世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published a summary of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the topic of company internal blogs and Social Networking Services (SNS).

Demographics

330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor group in salaried employment successfully completed a private internet-based survey between the 8th and 10th of May 2007. 69.7% of the group was male, 18.2% in their twenties, 44.8% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 8.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

I always find it difficult to comment on these sorts of surveys as I fear I might stray too far into criticism of my employer, so I’ll not bore you with my experiences with groupware activities at my place of work.

There will be a significant difference, I think, between the availability figures in Q1 and the actual usage figures by either the respondent or others at the company, but sadly that is not reported.

For reference, I previously translated goo Research’s more detailed look at company internal communication issues.

Survey results

First, those currently unemployed or self-employed, etc, were eliminated from the survey, leaving 298 people who were asked the following questions.

Q1: What information-sharing tools have been introduced at your place of work? (Sample size=298, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Groupware	118	39.6%
Bulletin board	82	27.5%
Company-internal SNS (to SQ)	28	9.4%
Messenger	19	6.4%
Company-internal blog	13	4.4%
Don’t know	56	18.8%
Don’t have any information-sharing tools	65	21.8%
Other	9	3.0%

In the Other category, mailing lists and a shared folder were the top answers.

Q1SQ: What sort of features of your company-internal SNS do you often use? (Sample size=28, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Sending and receiving messages	14	60.9%
Community	10	43.5%
News	10	35.7%
Diary	2	8.7%
Other	0	0.0%

When these same 28 people were asked what features they’d like to see from their company-internal SNS, answers included sufficient help, features to tell if people were in or out, search functionality, knowledge management, and Wiki features.

Q2: What kind of company-internal infromation sharing tool do you most want to use? (Sample size=298)

Groupware	16.4%
Company-internal SNS	13.4%
Bulletin board	12.1%
Messenger	6.0%
Company-internal blog	4.7%
Telephone and mail are enough	18.1%
None in particular	10.1%
Don’t know	18.5%
Other	0.7%