Tech Comm Student

Only a few days ago Gartner, Inc., a world leader in information technology research, made five bold predictions regarding the direction of social media that could significantly impact the role of technical communicators if time proves them to be correct.

“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business,” stated Mark Gilbert, vice president of research at Gartner. “Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business.”

E-mail Will Be Replaced

As early as 2014, Gartner predicts that social networking services (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc.) will become the primary way of communicating within the company for about 20 percent of businesses. These social network sites will become the “hub” of business activity, and allow for interaction with their clients through the use of employee-created social networking accounts specifically to be used for business communications.

Interestingly, rumor has it that Facebook has already begun working on this project.

Twitter For Businesses?

More than 50 percent of enterprises are said to be participating in “microblogging” by 2012. When you think of microblogging, think “tweets” from Twitter: short status updates to aid in communicating in-the-moment information. Most businesses will be using an internal, more secure and potentially customized version of a Twitter-like service, while we’ll only find 5 percent of businesses participating in this form of communication outwardly to the clients and shareholders.

Social Media Initiative Failures

Over 70 percent of IT-initiated social media initiatives will fail; 50 percent of those initiated by the business-side won’t reach success either. ” IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value,” Gartner asserts, “Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high.”

What do you think this prediction means for technical communicators? It looks to me that we’ll have some decent job security in this area as long as employers are able to recognize the (often) intangible value we can bring to their business.

Smartphone Software Will Influence PC Application Design

“70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.” With cell phones having such a large market penetration rate, users are able to now communicate with more people in less time than they can using their PC at home. As a result, PC software will begin to take more of its influence from handheld-based applications within the next 5 years.

Businesses Are Reluctant To Ask Permission For Data

Only 25 percent of enterprises will utilize social network analysis on a regular bases through 2015. With recent news of Facebook and other such companies collecting detailed information on users without expressed permission, Gartner estimates that privacy issues will still be a major concern for the majority of internet users. However, if businesses are able to obtain this permission to improve targeting of products and services to potential customers, both performance and productivity can increase.

Read the official press release here.