Forrester Research has published a new report on the state of wikis, blogs, social networking, and other new tools in the enterprise: Forrester TechRadar™ For Information & Knowledge Management Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0.

No longer new, Web 2.0 technologies solve problems that enterprises have today - but most have not yet used these tools to anywhere near their potential. Waiting for tools to mature seems prudent, but if you wait too long, employees may create their own collaborative environments on the Web. Timing your next move requires you to track the maturity of enterprise Web 2.0 technologies. In a careful examination of the marketplace and trends for enterprise Web 2.0 tools, we reveal that organizations find wikis valuable, forums stable (though underutilized), and report mixed success with blogs. Enterprise social networking tools stand ready to redefine workplace collaboration, adding new value to your organization’s content by associating it with peers and experts.

For more on this, check out the teleconference Forrester hosted on Monday with two of the report’s authors, analysts Gil Yehuda and Oliver Young.

Via Grow Your Wiki.

Forrester Research published a new report on the state of RSS entitled What’s Holding RSS Back? In short, while there are bright spots, it does not paint the picture of a technology that’s going mainstream anytime soon.

On a positive note, the resarch says that nearly half of marketers have moved to add feeds to their web sites. Further, RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago. RSS feeds usage is more dominant among men.

According to the research, of the 89% of those who don’t use feeds only 17% say they’re interested in using them. In fact Forrester spends much of the report helping marketers better explain the benefits of RSS to their customers.

Read more at Micro Persuasion…

According to a study [pdf] done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

Software functionality came in at 1% surprisingly, with organization change at 16% and process alignment at 13%.

“You can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated features, analytics and integration, blah blah blah - but if people don’t use it, it isn’t going to add value. I can’t tell you how many RFPs and software selection processes I’ve been involved with in prior lives that focus almost exclusively on tiny little features that few people will ever use. This study shows that focusing so much on features is missing the boat entirely.”

Read more at ReadWriteWeb…

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

“Businesses will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail.” Adam Sarner

What does he mean by a “mutual purpose?” Any social media campaign has to be an authentic involvement with a community. A successful campaign will serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it and finding that balance is not easy.

Read more at socialmediatoday…

“At some point every few years (or every year in some cases) organisations decide that the most effective way to improve productivity or profits is to reduce expenditures.

Intranets are a common target of cost cutting, either by delaying improvements to infrastructure, cancelling new functionality, reducing author training or cutting intranet staff numbers.

In some cases these decisions are justified, however with intranets often lacking high-level representation and sponsorship, there are cases where these cuts have serious negative impacts on the entire organisation.

So are there ways to position an intranet to avoid damaging cost cuts, and even increase the budget to the area in order to generate savings elsewhere?”

Read more at eGov AU…

Cone just released its 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study showing that almost 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on a social media web site, and one in four interact more than once per week.

According to the survey, 93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:

• - Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• - Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• - Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• - Companies should market to consumers (25%)

Read more…

Dennis Howlett presents StatusHQ, another Twitter clone focusing, this time, the Enterprise. With a number a differences as compared to the original most famous Twitter:

• - it offers authenticated RSS
• - it removes the 140 character limit, instead it imposes a limit of 255 characters
• - individuals can create up to 10 private groups on their own account but can be invited to any number of groups
• - while Twitter asks:What are you doing, StatusHQ asks two questions: What are you doing? and Where are you?
• - you can update via SMS
• - the service allows you to delete messages

Let’s wait and see what companies pick up the microblogging trend first!

Via ZDNet.

With the help of Google data, Royal Pingdom have looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple but highly interesting question: where are they the most popular?

The social networks they included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.

See the results at http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=336.

The Online Community Research Network initiated an online community compensation study in July this year to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

They received approximately 225 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

Key findings from the report:

• - The majority of the respondents are: Female (55%) vs. Male (45%).
• - The majority (61%) of respondents ranged in age from 31-50 years of age.
• - Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• - The average Salary of the respondents was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k.
• - Women are earning only 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.
• - Most participants are satisfied with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.2 and a median score of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).

The report is available for free to members of the Online Community Research Network or available to purchase for non-members.

Remember Charlie aka Mr Enterprise 2.0? One of the best series of slides to teach the basics of Enterprise 2.0 to newbies.

A few weeks later came Charlotte, Ms Web 2.0 and one of Charlie’s friends. Followed by Dave, the Facebook fanboy and startup mentor.

The latest one I discovered is Jessica aka Dr Enterprise 2.0. Wow, I didn’t even know one could be “Dr Enterprise 2.0″. Basically, it’s a Charlie-like set of slides on how to use some of the Enterprise 2.0 techniques in the pharmaceutical industry.

Today, business professionals everywhere are meeting online to share ideas, make decisions and generally be more efficient and productive. The savings in both time and money can be astounding, but where should you start?

Bnet proposes a live webcast on August 27 at 5pm GMT on using collaboration technologies to improve business efficiency.

Smart enterprises are deploying blogs and wikis to power the Enterprise front line: Sales. Use cases may involve using Enterprise 2.0 technology to distribute timely market information, maintain a continuous loop of customer feedback, or maintain a wiki to manage selling points, FAQs, and collateral.

The Aberdeen Group is working to build benchmarks for how enterprises are deploying social media in general, and for various use cases like Sales. They just launched a benchmark study called “Sales 2.0: Getting Social About Selling”. Participants to the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the report ($399 value) allowing them to benchmark their sales performance and enterprise-wide use of social media against peers and Best-in-Class companies. The report is expected to be available on October 1st, 2008.

Via Traction Software.

“The most common problem with top-down efforts is that businesses simply roll out the technology and assume everything else will take care of itself. Usually what happens in these cases is an email goes out to workers announcing the new corporate Wiki, traffic to the Wiki spikes in the hours after the email, and then you see an immediate dive off a cliff. The technology might be great, but it isn’t solving a problem by itself.

A corporate Wiki won’t work unless it contains information that helps people, which could be as simple as a list of restaurants near the office. That’s the key to the grass-roots projects - at least the ones that succeed. They become a source of information that people didn’t have or no where to find. And usually it’s the person with the pain that can best imagine the cure.”

Via The Wall Street Journal.

Via commoncraft.

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees’ time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee’s work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee’s calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others’ time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive ‘telephone tag’ our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

1. For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company’s Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters — if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
2. For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to ’share’ the contents of each other’s screen while they converse.
3. For ‘FYI’ type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company’s E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
4. For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company’s Instant Survey tool.
5. For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company’s E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management

Via How to Save the World.

Via Project Management 2.0

Marketing is often executed in project-based manner. That is why a lot of generic project management principles perfectly apply to marketing and why marketing should also be optimized, similar to project management techniques. Agile approaches to marketing may help to overcome problems experienced by marketing executives. One of these approaches is Scrum, which has originally been developed as an agile software development method for project management. Now Scrum is successfully employed by hundreds of different companies, such as Yahoo.com, Wildcard Systems, H&M, and John Deere, in many different fields, with outstanding results.

Scrum adopts an empirical approach, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or successfully defined in a predictable and planned manner. The focus of Scrum is on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements. This method is praised for making the team more productive, reducing risks and maximizing the business value of a developed product and minimizing the period of the development time. Scrum is based on defining sprints - time periods (usually 2 to 4 weeks) during which the prioritized work (sprint backlog) should be done. During a sprint, the team gets together for daily meetings where team members discuss what they have already done, what they are going to do till the next meeting and what prevents them of doing something that they planned to do. In other words, Scrum meetings are supposed to keep teams on track and help members get their work done. At the end of each sprint, there is a brief sprint retrospective at which all team members reflect about the past sprint. According to Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum meeting method (along with Jeff Sutherland), the purpose of a daily Scrum is to keep teams focused “on their objectives and to help them avoid being thrown off track by less important concerns.” Now Scrum is often viewed as an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. Indeed, short and regular meetings can be as important for small marketing teams as they are for production teams. Members of a marketing group may be working on a variety of projects, but they’re all working toward the same goal – marketing the company and its products or services. Therefore, every member of a team has to know what the others are working on and what direction the whole team is moving in.

Scrum lets you involve your clients in the marketing process and take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. Collective intelligence helps to improve the quality of products and services and make them fully satisfy the consumer’s needs. Scrum lets you promote your product not for a client, but together with your client.

A new report from Forrester Research, a company that has been closely following the adoption of web 2.0 and social technologies by businesses, now says that their earlier predications about Web 2.0 in the enterprise may have been too timid. Last year, they said that in 2008 I.T. shops would start to take a leadership role in Web 2.0 adoption by business, but this latest report is now debunking the conventional wisdom that I.T. is as skeptical as once thought.

Read more at Read Write Web…

Simply blocking applications means disgruntled staff and missed opportunities. Businesses need to change tack.

Young people entering the workplace see email as slow and have grown up with P2P applications and Web 2.0 technology - yet most businesses are still living in a Web 1.0 world, with security policies to match.

The web landscape has changed dramatically in the past five years. Users have evolved from passive consumers of information to active contributors of content. Blogs, podcasts and RSS (really simple syndication) are being used within the enterprise. Wikis, tagging and web-enabled social networking can improve collaboration among workers.

Read more at SC Magazine…

Andrew McAfee listed a number of frequent questions people ask about Enterprise 2.0.

“As I’ve talked with many different audiences over the past two years about Enterprise 2.0, I’ve noticed that the same questions keep coming up, and I wanted to capture them. I’ll talk about the best answers to these questions later, and also about which of them seem to be most legitimate - to reflect the real risks a company takes on when it deploys emergent social software platforms (which from now on I’m just going to abbreviate as ESSPs). For now I just wanted to list them, and to make sure that I’m not missing any common ones.”

Take a look at the questions and let us know if you heard the same or different ones around you.