Web 2.0 may have emerged from a slow-gathering wave of hype, but
it describes a range of business models, ideas, methodologies and
computing platforms that represent a sea change in the business
world - partly driven by the ways consumers like to communicate and
consume.
This is the second article in our series on next-generation
enterprise IT, produced in association with IBM. There is also an
accompanying podcast on Web 2.0 at work.
The Facebook generation
Social networking site Facebook is not just about personal
profiles: 130,000 businesses make either formal or informal use of
it as a networking tool. Most major brands are there, from Virgin
to the BBC's use of the service to distribute Radio 5 to fans, via
multinationals and public libraries. Corporations such as Disney
use it to foster communities, encourage fan sites, and create the
means to opt in to marketing. In fact, never mind Facebook, it is a
sign of real change when that old economy stalwart, the BBC -
steeped to its polished brogues in the Reithian public service
concept of broadcast, entertain and educate - is behind one of the
most successful Web 2.0 projects, iPlayer.
So, Facebook and its generation are here to stay, yes? "The
challenge is that we have to bring people along the whole path
first bring people along to Facebook, and make them comfortable
with sharing information online," says Facebook founder and CEO
Mark Zuckerberg. "We got people through this really big hurdle of
wanting to put up their full name, picture, even their mobile phone
number in many cases. Growth is a strategic thing for us. We are
not as focused on optimising revenue. People have suggested we are
not thinking about it, but that is wrong. We have thousands of
advertisers coming to the site and reaching people."
Facebook has B2B interests, though, confirmed in its alliance
with Salesforce.com, a relationshp which makes Facebook an
"enterprise-friendly platform" for global enterprises and
individual entrepreneurs, according to Salesforce.com. "This is the
premier social graph fully integrating with the premier enterprise
cloud computing company," says Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, adds, "Facebook's users are always
eager to try new applications that can improve their ability to
connect and share in a trusted environment... our work will give
developers the tools to create and deliver a new class of business
applications for Facebook's 120 million active users."
But is Web 2.0 and social computing really enterprise ready? Is
it really something the CIO needs to worry about today, especially
with the economic meltdown slashing the IT budget? For many
analysts, the jury is still out. While IT departments may be
acquiring Web 2.0 technologies, utilities such as blogs, wikis, and
RSS (really simple syndication feeds) are often left unused, even
within the IT community. For example, 64% of IT providers have no
plans to invest in wikis this year, while 8% admit they are not
even familiar with the technology, according to a Forrester survey
of over 700 IT decision-makers within US enterprises.
Social networking in business
In reality, the mistake the nay-sayers make is in thinking of
such apparently consumer-orientated entities as Facebook, LinkedIn
or even YouTube - where many organisations have their own channels
- as websites that people "waste time" on. In fact, all of these
services are already powerful computing platforms with their own
APIs - development toolkits through which millions of people
organise themselves into groups, and create new content,
applications and behaviours.
In fact, the use of social networking tools as part of everyday
business has led to an increase in efficiency, according to an
independent market report released by AT&T, whose pan-European
survey of more than 2,500 people in five countries found that of
those employees using social networking tools in the workplace, 65%
say that it has made them and/or their colleagues more efficient.
In addition, 46% say it has sparked ideas and creativity for them
personally.
The top five social networking tools being used by organisations
across Europe are: companies' own collaboration sites on intranets
(39%) internal forums within the company (20%) company-produced
video material shared on intranets (16%) online social networks,
such as LinkedIn and Facebook (15%) and external collaboration
sites on the web and internal blogging sites (both 11%).
Increasingly, users are mashing up technologies into bespoke
services that scrape the Web for all that valuable chatter and
content. People may be talking about your business, and what
potential customers say and do ought to play some role in your
strategic planning. Web 2.0 technologies are an opportunity to get
closer to customers, conduct research and development, find out
what people are saying about you, and track and model emerging
behaviours and usage patterns.
Social networking sites have proved second to none in
marshalling support for both "like" and "hate" campaigns about
companies, councils, colleges and individuals. If companies can
mash up those streams within their corporate portal, then that is a
valuable tool to bring customers back into the fold.
The Web 2.0 economy is no longer about where information or
service originates (i.e. who it belongs to) but how easily it can
be consumed, personalised and shared by a target community, outside
of the strictures of format, date, ownership and hierarchy. Every
stream of information means defining a community, and then
satisfying its demands with supplementary information and the
opportunity for conversation. Social bookmarking services such as
Delicious, Digg it, Reddit, Stumbleupon and MyStrands either
aggregate feeds or allow users to leave a trail of recommendations
for others to follow, use, annotate and expand.
Every consumer is someone's customer, and technologies that
millions of people elect to use, and then organise themselves into
communities around, cannot be a timewasting exercise it is surely
the sign of a well-designed computing platform.
However, in an information economy, information is valued by the
speed at which it moves, not by its exclusivity, and that remains a
challenge to many enterprises. Information "chattering"
(microblogging) site Twitter is built on this principle, bringing
the share price ticker concept to bear on what individuals are
doing every minute of the day.
But the "Twittering classes" are perceived by some as a threat
as well as an opportunity. At a managerial and organisational
level, social networks, SaaS and cloud computing give a voice to
the many and potentially pose a threat to the few - those less than
broadminded CIOs for whom the command and control of monumental
enterprise systems and their usage runs in the blood.
It is understandable to a degree. The world has just seen its
first case of "edultery" - a real-world divorce brought on by one
partner's dalliance with someone else's avatar (a digital
representation of themselves) in virtual world Second Life. If
technology can redefine a real-world relationship to the point of
divorce, then it is obviously disruptive. All business is built on
relationships, and relationship-building and maintenance is what
Web 2.0 is about.
So what is next? E-mail, auctions, portable documents and
e-commerce were the killer apps of the first wave of internet usage
social (and therefore business) interconnectivity has been in the
vanguard of the current generational upgrade returning the web to
its collaborative roots. The next "upgrade", Web 3.0 - locative
media - promises to map real-world co-ordinates onto the grid, and
enable users to move seamlessly between virtual and physical worlds
based on location in the latter, with mobile platforms and
location-based services replacing the deskbound PC. In short,
technology has become integrated into everyone's lives to a degree
that seemed impossible even a decade ago.
Role of the wiki
Wikis replace the concept of a web page with a wikipage, the
location of a piece of ongoing, collaborative content-generation.
Wikipedia and its associated family of sites are the most familiar
names, but many companies use their own Wikis internally, among
them Accenture, Airbus, Apple, the BBC, BMW, Boeing, Bosch, BT,
CERN, Cisco, Deutsche Bank, Expedia, the FBI, Gartner, Lockheed
Martin, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Pixar, Siemens, Sony, Sun
Microsystems, SAP, Volvo, Disney and Yahoo!.
Wikis favour collaborative work so they are a boon for software
development e-learning project management knowledge management
policy creation and dissemination brainstorming tech support
resource management marketing and customer relationship management
(CRM) and research and development (R&D) - all activities at
the core of any business.
One company using wikis as the bedrock of a revenue-generating
business is Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com), which brings the concept of
user-generated and moderated content into the competitive world of
business contacts - the kind of information that directory
providers find hard to police, clean and keep up to date, but which
their customers rely on.
The company has 10.25 million personal records on file and
counting, provided by 650,000 contributing members. "People trade
information on Jigsaw. Our system is based on points. If people do
not have data to give, they clean the records that are there. We
use technology to complement our community. Every single record is
complete. Usually, most such information [in other company's
systems] is incomplete, dead, incorrect, duplicate, or in a
non-standard format," says Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler.
Case study: Second Life
Dominic Shine is CIO of Reed Exhibitions, the world's largest
B2B conference organiser with 500 events annually across 35
sectors. The company makes extensive use of the web for brand
extensions, he says.
"The heart of our business model is bringing buyers and sellers
together in the physical world at specific times, but online
communities can give you a year-round capability. They can extend
the proposition of the physical community, facilitate commercial
discussions and help peers to find each other. At present, we use
Facebook in a limited way. We feel there is a need for something
more tailored so you don't get social network fatigue. Facebook and
LinkedIn are very successful at acquiring traffic, but neither
offers a business model we can use," he says.
Reed Exhibitions has experimented with Second Life, building a
virtual version of its Midem event and screening awards in a
virtual press area. Shine admits it had limited traction within the
target community, but says it was "a useful learning stage on a
journey somewhere else. Virtual world immersion does not add much
value. Sometimes you recreate some of the problems of the real
world, but it is harder to find people!" The real boon of Web 2.0
is powerful search tools, he says.
The top five social networking tools
- companies' own collaboration sites on intranets (39%)
- internal forums within the company (20%)
- company-produced video material shared on intranets (16%)
- online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook etc
(15%),
- external collaboration sites on the web and internal blogging
sites (both 11%)
For more on How to use Web 2.0 at work, listen to our
podcast, produced in association with IBM.