by Jacob Morgan
Accenture and Microsoft teamed up at the Microsoft Global Energy Forum 2009 to conduct a survey of oil and gas professionals. The results? 40% of oil and gas pros believe that social media (including tools/platforms/sites) would boost on the job productivity. You would think that most of these oil and gas pros would be somehow involved in the social media space…right? Not so, according to the survey only around 25% are using social media. Here are some key stats from the survey:
- over 70% believe that knowledge sharing is important to drive revenue
- 61% search for info 1 hour a day (information pertaining to their job), this translates into 10 million people hours a year (based on 65,000 engineering pros in oil and gas industry) wasted and a loss of $485 million/year
- 41.5% say using new collaborative tools would save them 1 hour/day
- 74% surveyed say info sharing/collaboration is very important to keeping costs down and managing projects
- 51% say info sharing/collaboration is important for sourcing rare technical skills
- 50% surveyed new media collaboration/info sharing can help shrink productivity but 48% say management doesn’t see collaboration/info sharing/intellectual capital as a problem
When asked which new collaboration tools can help with the flow of information the results were:
- 81 percent cited Internet portals
- 58 percent pointed to social networking sites
- 56 percent named video or photo sharing
- 44 percent cited blogs or mini-blogs
- 43 percent preferred wikis
As with many large organization across various industries the challenges for embracing new media technologies seems to come from corporate culture and the “old way” of doing things. The oil and gas industry especially has a lot of older people working for them that just aren’t as familiar with new media tools. This is a great example of how a traditional industry is trying to overcome the corporate culture obstacle for social media.
What do you think? How can the oil and gas industry adopt new media tools? I think it has to start with educating the senior execs.
Jacob is a social media consultant