The role of marketers has long been to hunt out clients and, with the aid of salespeople, capture this prey. However, particularly with the maturation of the Internet, the tide is turning. For instance, in the vacation market now, many people hunt out the holiday they want themselves. They use the Internet to find and then make choices, sometimes interrogating potential sellers online. In industries like this, the role of marketing is to make sure that a company’s products or services are easily found online, and that the company responds effectively to potential customers.

(Mistakes Marketer Make by David Corkindale, published in the recent MIT Sloan Business Insight edition).

Cisco also employs social media tools and methods internally (Enterprise2.0) to “enable the company to accelerate productivity, growth, and innovation”.

It became a well known fact that successful web2.0/enterprise2.0/corporate social media adoption must be accompanied by an internal cultural change and have a senior sponsorship.  After reading John Chambers’ vision about collaboration and web2.0 as the new enterprise engines, I am certain that Cisco got the senior sponsorship issue covered…:)

Update: More from Om Malik

• Innovation Loves a Crisis. Jonathan Schwartz wrote a publics memo about the financial markets crisis as a catalyst of innovation and new opportunities.
• Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media - Will It Continue? Bill Ives of FASTforward thinks it will.
• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples. A list gathered by Peter Kim comprised of 239 companies utilizing social media for marketing purposes. Admirable effort.
• IBM Rolls Out Bluehouse Social Office Suite. IBM is  publicly opening its Lotus Connections (in my opinion -  the most mature enterprise social computing environment available today) demo site.
• All Their Base are Belong to Us. Prof. Andrew McAfee is looking for E2.0 research questions suggestions.
• Crowdsourcing? Try expert sourcing. “Corporate America has hopped on the crowd sourcing bandwagon, but they may want to start considering another option: Expert sourcing.”
• An interview with Matt Rhodes of Freshnetworks. FreshNetworks is a social media agency from the UK and Matt is talking about the shift in the way companies engage with customers and prospects he witnesses.
• Shel Israel’s interview with IBM’s George Faulkner. Faulkner, editor in chief of IBM media library is talking with Shel Israel about IBM’s behind-the-firewall social media initiatives and experience.
• The Many Challenges of the Social Media. Jeremiah Owyang about the challenges social media professionals face and need to overcome.
• SocialText - the next generation. The E2.0 veteran (I’m following Ross Mayfield since 2004) is still innovating .

Sam has developed the character of  the “enterprise octopus” to illustrate the concept of social media within the workplace, and the octopus has become both Sam’s and Jive’s trademark.

A couple of months ago Sam has published a blog post titled: “Norman Naysayer,” the Enterprise Octopus arch nemesis which I somehow managed to miss.  The post portrays the image of the  enterprise octopus nemesis, i.e. the corporate executive which will stand in the way of embracing social media tools and methods saying things like “Social is what you do outside of work”,  “Show me the financial justification for this investment”, “Show me a business process this improves” or “What if people post bad stuff?”.

I have met some Norman Naysayers during my social media voyage so far, most of them have repent and even became social media advocates, understanding that being a constant naysayer makes them innovation opposers in an innovation-centric era.

Being rational and responsible when making business decisions is not a bad thing of course,  but being a Norman Naysayer is just being frightened.

(From Sam Lawrence blog post)

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Via Bertrand Duperrin

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:

1. I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as “consumer-grade” technology
2. Ad-supported web tools generally have “free” as the starting point
3. 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.

update:Dion Hinchcliff’s take on the report.

All I need to do now is write…

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Sounds very simple, doesn’t it? I guess it is, but introduction posts are the hardest. I should know that since part of my job in the past year is assisting numerous Israeli and global corporates and businesses with blogospheric conversation engagement. Writing the first post is always the hardest hurdle to overcome when starting a blog. I’ll try to do it in a graceful manner.

So, first things first. My name Israel Blechman, I live in Tel Aviv and I am the CTO of Blink (our Hebrew blog), which is the first Israeli social media and Enterprise2.0 consulting and professional service firm. Blink’s focus is on empowering internal and external communication by utilizing Web2.0 methodologies and tools.

I hope this blog will assist me with the process of collecting, organizing and sharing ideas and thought related to my fields of interest: Collaboration, Social Software, Social Media, Conversation Marketing, Corporate blogging, Corporate Social Networks, Collaboration, Customer and Employee Engagement, and Online PR .

Prior to my exciting and ever-evolving work at Blink I was involved in an Enterprise2.0 start-up and before that I was a researcher and lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a freelance web and knowledge management solutions developer.

I am married to my wonderful soul mate Adi, who is a hard working dedicated speech therapist, and we have a very cute (yet very annoying) cat called Shasi (who also blog).