• More than 70% of the engineers, geo-scientists and business managers polled believe that collaboration and knowledge-sharing are important for driving revenue, cutting costs and contributed to the health and safety of workers.

• 40% of them believe company adoption of new social media tools, including social networking sites, would boost productivity on the job.

• Only one out of four reports leveraging these newer tools to capture and share important information internally.

• Most respondents stated that their organizations are still using older means of collaboration, such as face-to-face meetings, e-mails and conference calls, even though newer, more sophisticated technology tools are available today.

And the way they’re doing it now is certainly not optimum: 61% of respondents said that they spend at least one hour each working day searching for information and knowledge sources necessary for their jobs.

That’s a lot of wasted hours – do the math. There are an estimated 65,000 engineering professionals in the global oil and gas industry today, and one hour searching for data every day translates into a potential loss of almost 10m people-hours a year among engineers alone, an average net annual loss of $485m for the industry, calculated by the U.S. Department of Labor salary statistics. Ouch!

“When every dollar counts and effective decision-making is crucial, new technologies such as social media tools can help oil and gas industry professionals find information, collaborate and generally be more productive,” says Ali Faramawy, VP Microsoft International.

According to the report Web 2.0 technologies can support the following industry requirements:

• connection with remote geographic locations

• knowledge capture

• knowledge access

• informal knowledge sharing

• joint ventures and team projects, reducing costs and driving incremental business value

Perhaps it’s time to take another look at how social media could improve your internal knowledge management procedures – and your bottom line.

Comments

Forrester  polled more than 1,200 business technology decision-makers in North America and Europe about their social media participation throughout the buying cycle.  The numbers are quite different – and I’d guess that the rapid adoption of social media over the past two years is one factor.

The Social TechnographicsProfile segments business buyers into six categories based on their social activities:

• Creators - 27 percent publish a blog, publish Web pages, create/upload video or music, or write articles and post them online.
• Critics – 37 percent post reviews of products or services, comment on someone else’s blog, or contribute to online forums.
• Collectors – 29 percent use RSS feeds, vote for Web sites online, or add tags to Web pages or photos.
• Joiners - 29 percent maintain a profile on a social networking site or visit social networking sites.
• Spectators – 69 percent read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video from other users, or read online forums and reviews.
• Inactives – 23 percent do not participate in any social media activities for work purposes.

What’s the biggest influencer?  75 percent said peers influence their purchase decisions more than any other media or information source.

“Emerging social behaviors will fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers - especially in a down economy,” said Oliver Young, senior analyst at Forrester. “B2B marketers must use social profiling data to determine how social tactics complement the rest of the marketing mix. Integrating traditional and online tactics is essential as the groundswell of social activity grows.”

The new report, “The Social Technographics^® Of Business Buyers,” directed at Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals, is available to Forrester RoleView™ clients and can also be purchased directly from the Forrester website.

Comments