valerie bauwens's blog

We took Lifters on a journey into their future usage of professional social networks.

We started from their present usage by concentrating on current use cases. By sharing the results of our own study at Swisscom, we also allowed Lifters to compare their own behavior to that of our study's 45 lead users. Finally, we asked Lifters to project themselves 3 years into the future and imagine what they personally would, or would NOT do on social networking sites.

And so what did we learn?

1. No new actual use cases: we confirmed that our study's use cases remain accurate and relevant.
2. Future use cases: Lifters want improvements like more specialized SNS. They also voiced their frustration about the tension between private and professional on SNS - they are looking for ways to control one’s content publishing better. When publishing, they would like to decide and control the visibility of that information (for whom is it going to be visible).
3. There was consensus on the fact that the business model around soc. networking sites is still not there. There is no clarity about how to monetize them and according to what incentive mechanisms.
4. Communication culture in large companies is one of the main issue for the adoption of SNS. Changes of management, restructuring of departments can be a good opportunity to grasp to change a communication culture.
5. It is very difficult to get people to think about the future, even though we asked them to think about their personal usage in 3 years.

Want to join the debate?

Come talk to us at our Rezonance First on Thursday March 10th.