世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the matter of corporate blogs. This can be considered as a follow-up to the survey published yesterday on company-internal blogs and SNS.

Demographics

On the 17th of May 2007 JR Tokai Express Research gathered responses from 330 members of its online monitor group employed in private industry. 76.4% of the sample was male, 10.3% in their twenties, 40.6% in their thirties, 37.6% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

My employer has neither a corporate blog nor a president’s blog. We get once a month press release-like messages from the prez, and at one time our division manager tried starting an internal blog, but the plan died horribly. I think people expressing opinions was the main issue that stifled any progress.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

Jumping on the recent mixi float bandwagon, this half of the survey looks in a bit more detail at the subject of Social Networking Services, or SNS. Whereas I can get behind the idea of corporate blogging, I don’t think that SNSs would work too well. Perhaps I am of the generation (or personality) that never really got into the whole Instant Messenging boom, of which I see SNSs being an offspring of. A mailing list where answers can be considered and replied to at leisure, or a blog with decent RSS support (or even wikis) would seem more productive than a more free-form free-for-all SNS.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

This is a subject I’d love to talk about, but company confidentiality issues prevents me from feeling free to let rip. In addition, I still don’t fully understand Japanese working culture, so the exact reasons for some of the issues I experienced still escape me, although management control is one important factor.

One thing, though, that I thought would be good for many large companies would be something like the halfbakery, only with more serious ideas. I had an interesting idea last night regarding mobile phones but, as Q1SQ indicates, communication with other teams with more direct responsibility for phones is problematic, so the idea will just die.
Read the rest of this entry »