LR 2011 Social Networking Survey

8/4/2019 LR 2011 Social Networking Survey

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Light Reading’s

2011 Social NetworkingSurvey

By Sarah Reedy, Senior Reporter, Light Reading Mobile

JULY 2011



2011 Social Networking Survey

2 2011 Social Networking Survey www.LightReading.com

CONTENT PAGE

Introduction 3

Meet the Survey Respondents 4

Social Media Strategy 6

Tracking Social Media 7

Social Perceptions 9

Social Network Usage 10

Social Status 12

Social Consumption 13

Doing Business on Social Media 14

Social Job Searching 15

Pay for Play 16

Connect With Light Reading 17





IntroductionSocial networking represents a profound change in the way people connect,

communicate and gather information. It is both made possible by and changing

the telecommunications industry. And we wanted to learn more about where,

how and when people in the telecom space are using third-party Web services

to communicate and share personal and professional information.

In the first ever global Light Reading survey of 750 telecom professionals,

including over 200 service providers, we learned that communications

professionals are waking up to the value in social media -- some are even

using it to help find potential customers, with LinkedIn Corp. as the preferred

network by a landslide.

LinkedIn attracted 33.9 million unique visitors in June and now has 115 million

users, according to comScore Inc. Twitter Inc. had 30.6 million visitors in June,

and Facebook outpaced all other social media sites with 160.8 million unique

visitors during that month.

Why get social?Social media is where our personal and professional lives are becoming

intertwined. Ask any number of politicians or athetes if you need proof.

While personally gratifying (or indemnifying), social media can also be

professionally advantageous. Even when the information a user conveys online

is not related to their business, residual good vibes reflect on the company too.

Conversely, negativity spewing from an individual account can have the same

counterproductive effect.

While social media doesn’t represent a huge revenue opportunity for telecom

operators, the survey results on the following pages provide a snapshot of

how the industry -- inclusive of everyone from C-level execs to engineers to

marketers -- is using social media, what sites they prefer and some prevalent

attitudes toward the information that comes from such sites.





Survey respondents spanned all ages and sectors in the communications industry, with about a third coming from service

providers.

In terms of geography, 45 percent of the respondents reside in the U.S., 6 percent in Canada, 8 percent in the U.K. and the

rest spanned the globe.

Looking at only the respondents from the global service provider community:

• Forty-nine percent came from Tier 1 service providers

• Seventeen percent from Tier 2, 3, or 4 service providers

• Twenty-five percent from wireless network operators

• The remaining 10 percent from either cable providers/ MSOs or independent cable operators

It is important to also note that 29 percent of respondents held sales and marketing roles, and 3 percent work in PR, which

could both have more customer-facing use cases for social media than other positions.

For the rest of the respondents:

• Seventeen percent are in corporate management

• Nine percent work in network operations

• Twenty-eight percent are engineers

• Of the remainder, 2 percent are in finance, and 12 percent have other job functions

Meet the Survey Respondents





Wireless habitsWe also asked our survey takers about their tablet and smartphone usage, as a core motivation for the survey was to

determine how pervasive mobile devices and apps are in this particular part of the business. We expected usage to be on the

high end -- after all, everyone in telecom is an enabler of mobile and social networking in some respect.

Here’s what we found out:

• Seventy-six percent of respondents attend between one and five tradeshows every year

• Twenty-seven percent use Apple Inc.’s mobile operating system, 29 percent use Android and 22 percent own Research

In Motion Ltd. devices. The rest were split among Symbian Ltd., Microsoft Corp. Windows Mobile and Hewlett-Packard Co.

webOS devices

• Thirty-seven percent owned a tablet and, of those, 73 percent had Apple iPads. The remaining 27 percent were split among

Samsung Corp., High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC), RIM and other tablets

• Only 16 percent had ever used Apple’s FaceTime two-way video chat service





Our respondents were split nearly evenly on whether their company employs a social media strategist and if they had a

company-maintained account.

Fifty-one percent of respondents worked for companies with a social media strategist or someone hired to run social media

activity, and 49 percent did not.

When it came to maintaining that social presence, 53 percent left that to the company, 8 percent to an external PR firm

and 39 percent said that their company did not have an account representing the entire organization, just personal accounts

upheld by individuals.

The telecom vendors may be further ahead in dedicated social media practices than their service provider customers,

according to Ciena Corp. social media manager Bo Gowan. Prior to Ciena, Gowan brought social media to Nortel Networks

Ltd. in 2007. Over the past four years, he’s watched the attitudes of employees in the company change from resistance to a

mindset of “How can I not be involved?”

Now, practically all vendors have well-defined social media programs and managers to run them, whereas some service

providers are still trying to figure out what social media means to their business and their bottom lines.

This was evidenced by our survey results, although the differences weren’t as extreme as Gowan suggests. Sixty percent of

both the service providers and hardware and software vendors worked for companies with social media strategists, and only

slightly more, 60 percent of vendors compared to 55 percent of service providers, had company-wide social media accounts.

Less than 10 percent at both outsourced the practice to PR agencies.

Social Media Strategy





Monitoring and analyzing social media activities is new territory for telecom professionals.

Slightly more than half do not use social media monitoring software, which lets companies track and analyze their mentions

online.

Out of the 48 percent of respondents who use analytics, the majority -- 60 percent -- use Google’s free service, Google

Analytics, for monitoring. No other platform was significantly represented in the survey.

As many of our respondents are coming from large companies it’s possible that not everyone will even know whether theirorganization uses social media monitoring software. But, acknowledging that there’s a larger than average margin of error, the

results are still indicative that the industry hasn’t yet fully embraced monitoring.

Dell Inc.’s use of Radian6 put it on the map, but if you’re not a consumer brand, using social media monitoring software may

not be vital, according to Gowan. Ciena, for example, finds free tools like Google Analytics or Alerts and HootSuite sufficient

rather than paying for a more advanced service.

Tellabs Inc., however, relies on the tools for brand awareness. The company uses Spiral16, Netvibes, HootSuite and other

monitoring programs, and Ariana Nikitas, Tellab’s senior manager of communications, says this has helped them catch

conversations about the vendor and its competitors within 30 minutes after they’re posted.

“In today’s world where everything is global and everything is real time, you want to catch conversations fast,” she says.

Tracking Social Media





Telecom vendors may have other interests in the social media monitoring space too. Rather than be the customer, some,

including Sybase Inc. and IBM Corp., are now starting to brand their data mining capabilities and sell them as social media

monitoring products.

“Some vendors, as part of their CRM [customer relationship management] are doing a social media component, so it’ll be

interesting when they pitch it to carriers if they’re all over it or think they don’t need it,” says Heavy Reading Staff Analyst

Sarah Wallace. She was surprised that Radian6, a robust monitoring product recently acquired by Salesforce.com, wasn’t

more commonly used.

“Those monitoring programs are a nice, quick way to find a sentiment of your company,” Wallace says. “But, right now the

priorities are more mission critical than social media monitoring.”





Social networks can be a mixture of productivity and fun, and it’s these two traits that capture how the majority of our survey

respondents feel about the sites.

Of our respondents:

• Forty-five percent think social networks are productive

• Twenty-six percent think they are fun

• Fifteen percent think they are efficient

• Another 15 percent think they are wasteful

Age is still a factor in acceptance of social media, but Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Adi Kishore says that job function is more

indicative of use level. Indeed, 52 percent of those in sales and marketing or PR found social networks to be productive,

compared to only 39 percent of engineers, for example. Seventeen percent of engineers described them as wasteful

compared to only 11 percent of those in a consumer-facing role.

It’s also interesting to note that from the survey’s inception to publication, at least two social networks have changed courses

and one more launched. Social network pioneer Friendster morphed into a gaming network, and MySpace was acquired by

ad-targeting firm Specific Media. More recently, Google launched its own social network and Facebook competitor, Google+.

The market for social media is clearly hot, and it’s one that reinvents itself about every six months. It raises the question, what

separates a fad from a social network with staying power? If you can’t get 700 million users like Facebook, is there room for

multiple networks in the market?

Social Perceptions





Most of our survey respondents’ interest maxed out around three networks. They had 10 to choose from, but they only

actively used LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn, the professional networking site, was the overwhelming favorite

among telecom professionals.

The fact that LinkedIn was rated most highly amongst survey respondents came as a surprise to Wallace, whose background

is in consumer marketing via social media. In the marketing world, Facebook and Twitter are more highly regarded, she says.

But LinkedIn’s relevance to telecom professionals relates to its business utility and ability to connect service providers to

customers, vendors to partners and industry thought leaders to one another.

The big three also have relatively well-defined use cases that contribute to how often they are used -- LinkedIn for

professional networking, Facebook for personal connections and Twitter for information sharing.

Amongst the leading social networks:

• Forty percent use Facebook daily, and 24 percent use it weekly

• Thirty-two percent use LinkedIn daily, and 46 percent use it weekly

• Twenty percent use Twitter daily, 14 percent use it weekly and only 7 percent use the real-time service hourly

Social Network Usage

More than 85 percent of survey respondents do not ever use the following social networks: FourSquare, Gowalla, MySpace,

Google Orkut, Tagged, Hi5 or Bebo.

It is worth noting, however, that this is not the case in India, where 67 percent of respondents use Google’s location-based

social network, Orkut, at least weekly.

Tellabs’ Nikitas runs these big three platforms for the vendor, and her focus for this year is on how to make them more

valuable on a day-to-day basis. She says that Tellabs is trying to up its participation in LinkedIn and Facebook groups. This

has been a successful way to find new vendors for the company, but so far has been little more than a marketing vehicle for

events and products.





Twitter is also a new medium for most Tellabs employees whose time is spread thin, Nikitas says. Most use it as another way

to connect with customers, partners and other target audiences.

“Twitter is the one people love or hate,” Gowan adds. “Some think it’s a waste of time, but it’s all about who you follow.”

A lot of professionals get hung up on what they will say on a network like Twitter, but most of the value - at least at first -

comes from just listening: choosing to follow people whose opinions matter to you and observing the conversations.

“In the telecom industry, there is such a culture of information sharing and learning from others, and there’s so much change

going on, that it draws people of all ages into these channels,” Gowan says.

Although location is a hot topic and many vendors are working out deals with the wireless operators for location-based

services, friend-finding networks like FourSquare and Gowalla fell flat amongst survey respondents.





LinkedIn was far and away the most valued social network, with 73 percent of respondents indicating it was the most

important network to help them do their job. Twitter came in a distant second with 13 percent of the votes, followed closely

by Facebook with 13 percent.

Of the 80 percent of respondents that indicated being active posters to their social networks of choice:

• Three percent post information hourly

• Twenty-three percent post daily

• Thirty percent post weekly

• Twenty-four percent post monthly

One question that arose in many of the discussions around LinkedIn was, how are telecom professionals actually using the

site? Was it actual day-to-day use, or just the idea of a professional networking platform like LinkedIn that appeals to people?

Forty-five percent of respondents checked the site on a weekly basis and 32 percent daily, suggesting that it’s more than just

a job-searching tool.

“At a high level, executives are largely using social media to connect, which is why LinkedIn rates highly -- rather than to

gain information or step outside the marketing team, it’s to market products,” Kishore says. “It’s not really about information

gathering or dissemination, it’s about connecting with people whom you then follow-up with.”

Social Status





LinkedIn may be primarily about the connection, but -- like Twitter -- it also has elements of information gathering and

disseminating.

Sixty-six percent of survey respondents say they have used a social network to get information, expert opinion or data related

to a business issue.

Most trusted the information they saw as well, at least to a certain degree. Twenty-nine percent believed it to be both

accurate and timely, while 12 percent thought it was only accurate and 43 percent thought it was only timely. The remaining

16 percent had little faith in the information’s timing and accuracy.

Sites like Twitter are becoming a viable way to get news, replacing users’ RSS feeds in many cases. Many executives even

turn to the site to break news first. This has been the preferred medium in the past for Google, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

executives. Outside of the tech world, it was also how one Twitter user unknowingly chronicled Osama bin Laden’s capture,

as well as how people in Egypt expressed outrage at an oppressive government.

It was interesting that while our respondents saw social media as a way to get the news quickly, they didn’t always trust that

what they’re hearing was accurate. In most cases, users will trust people, not necessarily information. If the news is coming

from a reliable source, they are more inclined to believe than if it’s something they randomly noticed on Twitter.

“That’s the thing that turns people off professionally with these social media platforms,” Gowan says. “They hear things and

start using it, but it could take you literally months to start understanding it and seeing value in it.”

Social Consumption





Outside of information gathering, some found that social networking contacts can lead down the path to producing revenues.

That’s been the case for one quarter of the survey respondents who indicated that a contact on a social network has directly

resulted in revenue for themselves or their company in the past year.

The other three-quarters of respondents may have had more indirect success too. Forty-nine percent said they have used a

social network to find a business partner or vendor. Of those, 80 percent found success on LinkedIn, 10 percent on Facebook

and 9 percent on Twitter.

Of course, as ever, a grain of salt should be taken with such figures. “It’s about a series of conversations that eventually leadsto a proposal that may lead to a project,” Kishore says.

Indeed, a post or tweet may not change a service provider’s mind or purchase decision, but it could start a series of

conversations that lead to a buyer. Also, it is admittedly difficult to pinpoint how a single contact might have led to a sale. “We

[at Ciena] see it as metrics, views and interactions and comments from individuals we care about, but don’t worry about going

through the sales cycle,” Gowan says.

Doing Business on Social Media





A third utility that LinkedIn is uniquely positioned for is the job search. Just over half of survey respondents have used

LinkedIn to search for a job and just under half have been successful in their pursuits.

LinkedIn was a far more valuable tool for job searching than Facebook, where survey respondents kept their personal and

professional lives separate.

On Facebook, for example, only 3 percent maintained a professional account alone. The majority, 58 percent, only had a

personal account, and another 13 percent used the same account for both professional and personal interactions. Only 7

percent kept up two separate accounts for personal and professional use.

The value of Facebook, while not as professional of a culture as LinkedIn, is that it counts 700 million people as users. It

has the hip factor and cache that other sites lack. Since the survey was of professional users, it follows that most are using

Facebook for personal purposes and, therefore, find less of professional appeal.

In general, Wallace says the industry consensus seems to be that Facebook is for personal use, LinkedIn for business

purposes and Twitter for use cases somewhere in between.

And, by the way, if you are looking for a job in the telecom industry, why don’t you have a look at http://jobs.lightreading.com?

You’re welcome.

Social Job Searching





These social network business models could change at any time. So which ones does the telecom business really see as

valuable enough to pay for?

When asked which social networks users would be willing to pay for if the free versions went away:

• The overwhelming majority, 81 percent, said LinkedIn

• Another 31 percent said Facebook

• Seventeen percent said Twitter

• The other seven social networks failed to attract more than a few votes, with the exception being Google Orkut, which 3

percent said they would pay for

Pay for Play





What kind of survey makers would we be without offering to connect with you on social media? See below for our editors’

social networking information, and feel free to make a connection.

Also, check out our videos on Light Reading ’s YouTube Channel. And, be sure to friend Light Reading on Facebook and follow

@Light_Reading on Twitter.

Joe Braue

Group Director & Senior Vice President

Twitter: @joebraue

Joe on Facebook

Joe on LinkedIn

Phil HarveyEditor in Chief

Twitter: @futurephil

Phil on Facebook

Phil on LinkedIn

Ray Le Maistre

International Managing Editor

Twitter: @raylemaistre

Ray on FacebookRay on LinkedIn

Jeff BaumgartnerCable Site Editor

Twitter: @thebauminator

Jeff on Facebook

Jeff on LinkedIn

Craig MatsumotoWest Coast Editor

Twitter: @craigmatsumoto

Craig on Facebook

Craig on LinkedIn

Dan Jones

Mobile Site Editor

Twitter: @dan_LRMobile

Dan on Facebook

Sarah Reedy

Senior Reporter

Twitter: @sreedy

Sarah on Facebook

Sarah on LinkedIn

Michelle DoneganEuropean Editor

Twitter: @mpdonegan

Michelle on LinkedIn

Carol Wilson

Chief Editor, Events

Twitter: @CNWEdit

Carol on Facebook

Connect With Light Reading

Documents

LR 2011 Social Networking Survey