Overdue research on social media in use in organisations and society

For years now I maintained that I had nothing of importance to tell the world to justify having a blog. To some extend I agreed with Geert Lovink (http://bit.ly/Eo2IP) that blogging has a strong nihilist impulse and I am not one for self-exposure - usually. I was happy monitoring the developing social media use of fellow professionals and even in my workplace at the time, often getting disappointed with many hyped initiatives that inevitable lost momentum after the first few weeks. I follow Steve Bailey’s and about 20 other blogs on web2.0 and social media with interest and enjoyed participating in his social network for records managers (http://recordsmanagement2.ning.com). Even though I felt ever so slightly asocial watching passively how the world of collaboration manifested itself around me, I never really had the impulse to act and make myself heard (much). And now to the inevitable ‘but’…

But last week I felt I heard battle cries from all over the information management profession for the use of social media tools such as twitter, blogs and even live streaming of events. A Cilip event on Web2.0 (called Cilip2) suddenly sparked a large debate on Twitter (#cilip2) about the use of social media in the LIS sector and the professional body’s engagement with new technologies and its membership. It seemed that for the first time librarians all over the UK came together virtually to debate professional issue and suggested ways to improve professional engagement (interesting here is a blog post by digitalist  http://tinyurl.com/dc62zk).  A similar debate (on a much smaller scale) happened during the Records Management Society’s annual conference in Brighton last week where a few tweeters (#RMS09) were wondering why the conference organisers made so little use of social media tools and how subsequent conferences could be improved.

Tom Roper, in a subsequent blog post, is calling for “providing the practice on which theory can be developed” (http://bit.ly/CLFtL ) which is true in a way because how else can we gather quantitative and qualitative information on the uses of social media in organisations across the sectors. Being a newly converted academic though, I think serious research is now needed in order to disperse the hype of ‘Web2.0’ (and I am no great supporter of this term) and gain an understanding of its reality. Ever the pessimist I am wondering how much of all this web2.0 talk is hype and how much has been properly evaluated. There might be the ultimate study out there but if so, I can not find it because of all this information overload. I already have over 500 bookmarks in my delicious account and no time to properly read any of them. I more and more keep asking myself (and keep playing devil’s advocate):

·         How many organisations are using social media, to what extent and to which purpose?

·         There are many examples of people and organisations making use of social media but how effective is it?

·         Why are some sectors such as LIS and the media quick on the uptake and others so resistant?

·         Do we really have anything to say in 140 characters or less? What is the quality of tweets compared to the quantity?

·         How much conversation do we need and where is all the content?

 

Maybe the answers to my questions are already out there…..

Just set up this blog and still unsure of how best to use it. If only I have enough interesting things to say to the world at large and - don't we already have information overload?! Does the worl really need yet another blog by someone with no majorly new interests?
Maybe not but I still want to be heard!
So watch this space...