IDC ITpartner.net on Social Media!!!

Well– you can’t go too far these days without reading or hearing about Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Facebook, or blogs, and the list goes on.

And it’s fun it seems. But is it for business use? Or is this all a big waste of time?

I’d argue that it’s worth looking at – but there has to be a business case on the use of each.

Let’s have a look at some very recent survey results about how solution providers (VARs, RSIs, ISVs) are using Web 2.0 sites and technologies for business use – both today, and what their plans are in the future. Current Use is in Yellow. Planned Use is in Red. IDC split up the responses so that they were either in Currently using, future using, or neither.

LinkedIn , for networking use has the most users at over 50% of all those surveyed. This makes sense. LinkedIn has become very pervasive in the last few years.

Not for business use in this case – but a good benchmark – is the use of Facebook for personal reasons. Almost 40% of solution providers were using Facebook for personal reasons.

Something that IDC finds is very useful is LinkedIn Groups. A new piece of functionality within LinkedIn that allows people to participate in communities of interest.