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!

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!

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…

Via Emilie Ogez News.

Via AdsVark.

Part I - The Wikipedia Myth

Part II - People at the Center

Part III - Getting started

The 2009 survey shows that there is great reputational risk associated with social networking as 74 percent of those surveyed believe it is easy to damage a brand’s reputation via sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

As this medium is evolving, there are different opinions about use and access. For example, 60 percent of business executives say they have the “right to know” how employees portray themselves and their organizations online, while 53 percent of the employees contend that “social networking pages are none of an employer’s business.”

So what should business leaders do? One option is to establish policies and protocols. However, nearly half of the respondents say that such guidelines will not change how they behave in cyberspace. Therefore, organizations should emphasize culture, values, and ethics in order to mitigate reputational risk in these online communities.

Read more…

Update: on Slideshare (via Demain la veille)

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester Research, took some time with Stowe Boyd to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

Via Enterprise 2.0 blog.

According to the “The ROI on Social Media Marketing” report from the Aberdeen Group, marketers have developed the tools and methodologies to drive marketing ROI by listening to and learning from customers and prospects.

Aberdeen found that 63% of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

eMarketer estimates that social network advertising alone will rise over 17% this year to $2.35 billion, up from $2 billion in 2008.

Read more at eMarketer…

The recession has put more pressure on interactive marketers to deliver measurable results. While many marketing budgets are being cinched, more than 50% of interactive marketers say they will increase their spending on social marketing. Why? These inexpensive tools can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth and, properly managed, can deliver measurable results. But in this downturn, interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.

Read more at Forrester Research…

Via MédiasSociaux.com.

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…

Four IBMers, Joan M. DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan recently published, Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace [pdf]. It focused on their Beehive social networking website behind IBM’s firewall. Beehive was launched in 2007 by IBM Research as an internal social network site for IBM employees designed to blur the boundaries of work and home, professional and personal, and business and fun.

IBM Research is looking at four main areas: understanding adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and impact. This position paper gives a brief overview of the key findings from last two: motivations and impact on the workplace. The found that within a company intranet’s protected environment, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior reported on Facebook. They also found that employees also share personal details that have not appeared with any significant frequency within IBM on other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.

Read more at The FASTForward Blog…

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…

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…