72 people wrote in social media as a way they used to communicate internally. Of the 72, 79% said they use this method frequently. So, about 57 of the 1,477 survey respondents frequently use social media for internal communication. This is about 4%.
Contrarily, 75% of 1,418 survey respondents said email is used frequently for internal communication. This is approximately 1,064 of the total respondents.
The survey provides absolutely zero basis for comparison between social media and email. Since email was an answer choice and social media was a write in answer, we can't compare them. The "outranking even email" comment is simply wrong.
Email is still the workhorse for internal employee communication. Blogs, discussion boards, internal social networks, and wikis are all being used more and provide very valuable tools. They haven't displaced email and they won't displace email for a long time. Beware statistics that support hype in spite of the facts (and common sense).
"As social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook assimilate into our lexicon as verbs, companies faced with reduced communication budgets are realizing the value of engaging their employees and customers through Web-based interactive media. A June survey conducted by The Internal Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and Buck Consultants reported almost 80 percent of organizations frequently use social media, outranking even e-mail."
The rest of the article contains excerpts from an interview with Julie Freeman, president of the International Association of Business Communications (IABC) talking about how ans why companies should participate in social networking. Which of course begs the question, if 80% of companies are already using it, then why the need to talk about the basics of social media? Simple, because they don't!
So, where is the problem? Well, the original press release from the IABC, Two Out of Three Communication Professionals Don't Think Twitter's Popularity Will Last, makes a lot more sense. Furthermore, the full report, Employee Engagement Survey, provides some interesting information on the current and future plans of how companies plan to use social media tools in communicating with internal employees.
Unfortunately, the Houston Chronicle is the latest to get caught up in the feeding frenzy around social media and email bashing. In doing so, they failed to grasp the incredible significance of an asterisk.
Reading this chart, you must take the little notation next to the channel that says (n=xx) into consideration. This tells you how many people answered the question and form the basis for the percentage in the chart. For social media, there is an additional asterisk saying that this was not listed as an option in the survey. However, 72 people wrote in social media as a way they used to communicate internally. Of the 72, 79% said they use this method frequently. So, about 57 of the 1,477 survey respondents frequently use social media for internal communication. This is about 4%.
Contrarily, 75% of 1,418 survey respondents said email is used frequently for internal communication. This is approximately 1,064 of the total respondents.
The survey provides absolutely zero basis for comparison between social media and email. Since email was an answer choice and social media was a write in answer, we can't compare them. The "outranking even email" comment is simply wrong.
Email is still the workhorse for internal employee communication. Blogs, discussion boards, internal social networks, and wikis are all being used more and provide very valuable tools. They haven't displaced email and they won't displace email for a long time. Beware statistics that support hype in spite of the facts (and common sense).
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