Following in the footsteps of consumers, large international companies are now becoming active participants in social media. A recent Burson-Marsteller study found that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs. Read more…

Via Mashable.

Wondering what all this social media excitement is about? Mashable proposes a 10-minute video mashup of the 5 best books about social media: Trust Agents, The Whuffie Factor, Six Pixels of Separation, Crush It, The New Community Rules. Enjoy!

Enterprise 2.0 – the application of Web 2.0 technologies in a corporate context – is still in its infancy in Switzerland. The step from leisure activity to productive tool is off to a sticky start.

Read more at Unic.com Magazin…

Via Emilie Ogez.

Via GlobeCorp.

Some fresh news for the friends and followers of b-spirit. I’m involved in an exciting new project since a few weeks. We’re helping Fair Web Entertainment, a start-up based in Lausanne, to launch its brand new web service, BETCoffee.

Basically, BETCoffee is a social bookmaking website - not bookmarking, bookmaking! It aims to bring online betting to the crowds providing a pleasant and safe environment to bet online. Unlike traditional gambling sites, it has been designed to be dead simple to let everyone have fun with friends, colleagues or family members: no complicated odds, betting rules are user generated and based on head-to-head challenges. Hence BETCoffee will be highly social as bets will play the role of social objects to let people interact with each other. In this context, b-spirit will play an important role as I will take over the community management.

A private beta will be launched by the end of this month. I encourage you to go to BETCoffee.com and to enter your email address if you’d like to be part of the beta.

Also, we’ll introduce BETCoffee on 15 October during a SwissW2 event. You can register at http://fr.amiando.com/Betcoffee.html. See you there!

This was one year ago…

A June survey released by Facetime, makers of a gateway appliance for managing Web 2.0 applications, revealed the growing popularity of social networking applications in the workplace. Out of 1199 survey respondents, all IT professionals, there were more who felt that social networks played an important role in the business world than those who didn’t. What’s more, it appears that the IT folks are now seemingly OK with providing access these networks behind the firewall - even those that don’t approve of their use!

Read more at ReadWriteWeb…

The top CEOs in the country appear to be mostly absent from the social media community. That’s the result from research we conducted over the past several weeks. We looked at Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog. The results show a miserable level of engagement.

Read more at ÜberCEO…

Want to see good examples of corporate blogs? Check out the blogs of the Blog Council. This site includes blogs by Coke, Cisco, General Electric, Intel, and the Mayo Clinic.

Via Alltop News and Updates.

Via Emilie Ogez News.

Via AdsVark.

“Since their early days, weblogs have been envisioned as a prototype technology for enabling grass-roots knowledge management. However, while experiments with blogging are underway in many businesses, research that could inform them is limited. In this dissertation early adopters of weblogs are studied to develop an understanding of uses of weblogs in relation to work, and to provide insights relevant to introducing blogging in knowledge-intensive environments.

This research focuses on describing the blogging practices of knowledge workers. It is guided by a framework that provides a view of what knowledge work entails and includes tasks, the essence of one’s work, and enabling personal knowledge management activities, such as developing one’s knowledge and relationships over time.”

Read more at Mathemagenic…

Andrew McAfee:

I’ve had for some time now the vague sense that the iPhone, Twitter, Gmail, Googling, Facebook, Wikipedia, Delicious, and other runaway successes are trying to tell us something about how we want to use technology in our lives and in our work, and if we enterprise technologists listen carefully we’ll hear what that something is.

[...]

I started jotting down some comparisons based on what I’ve seen, read, and experienced for myself, then realized that I was identifying patterns [...] And I thought that in best 2.0 fashion I should open up this work early in the process by posting an initial set of patterns, seeing if they resonate with people, and asking for further contributions.

Read more on Andrew McAfee’s Blog…

A poll of 524 white-collar workers commissioned by fin­ancial comms agency FD has found worryingly high levels of employee dissatisfaction facing businesses bosses as they adjust to the economic downturn.

YouGov found that a minority of employees (44 per cent) felt their CEO showed strong, decisive leadership and only 28 per cent trusted messages from their CEO more than ‘a little’.

Only 15 per cent of respondents felt that their employer had communicated news about job security ‘very well’, with 37 per cent saying that the communi­cation had been poor or non-existent.

Read more at PRWeek… (via Geneva Communicators Network)