Enterprise use of Social Media – Cisco Austria and MU Vienna jointly present survey results

On September 1st, MODUL University Vienna’s Vice President Prof. Arno Scharl and Cisco Austria CEO and NMT Advisory Board member Dr. Achim Kaspar presented the results of a recently conducted survey on the usage of social media platforms in Austrian businesses. The results indicated that three-quarters of managers and senior executives are aware of the potential of social media, but are concerned that they do not fully utilize this emerging technology.

These findings are highly relevant for the research and teaching portfolio of MU’s Department of New Media Technology. The results show that Austrian businesses are open to new media tools, but still need to adopt the required tools and infrastructures. MU Vienna is developing such tools and infrastructures in two current research projects:

• To cope with the resulting increase in information volume, the department is continuously extending an award-winning Web Intelligence Platform. The platform provides the foundation for the DIVINE research project, funded within the FIT-IT Semantic Systems program line. The platform helps to assess the strategic positioning of an organization, measure the effectiveness of its communication strategies, and compare the opinions of multiple stakeholders.
  
  Prof. Scharl explains it so: "With this platform, we provide decision makers with a comprehensive system for social media analysis. Relevant entries on blogs and Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are automatically recorded. The system not only provides important indicators for the strategic positioning of an organization, but also supports PR and marketing activities with topic detection capabilities and a sentiment barometer ".
• The department is also engaged in investigating new forms of communication and collaboration as part of the Climate Change Collaboratory, a project that builds tools to manage expert knowledge as well as a context-sensitive environment for creating and editing documents in a collaborative manner. This interactive Web tool connects the normally separate processes of information research and the writing of documents, and identifies substantive relationships in large document repositories. Funded by the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP), the project supports networking activities between climate change experts, whose knowledge will be used to expand and improve the functionality of the system.