Blogs and wikis are gaining a foothold in the corporation, but social media-style homepages for the intranet aren't catching on as quickly, according to a web-based survey of 1,401 organizations.

Most companies right now don't appear to be looking for the kind of openness that social media-like communications convey, reports David Carr at InformationWeek. The idle chatter that social networking often embodies is not the type of message many of them want to project on the intranet. Instead, they're looking for a more task-focused image, according the Social Intranet Study conducted by Prescient Digital Media and the International Association of Business Communicators.

Three-quarters of the organizations participating in the survey have intranet blogs, and 61 percent have wikis. Forty-three percent have deployed social networking on the intranet, but just 19 percent have done so enterprise-wide. 

Prescient Digital's president, Toby Ward, suspects that the number of intranet social media sites is under-reported in the survey, however. Often social networking at work is initiated in "some little corner" of the organization, which the individuals participating in the survey may not have even been aware of.

Ward speculates that limited budgets are a big reason more enterprises aren't using internal social networking more aggressively. It isn't unusual for companies to spend millions of dollars on their public-facing websites, but more than a third of the organizations surveyed said they figured that less than $10,000 was spent on the intranet. "The intranet remains the poor stepchild of the corporate website," he said.

For more:
- see David Carr's article at InformationWeek

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