Tag: web 2.0

Charlene Li on Enterprise 2.0

Are you pounding your head against a brick wall when it comes trying to move your Enterprise 2.0 plans forward. You’re not alone.

In this video Stowe Boyd interviews Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell). Use it to re-energize your Enterprise 2.0 plans. Some of the enlightening quotes are:

  • “it won’t go very far without an executive champion”
  • “when you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared”
  • “when you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, […] and if you let them do it freely, that diminishes the gate-keeper role. […] and if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big stick of dynamite in that
  • wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. […] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. […] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”

Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”

Posted on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Blog.

5 Things Every Practice Should Know About Web 2.0

There are countless presentations that give an overview of Web 2.0. Slideshare.net is an excellent site for finding reusable presentation material on Web 2.0 and almost any other topic. I ran across this one from Lee Bryant presented at LegalTech09. The reason was that generally a law practice or legal department in an enterprise often has higher levels of security around information. I wanted to see what they had to say.

Althought this was for a legal conference, just view the slides and remove the (few) references to firm and practice. It applies to any large organization. Lots of good information. Slides 9 & 10 has a good list of the types of Web 2.0 tools.

Just click on the slides to advance. Click on the FULL icon in the Slideshare frame to in full screen.

Forrester predicts dramatic growth in Enterprise 2.0

Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, the global Enterprise 2.0 will be $4.6 Billion. The biggest growth and share will be in social networking.

One example of an enterprise social network is NewsGator’s SocialSites. It built on top of Microsoft SharePoint and provides a dynamic space for communities, expertise location and “work streaming”. Two screenshots from NewsGator Profile Page and Community Site.

A few of the key messages from the report are:

  • that consumer Web 2.0 products are not long-term solutions for enterprises, especially free or ad-supported services
  • IT continues to be the gatekeeper preventing Web 2.0 applications from being leveraged in the enterprise
  • business areas are asking for these tools and bypassing IT if they find a service that will help them in some area
  • IT is worried about scalability of these applications
  • IT budgets are primarily focused on maintaining legacy applications with little capacity to look at these new tools
  • younger employees growing up with these tools will want something similar when they arrive at your doorstep to work
  • IT is concerned about the security of Web 2.0 applications
  • major enterprise players (IBM, Microsoft, etc) will make Enterprise 2.0 a feature of their monolithic solutions
  • major growth in the enterprise will not happen until the baby boomers retire from the executive ranks
  • social networking tools that allow customer interaction, profiles and participation in discussions and blogs will receive significant investment

Read a good review of the Forrester report.

Enterprise 2.0 Spending - Forrester

Enterprise 2.0 Spending - Forrester

Via ReadWriteWeb.com

Blogs for customers, not companies

Blogs are written for all sorts of reasons. Most are a labour of love viewed by a small band of readers. Corporate blogs on the other hand can and should have a much broader reach. They can be an important part of supporting an organization’s brand.

So what makes a successful corporate blog?

First and foremost is the realization that a blog is for the customer’s benefit – not for the company’s. It’s important to remember readers will only come back if there is value for them. That’s right value for them. Not value for the company. Readers don’t care if you are providing a nice, efficient press release site.

Rick Burnes reminds us of the real reason for corporate blogs in a posting at ZDNet.

Blogs for Customers, Not About Companies

If you look closely at the search results you pull up every day (and even some of the Alltop corporate blogs), you’ll see that an alternative model of corporate blogging is beginning to emerge. Instead of writing about themselves, companies are following the lead of the other company blog in the Technorati Top 100 — Signal vs. Noise. They’re beginning to create content that’s not about their business, but that appeals to their buyer personas.

Whole Foods is going beyond their blog and publishing recipes. American Express is publishing small-business advice. Indium Corporation is writing about thermal interface materials.

In each of these cases, the company is attracting a broad audience by focusing on content that is interesting to the demographic it serves rather than content about the products it sells.

Every company that is considering starting a corporate blog should spend some thinking about how this effort can support their brand. Otherwise publishing the blog could be wasted effort.