Archive for April, 2008
The Future of Enterprise2.0
Based on a recent Forrester report, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb is anticipating a great future for Enterprise2.0 (but not without hurdles):
A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
This change is not without its challenges. Although there is money to be made in the industry by vendors, Web 2.0 tools by their very nature are defined by commoditization; as is much of the new social media industry, a topic we touched on briefly here, when discussing how content has become a commodity.
For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:
- I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as “consumer-grade” technology
- Ad-supported web tools generally have “free” as the starting point
- Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments
Seems to me like the greatest challenge facing Enterprise2.0 adoption, the organizational culture, was left out of the report. Was it?
Larry Dignan also refers to the Forrester report and emphasis the future role of Social Networking within the enterprise:
The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t quite cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI.
Cars and Conversations
Yesterday we (at Blink) launched a blogospheric campaign for Peugeot 308 (Hebrew), which is about to arrive to Israel in the next couple of weeks. The campaign invites Israeli bloggers to join a cross-country tour with the car and blog about their experiences (they are encouraged to travel to and write about their favorite places, and not necessarily about the car itself). Currently bloggers are invited to register (and many already have), but eventually only seven of them will go on the tour. Each blogger will drive the car for two days and pass it on to the next blogger. The tour will start at the north and end at the most southern (and fun) point of Israel - Eilat. The tour will be followed by the 308BlogTour anchor blog. Needless to say - the Tour is first and foremost about the bloggers and their stories. This is the first time a commodity is being launched exclusively in the Israeli blogosphere, and I think it shows that the Israeli groundswell is finally getting the recognition it deserves from the local business community. Community engagement of this sort is very hard to achieve, especially since bloggers are suspicious when it comes to communicating with brands and organizations. We are getting great feedback from local members of the blogging community, most of them note that they also see this campaign as a blogging-awareness campaign, and we are very (!) happy about it. Yesterday must have been the “social media and cars day”, since besides our launch of the 308BlogTour, Shel Israel published a video interview with Bob Lutz from GM about his personal experience with social media. It is a very sincere and inspiring report about the role social media is playing in GM, and its impact on GM’s PR, marketing, media relations, customer and employee engagement. I have been following GM’s social media adoption for quite some time now and getting the “behind the curtain” perspective was very enlightening for me.
WP2.5 upgrade
Great new features, great new “interior design”, much quicker.
All I need to do now is write…