Profile done

I finished our social technographics profile yesterday. The results surprised me, but in a different way than they were surprising me the other day.

Survey Recipients: 631			Responses: 227… (36%)
Category	Respondents	Percentage	U.S. Norm	Index
Creators	51	22.5%	21%	107
Critics	70	30.8%	37%	83
Collectors	54	23.8%	19%	125
Joiners	81	35.7%	35%	102
Spectators	183	80.6%	69%	117
Inactives	37	16.3%	25%	65

Two things jumped out at me. One is the low level of Inactives. I thought for sure that number would be above the U.S. average. The other is the high level of Collectors. I have no idea where that comes from, and may have to do a deeper dive to determine why the number is 25% higher than the national average. On the other hand, 23.8% still isn't very high.

Another interesting result from the survey was the response to the question "Have you ever contributed to or edited a wiki?" Not a single person answered yes.

Compile, analyze, re-combine, re-analyze

Today is the day I pull the results of our social technographics survey and analyze them. I'm a little nervous about the results, but anxious to get it done. Off to work!

Profiling update

I took a brief look at the raw results from our internal social technographics survey yesterday. The results are not what I expected, but in retrospect I suppose they make sense. At first glance it appears that while we have an large population of spectators within the organization, the population of creators is extremely small. However, the population of joiners is also pretty high - almost as high as the spectator population.

Next week I am going to do a deeper analysis of the results and write up an internal white paper on my findings. I anticipate that these first impressions will hold true upon taking a closer look. My biggest concern is that we may have to drastically rethink our approach if those results are accurate.

There be Progress

Today I released our internal social technographics survey out into the wild. Well, sort of. I actually sent it off to our University administration team so that they could send it out from their "official" AAA University mailbox. They haven't done that yet, but I should be seeing it within a couple hours or so. I'm a little nervous about the level of participation we will receive, and how people will react to the wording of the e-mail announcement, but I'm sure it will all work out.

Our funding got put on hold for a couple of weeks (after it was already approved and stamped) while we await another round of approval from a committee of folks from our parent department. I anticipate we will make it through that without much trouble, though. If we do make it through the committee I will have a decision to make on another matter. One of the project team members has thus far failed to attend any of our meetings, and I have located - purely by accident - a volunteer from the same college who would like to get more involved. I don't want to step on anyone's toes by switching the team members, but I really need the participation. I don't know; we'll see what happens.

Whoops!

I was sitting here reading the blog of an old friend, and all of a sudden an Outlook reminder popped up. Apparently I have another Web 2.0 project meeting in 4 minutes. One would think that I would be keenly aware of when these meetings are (after all, I scheduled them), but this one I completely forgot about. It was one of those "Oh, crap!" moments. Good thing we have hardly anything to talk about today.

Forward Progress

I finally finished the last few pages of Groundswell today. I'm not sure what took me so long to get it done; I guess other priorities kept slipping in there.

Yesterday I attended a meeting that included our executive in charge of our Internet presence and strategy. I was reassured to learn that his team is working on deploying some external social media tools in order to better get in touch with our customers, and that he thinks building an internal social community is a terrific idea. Someone from our team (probably me) is going to start having regular conversations with his social media program manager in January. Although our projects have separate intents, and will very likely use separate platforms, we need to make sure that we are aligned wherever possible, and be able to share ideas. This is an exciting step.

What Audience?

I'm spending part of the morning catching up on reading my favorite blogs after taking the day off yesterday. One of the first posts I had to read was this one, about the blogger's audience. It made me think about how I've been writing my posts, and who exactly it is that I'm addressing them to.

The answer is that I don't really know. I don't believe that anyone actually reads my blog on a semi-regular basis. A couple of my co-workers have read the posts about my DevLearn experience, but I think that's it. There was a guy who tapped me on the shoulder after Dan Roam's keynote speech at DevLearn (on day 2) to let me know he had read my blog the day before, but again I assume he was just reading what I had to say about DevLearn specifically.

In the end I guess I am writing this as if my primary audience is the co-workers of mine who happen to stumble in here on occasion. Until I can prove my audience is anything else I'm just going to go with that.