Steve Boese has an interesting post about some research done inside IBM on internal Social Networking, why people participate and how they behave. Essentially, users are either Caring, Climbing or Campaigning, which really starts to get at how social networking data can indicate all kinds of talent segmentation indicators – take a look at what the research says about what these different user types actually post:

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Think about the cool uses for this in analytics, or in segmentation, or in all sorts of other interesting workforce planning software uses? Very, very cool…but also challenging in terms of privacy, stereotyping, etc. I think that this kind of data is essential for “predictive analytics” to be really useful in workforce applications…are you using any of it??