EnterpriseBlend

Ravit Lichtenberg has published her predictions about ways Social Media will change in 2010 over at Read Write Web.  In addition to her predictions, she’s quoted some interesting statistics that support her statements.  For example – 18% of companies say they saw meaningful return on investment from their social media activities.  The rest either saw little to no return or an inability to measure that return.

Great article to get you thinking about what impact these changes will have on you and your company in 2010.  Be sure to read the comments as well – some great points being made by readers.

Tags: research, socialmedia

Another interesting feature of the Outlook Social Connector (OSC) is that it gives developers the ability to add new social network providers.  ”Developing a provider for the Outlook Social Connector” over at the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog has the details.  Apparently the provider can be written in anything that creates a COM-visible DLL.  The only contract is that it must return XML to the OSC that conforms to its XML schema.

I haven’t even seen this tool yet, and they’re already getting me excited about it.  This seems like it’s going to be great for people who already have Outlook as a pivotal component in their work environment.

Tags: microsoft, outlook, social networking

Microsoft announced at the PDC yesterday a social network connector for Outlook 2010.  You can see more about the connector in this video.  Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, this is an example of some really great social technology coming out of Redmond.  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it at some point.

Tags: email, microsoft, outlook, social networking

According to Steve Boese’s HR Technology blog:

Recently, the folks at Second Life announced the availability of the beta release of Second Life Enterprise, a fully-functional ‘behind the corporate firewall’ version of the popular virtual world.

The offering actually sounds pretty compelling, despite the hefty price tag.  Of course, I’m a big fan of virtual reality collaboration and e-learning. 

An “inside the firewall” offering like this should make the solution much more viable for many organizations concerned with data privacy and trade secrets.

Tags: secondlife, virtual

Today is a very good day for this blog.  This blog is no longer a solo production.  I’m very pleased to welcome my friend Aaron Hursman as a contributor.

Aaron is not only a friend, he’s a co-worker at Hitachi Consulting.  His background is in custom development, Enterprise Content Management, and User Experience.  He is very passionate about user design and brings a different perspective on Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 to the table.  Knowing Aaron, I’m going to bet that he’s going to bring sexy back to not only this blog, but also highlight what’s sexy about these types of solutions.

Welcome, Aaron!

I’m not sure it’s really ROI, Sarah’s talking about, but she’s got a great post that talks about common misconceptions about return on social media efforts.  I love the one about not counting clicks.  You can really see that people/companies are starting to believe that followers = interest.  They don’t.  Being both a follower and an ignorer, I can tell you that most entities I follow don’t often see my click through traffic.  So, are they effectively reaching me to drive me to their products and services?  Probably not.

Tags: research, socialmedia, web2.0

Via Bill Ives on the FASTForward Blog, there is a new study that shows that companies are rapidly adopting Social Media on their Intranets.  Bill has a great summary of the key metrics.  The study makes some interesting observations – not only about the most popular types of social media (wikis and blogs), but also about budgets and executive support and adoption.

I think it’s clear that while the train has left the station on Enterprise 2.0, there’s much work to be done.  Companies are still at the beginning of the adoption curve, and there’s much work to be done to integrate these new types of media and technologies into the corporate information fabric.

Susan Scrupski of The Enterprise 2.0 blog has started a 2.0 Adoption Council and said she will award an “Internal Evangelist of the Year” at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  She is looking for people who are evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 in large organizations and “fighting the good fight”.

Tags: e2.0

Echo is a new service and toolkit that allows publishers to show comments made on their content across multiple social media sites.  So for example, in addition to tracking comments about your blog posts via your blog software, you can see what people are saying on Twitter.  Echo Core is free, but there are pay options that include additional features like real-time updates and paid support.

This seems like a really great idea to show a more complete view of the conversation happening around your content.  I can imagine how valuable this would be in certain situations where you were trying to track the buzz around your product or perhaps monitoring your reputation.

Tags: social networking, socialmedia