For the past few years, I've been working part of the time with Bloor Research - friendly folk, doing good work on analysing the markets for commercial software. One of my colleagues there, Carl Potter, has invited me to join him in looking at the potential for social networking within organisations.

The emphasis of our survey is on innovation, on doing something new. We're interested in:
- new products
- new technologies
- new markets
- new ways of delivering social networking products or services
- new ways of using social networking within an enterprise.

We have worked up a short online survey for suppliers, using the Survey Monkey service. If you would like your company to take part, please contact Carl.

Out of the survey will come initially a short report summarising the responses and our researches elsewhere. Depending on what we receive, we will follow this with other reports on particular areas of use. These sector profiles are likely to include:
- customer intimacy (it's both ethical and legal!)
- product or market research
- employee or partner communities.

Other possible application areas for us to report on will include product support and project management.

Meanwhile, we are writing a short overview of the market, along the lines to be set out in the next two Office Jotter items. They will appear over the next few days. The market overview will be free.