According to Comscore, social networking is drawing new European users into the mobile Web. In November, 34 percent of mobile phone owners in Western Europe who visited social networking sites accessed social media exclusive of all other mobile Web content.

With 12.1 million users in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K.), mobile social networking is a rapidly-expanding category that grew 152 percent from November 2007 to November 2008.

The U.K. boasts the highest penetration of mobile social networking, at 9 percent, nearly triple that of Germany, where the activity is the least popular. The average penetration rate across all countries is 5 percent.

Read more…

Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis.

Read more at The McKinsey Quarterly…

In a Garner briefing in Stockholm last week, Mark Raskino, VP and Gartner fellow in the Emerging Trends group of Gartner Research, gave a talk about “Business, IT and the Recession”:

“CEOs need new ways to strengthen culture, values and trust as relationships of all kinds are stress-tested [...] Human decision makers made frail by the speed of the programmed & connected world.”

As a consequence of this business trust issue, Gartner sees real possibility of business taking the social web / Web 2.0 seriously.

Via The Content Economy.