‘Let’s discuss’ ‘between us’, or is it ‘too late’?
Jinfo Blog

9th August 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Market research customers are forcing their suppliers to embrace social media and offer tools for analysis, says the latest Outsell survey. Too right – and as LinkedIn announces its latest acquisition, the implications for social media in the workplace continue to stack up. Outsell’s analyst uses the word ‘forced’ advisedly. As its report points out, the downside for the industry is that some of these tools might divert budgets from traditional market research projects (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bcdsc). Nowhere is this better illustrated currently than in LinkedIn’s agreement to acquire mSpoke, which analyses web content and alerts its users to items of interest. Of its three products, mPower observes what each user actually reads and uses that knowledge to choose the most relevant content on the web, mTrend monitors conversations on the web to alert its users to important changes, and mSense provides the tools to analyse each content item, add metadata and annotate it (http://www.mspoke.com). It’s not surprising that LinkedIn was interested enough to make this its second start-up collaboration announcement within weeks (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29984 for details of the other one). ‘Both LinkedIn and mSpoke are passionate about generating relevancy from the rich stream of content being created by our members,’ said mSpoke co-founder Dean Thompson when the deal was announced (http://digbig.com/5bcdsd). It looks like a recipe for a business environment for which the metaphor ‘goldfish bowl’ is a hopeless understatement. The trend towards more open conversations about work in progress is unstoppable (see for example coverage of the Economist Intelligence Unit report Dangerous Liaisons at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29421) – but it needs to be managed. Gartner recently predicted that social networking services would replace email in interpersonal communications for 20% of business users by 2014 (http://digbig.com/5bcdse). Yet in response, Craig Carpenter of enterprise search and eDiscovery specialist Recommind told Information World Review that, although 42% of United Kingdom businesses saw the increased use of social networking as a key influence in managing information risk, only 7% were factoring it into next year’s budgets (http://digbig.com/5bcdsg). It’s easy to see why businesses should be doing more – and not just because of the recent Cisco report reviewed on LiveWire by Nancy Davis Kho (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30019), but also because of a recent article in Forbes magazine by legal humour blogger Kevin Underhill. As he explains, an analysis of emails carried out by prosecutors in the Lehman Brothers case revealed some perhaps surprising phrases that they regarded as interesting – including ‘let’s discuss’, ‘just between us’ and ‘too late’ (http://digbig.com/5bcdsh). As more and more interested parties probe increasingly porous communications media, perhaps there are some keywords in these recent information industry developments that should have information managers sitting up with interest too – words like ‘alerts’, ‘metadata’ and ‘information risk’.

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