Last summer at Swisscom User Observatory we conducted an ethnographic research on professional social networking with brilliant folks from Dundee University. These last years and months, social media invaded our private lifes and we wondered whether they could have an impact on the ways we communicate, collaborate at work or the ways we conduct our business. We also wondered who the professional users of social media were, what they really did with them, why and how they used them, and whether private practices and expectations towards social media would influence the professional world.
What did we do ?
We interviewed (and observed when possible, at least we observed the online activity) 45 expert users in 3 places : London, Berlin, Switzerland.
These experts were chosen according to a set of criteria : we recruited people active on more than one social media platform, and having more than 400 contacts on LinkedIn or Xing.
By analyzing how these few individuals deal professionally with social media, we hoped to derive potential benefits for more mainstream companies (including ours). The idea is not to gather user needs or opinions or a representative picture of the Swiss market, but to understand their goals, the measurable objectives they hope to achieve with professional social networking, and the strategies they carefully tuned through time for that.
Providing inspiration
Our expert users turned out to be mostly independant workers, found of cheap, creative solutions to achieve their business objectives, quite innovative in their business use cases of these public technologies. Moreover, they can be described as trend-setters as they are highly influential in the professional communities they animate. Therefore, reflecting in this research on their objectives, strategies, and common use cases, provides an important inspiration to evaluate potentially relevant uses of social media in bigger companies.
Six main use cases
After many analyzes of the data, we restricted the whole practices observed to a set of six main use cases, which are :
1. Business Promotion
From SME which sell directly on Facebook, to consultants who promote their services via Twitter, social media offer new ways not only to inform your customers abou your products but to engage them in your business. The traditional one-way model is substituted by a more participative model where part of the marketing is delegated to key customers.
2. Business Intelligence
Social media represent a huge data bank which can be structured, analyzed and exploited. One of our users for example extracted more than 600 profiles from LinkedIn, did some cross analysis on excell, drew graphs and presented the results to his management to convince them that there was a new market which was worth a few explorations.
3. Establishing a reputation
This use case is about managing your own image online. Social media mostly enable individuals to establish themselves as interesting, reliable, witty, well-informed, connected, activ, creative people in a professional community. Producing, commenting and exchanging information is the cornerstone of this self-promotion strategy. As it is now, corporate or product branding is more difficult to perform via social media.
4. Testing ideas
This iterative prototyping is one of the most interesting use cases we encountered. Social media enable to get immediate feedback on ideas or prototypes. One of our users published all his new projects on his professional blog, collected feedbacks and comments and improved them accordingly.
5. People Sensemaking
Social media were used massively for people sensemaking, i.e. checking the online identity of your colleagues, partners, funders, speakers, customers... before you meet them - or after. This is supposed to provide fuel for chitchat (breaking the ice, finding common interests). But it is also precious to identify the key players in your activity : who are they, what are they interested in, etc. Professional social networks enable to get a kind of dynamic business card - but private social networks (like Facebook) or mix social media (like Twitter) are also used to make sense of people.They are said to provide a picture which is a lot more useful because it is less "polished", more faithful. For different reasons : Facebook because of its audience (you talk to friends so you share your life interests), Twitter because of frequency (you can not lie in constant stream).
6. Daily collaboration
Social media help solve some collaboration problems in speedy projects, distributed teams, or for Digital Nomads. Facebook may give a sense of being together although the team is geographically spread. Twitter is used by some innovative users as a project management tool to keep the whole team informed real time of the latest news and trigger discussion.
We learned much more, that I am not here fully authorized to share. Thanks again to our Dundee students for this nice ethnographic partnership !
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