To what extent has big data already penetrated the field of communication? What is the state of the crisis in this sector? And what do communication professionals do and do not do with social media? Every year, the Communication Panel of professional organization Logeion and Direct Research takes the thermometer in the sector and investigates the trends and developments within the profession. These are the results.
The results in the report (pdf) show, among other things, that we are approaching the use of social media in an increasingly professional manner and that communication professionals are confronted with the far-reaching transparency of society on a daily basis.
Social media in the communication mix
A large majority of the communication professionals surveyed (95%) indicate that they use social media in the communication mix. 42 percent spend a lot of time on including social media as a fixed component in the communication mix. In 2013, this was 54 percent. Can we conclude from this that social media has become an indispensable part of the mix and that communication professionals are now very familiar with it, which means that it takes up less of their time?
What do we use social media for?
We mainly use social media to send, to collect information and to enter into dialogue (respectively 95%, 89% and 86%). More than three quarters indicate that they use tools for social media monitoring.
The results further show that Dutch organisations make little use of co-creation , crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Only a quarter of the respondents use social media for this, while these media are very suitable for bahamas mobile phone number list this in my opinion. One explanation could be that these methods of involving the crowd are not (yet) used very much in the Netherlands, for example due to lack of time or the conviction that one knows perfectly well what a new product, service or facility should look like. Another explanation is that organisations do use social media, but that this is an area of attention for other colleagues within the organisation.
To keep up with online communication, about three quarters of communication professionals mainly learn in practice or read about it. More than half of the respondents keep up to date through conversations with colleagues and 19 percent indicate that they follow training courses for this.
Four main trends
Last year, Logeion formulated four main trends in society that have an impact on the communications profession, these are:
'Glass house' : This does not refer to the well-known 3FM campaign, but to the phenomenon that everything an organization does is visible, partly due to far-reaching digitalization. A recognizable trend I think, think for example of statements such as ' Privacy is dead ', which is attributed to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and the development of Google Glass .
Horizontalisation : Society has become flatter and people move within networks where many like to share their opinions. This development can also be seen on the work floor: a recent survey by Tempo Team among almost 500 employers shows that more and more companies are opting for less hierarchy on the work floor.