Israel Blechman

I have recently conducted a small research about Cisco’s social media presence for an Israeli software vendor that launched a new product alongside Cisco. locating Cisco’s activities within the social web wasn’t a very hard task to accomplish, since Cisco is absolutely everywhere. The vast and diverse participation of Cisco in various communities, social networks, and collaboration sites is really admirable (here is a Cisco presentation portraying a social media product launch strategy ). Add to that the social features Cisco has implemented within its own web site for customer, prospect and partner engagement and you get one of the most committed corporate social media adopters.

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

Tags: cisco, Enterprise2.0, Social media

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:

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.

Tags: definition, Enterprise2.0, Forrester, organizational culture, social networking