Gartner says 80 percent of active internet users will have a “second sife” in the virtual world by the end of 2011.

“The collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments will dominate in the future, and significant transaction-based commercial opportunities will be limited to niche areas, which have yet to be clearly identified. However, the majority of active Internet users and major enterprises will find value in participating in this area in the coming years.” Steve Prentice, vice president and analyst at Gartner

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Via Second Life Research.

Forrester just released a new report titled “Social Technographics”. Here’s the executive summary:

Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed - a blog here, a podcast there - to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term “Social Technographics” to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

Via The Groundswell.

Applications such as wikis, blogs, and RSS are still in the early stages of the hype curve. Enterprises are just now becoming aware of the existence of these tools, and are only now starting to evaluate their use and deployment strategies. This means that vendors in this space still have to spend a great deal of time educating the enterprise marketplace on the existence and capabilities of these tools before they are able to sell potential customers on their advantages of specific products.

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SAP develops its special treatment for bloggers, different from the press relations, and appointed Mike Prosceno as VP, Marketplace Communications (Blogger Relations).

via Moonwatcher.

b-spirit will be closed from Friday, April 20 to Monday, April 23. We will return on Tuesday, April 24.

In case of emergency, you can contact me on my mobile phone.

IABC members from the Europe/Middle East region took part in EuroBlog 2007, the second pan-European survey conducted by Euprera (European Public Relations Education and Research Organisation) to explore the use of blogs in professional communications.

The results were presented at the International EuroBlog Research Symposium in mid March in Ghent, Belgium.

View the full results here [pdf].

Via Geneva Communicators Blog

While the majority of big companies are still scared to death by letting their people blog, here is a counter example. It is the first time I see a company where blogging becomes obligatory!

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy. According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company “has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively.”

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IBM has launched a 3-D area called Codestation on Second Life intended to serve as a virtual forum for developers to share ideas, develop code and interact with one another to design new applications and improve upon existing ones.

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According to a new survey by McKinsey, only 16% of the companies surveyed said they were investing in blogs, compared to 63% for web services, 28% for peer-to-peer networks, and 19% for social networks. 78% identified web services as the Web 2.0 technology/tool most important their their business.

Managers in general still worry about loss of control with blogs. Letting their employees and consumers into the conversation and allowing them their say frightens them. That’s a huge mistake.

[...]

The great challenge to companies these days is to learn how to let consumers in, how to open a conversation with them that is honest and real. It looks like lots of managers have yet to get that signal.

Via NussbaumOnDesign.

According to a new survey by Clearswift, some 43% of employees access web 2.0 sites multiple times during the work day. Also, studies have shown that most blogging takes place during the day.

More stats from the survey:

• 51% spend an hour or more a week on Web 2.0 sites; 13% spend five hours or more
• 46% have discussed work-related issues
• 46% regularly access Wikipedia during work hours
• 50% believe they have a right to use work computers for personal internet access

Via Micro Persuasion.