Who is going to take the lead in corporate virtual worlds?

By

Since virtual worlds commenced, the promise of using virtual worlds in corporate settings has been evident. The first wave of business involvement in virtual worlds was primarily about marketing and customer engagement – I have written about marketing in virtual worlds and was interviewed on ABC TV about virtual advertising.

From here, a key focus will be how to use virtual worlds for meetings. I have no doubt that in the next decade it will be extremely common to hold meetings in virtual worlds. However those virtual worlds will be a world ahead of what we have experienced so far, being closer to merging high-bandwidth telepresence conferencing with the experience of immersion in a room of people from different locations.

Second Life essentially hasn’t gained ground for eighteen months, maintaining a dedicated core of users, but gaining few new users. The latest news is that Reuters is pulling out its Second Life reporter. Eric Kangel, who used to play that role as Eric Reuters, has some solid advice for Linden Labs on how to grow, including the interesting suggestion to ‘abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app,’ mainly because Second Life is not robust enough for enterprise use.

Since Second Life has been experiencing it’s well-known challenges, I have expected that new companies would emerge to take the vanguard of corporate virtual worlds. This is not to write off Second Life quite yet, which recently launched a corporate meeting offering, but the odds are in favor of new participants taking the lead in this space.

Some of the emerging companies that are looking promising include:

Read more →

The Age: Social networking can help business

By

The Age has just published an article titled Social networking can help business, based on our Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy report, released yesterday.

Much of the article describes the report, and takes some of the executive quotes used in the report. Then at the end, taken from a follow-up interview with me, it says:

Chairman of company Future Exploration Network Ross Dawson said there had been a transformation in the corporate attitude towards social networking over the past year.

“An initial scepticism and caution from executives has now shifted dramatically where they recognise that these can be extremely valuable for helping organisations perform more effectively,” Mr Dawson told AAP.

Some Australian companies were not so positive about using social networking technology in the workplace, Mr Dawson said.

“There’s a lot of diversity in the opinions of senior executives, some are still both extremely sceptical and extremely cautious.”

That’s the state of the nation. There absolutely has been a dramatic shift in attitude by senior executives towards social networks and similar tools in the enterprise over just the last year. However within many organizations there is a strong divide in perceptions, often meaning that relatively little happens.

The pace of change in how executives view social networks certainly suggests that this is not far from becoming truly mainstream in the enterprise.

Launch of the Enterprise Social Network Strategy report: what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside the organization

By

Today we are releasing our next major report, which distils – through unattributed verbatim quotes – what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside organizations.

Future Exploration Network created the report for IBM, hosting a select group of top executives at a Roundtable discussion, and capturing the key talking points from the conversations.

Download the Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Networking Strategy report.

Enterprise Social Network Strategy

I usually don’t put press releases on my blog, but the one we released this morning gives a good summary of the report:

For immediate release: 20 November 2008

Australian senior executives say social networking has “real power” to change business

The majority of large Australian companies are trialing social networks within their organisations and senior executives believe that, rather than being a waste of employee time, there is substantial value to be harvested from connecting with Web 2.0, a report released today says.

Read more →

Check out Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World on 24-25 November (and Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009 on 24 February!)

By

The Australian event industry is quickly getting better from what was until recently a very low base. There are more quality events than ever.

A few months ago I was planning to run an Enterprise Social Network Strategy event in early December. Then I found out that a very similar high-quality event was already set for the week before. As such I cancelled my event and rolled what I was intending to cover into my next Enterprise 2.0 conference. I then spoke to the organizers of the November event, AC Events, to see if we could collaborate. We have worked out a great arrangement whereby we are together bringing two highly complementary events to the market.

Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World on 24-25 November 2008 is a two-day conference covering social media for marketing, enterprise and government, organized by AC Events. I will chair the plenary sessions and enterprise stream at this event.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 24 February 2009 is an intensive one-day executive summit organized by Future Exploration Network on how to create value with Web 2.0 tools inside organisations. It features leading international speakers, Australian case studies, and highly detailed insights into implementation.

Read more →

Webcast Keynote: Creating Business Value from Web 2.0

By

This Thursday November 5 at 11am US Pacific Time I’ll be doing the keynote for a webcast on Creating Business Value from Web 2.0, targeted to the manufacturing sector. Webcast viewing is free with registration. The description of my presentation is:

Creating Business Value from Web 2.0

Business technology is being transformed. Web 2.0-style technologies that have emerged in the consumer space such as blogs, wikis, presence, RSS, and mashups are being adapted to enterprise use, changing how IT platforms support business success. The Web 2.0 Framework gives clarity into the tools and processes of Web 2.0 and how it creates business value. Applying the Web 2.0 Framework helps organizations to tap fully the insights of their knowledge workers, build more efficient processes, and get products to market faster. Six key steps to creating business value from Web 2.0 help executives to plan the path forward.

Following my keynote Tim Teeter, Product Marketing Manager from Epicor, and Scott Smith, Director of Technology from Epicor, will present how manufacturing companies specifically can apply Web 2.0 capabilities.

I’ll share some of my presentation here later.

Web 2.0 is happening inside organizations anyway – time to recognize it and do it well

By

The current issue of MIS magazine Australia has an excellent feature on Corporate Web 2.0 titled Meetings of 2.0 Minds, introduced with the words: The social communication tools of the web are making their irrevocably into today’s enterprise.

The piece begins with the example of how Bond University conducted an audit of use of Web 2.0 technologies, and “uncovered a vast, organic network of technologies already being used…”

The article goes on to quote me:

The experience of Bond University is far from unique, says chairman Ross Dawson of events and strategy company Future Exploration Network, who researches Web 2.0 technologies. Whether companies realise it or not, Dawson believes there are already instances of Web 2.0 tools being used within every large corporation in Australia, usually without any managerial oversight.

“One of the important characteristics of Web 2.0 is that it emerged in the consumer space, and made its ways in the corporate space, whereas most technologies did the opposite,” he says.

Read more →

The steady shift to an RSS-based universe

By

The Guardian is now providing full-text RSS feeds.

Let’s dig into why this is important, and an indicator of one of the broadest shifts happening in the information landscape.

Over the last few years RSS has shifted from a geek-thing that required explanation, to the point where most people have an RSS reader of some type on their desktops. As people go to more and more information sources, it becomes highly inefficient to visit to them separately, while an RSS readers allows all of your selected information sources to be found in the one place.

Currently virtually every professional publisher provides partial feeds, meaning that if you subscribe to their news feeds in an RSS reader you only get an excerpt or the beginning of the article, and you have to click through to the publishers’ website to read the article. For some years there has been a vigorous debate on whether publishers should provide full or partial feeds. Professional publishers have almost always chosen to direct readers back to their sites, where they can ply them with advertising and make money.

The Guardian is in fact the first major newspaper in the world to provide full-text feeds, according to the Google Reader team.

Read more →

Expertise location: linking social networks and text mining

By

A very interesting article in the Guardian today, US military targets social nets, describes new expertise location technologies.

Expertise location has always been a central ‘killer app’ first sought by knowledge management and now part of the promised of Web 2.0. It is a fundamental driver in any large organization being able to tap its own capabilities and take advantage of being large. This was always epitomized by the quote from Lew Platt, who as CEO of HP famously said “If HP knew what HP knows, it would be three times more profitable!”.

I wrote in 2005 about how Morgan Stanley was finding that blogging was trumping in effectiveness its years of efforts into dedicated expertise location systems. The next layer is tapping social network and content creation patterns to identify experts, as has been implemented in some content management systems (CMS) over the last couple of years. This can be taken further when used within online communities and social networks, as SRI International is currently doing:

Read more →

Business models for micro-blogging in the enterprise

By

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article titled Start-Ups Test Dot-Com Business Models, which compares the business models of Twitter and Yammer (a recent start-up focusing on business micro-blogging that I wrote about in a recent review of the space).

It says that Yammer, while a tiny fraction of the size of Twitter, is already getting revenue, while Twitter is still focusing on growth and waiting to monetize.

His focus on profits helped Yammer, which is based in West Hollywood, Calif., win the TechCrunch50 prize for start-ups in September. TechCrunch, a leading technology news blog that sponsored the contest, called the company “Twitter with a business model.”

Yammer’s business model is compelling, Mr. Sacks said, because it spreads virally like a consumer service, but earns revenue like a business service. Anyone with a company e-mail address can use Yammer free. When that company officially joins — which gives the administrator more control over security and how employees use the service — it pays $1 a month for each user. In Yammer’s first six weeks, 10,000 companies with 60,000 users signed up, though only 200 companies with 4,000 users are paying so far.

Read more →

Detailed case study of Twitter in the enterprise: Janssen-Cilag

By

Earlier in the month I wrote a post on Micro-blogging in the enterprise: an idea whose time has come? I mentioned a number of the current corporate initiatives in the space, including those of Janssen-Cilag, which in February implemented an internal version of Twitter it called Jitter.

After my post I learned (on Twitter) that Janssen-Cilag was highly commended in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards. The executive summary of the report includes a description of Jitter. James Robertson from the Intranet Innovation Awards has also recently posted a seven-minute video interview of Janssen-Cilag’s Nathan Wallace on one of their other Intranet initiatives, Juice, for ordering IT supplies.

Last week Nathan wrote up in detail Janssen-Cilag’s experiences with micro-blogging, very generously sharing insights into the challenges as well as benefits from the initiative. This is a must read for anyone interested in the realities of implementing Web 2.0 and new communications technologies. Some selected insights from Nathan’s review:

Read more →