by Bill Ives
February 25, 2008 at 2:57 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
I received a useful report from Awareness on adoption trends for web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. In an email survey they found that 54% of organizations with over 500 employees are using web 2.0 tools and 74% of those with under 500 employees. The majority of these use a both internal and external facing web tools. Blogs are the most used web 2.0 technology (87%) followed by communities, wikis, RSS feeds, and social networking. The vast majority (96%) report that the use of web 2.0 tools haven been successful. The biggest obstacle to deploying web 2.0 tools in the limited availability of internal resources to support their deployment. Security is also a concern. The results were obtained by Equation research in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The recent date might explain why these results are a bit higher than some others such as reported in Some Initial Web 2.0 Enterprise Research. However, the desire for web 2.0 in the enterprise has been building for some time. A University of Massachusetts survey done in late 2006 found that a majority of business respondents (66%) felt that social media were important to the firm’s business strategy. Another 2006 study by Watson Wyatt found that nearly 50% of the employee population prefers – and expects – collaborative and interactive methods of communication fund on the consumer web.
I was especially interested in how these tools were helping organizations both inside and outside the enterprise. Here is a summary:
Positive impacts for internal facing social media
Improving communication and collaboration - 91%
Finding experts inside the company - 81%
Improving knowledge management - 78%
Positive impacts for external facing social media
Increasing customer engagement - 68%
Increasing brand awareness & loyalty - 64%
Providing market research - 58%
Generating revenue - 39%
The Awareness research found that going forward 28% of organizations with over 500 employees have budgets greater than $50,000 for web 2.0 tools or social media. The top tools planned are blogs and wikis (56%) but many are also planning to deploy online communities.
Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness told me, “It’s clear from the report that two trends exist. First, enterprises are very interested in taking advantage of social media for business purposes. Second, many of them are stalled by two factors: concerns about security, moderation, and control; and the fact that they have limited resources and understanding to drive a successful Web 2.0 project. As you know at Awareness, we are putting a lot of energy into addressing both of the concerns. We’ve built a platform that specifically addresses the issues of security, moderation, and control, and because we do the work and host the communities for people we can help them overcome the obstacles of not having enough resources.”
Thanks to Awareness for sharing this work. Future studies should include a new category of web 2.0 tool, workspace or collaborative platforms, such as what Awareness offers. You can download the report from their web site.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Permalink
Great post Bill.
“…the fact that they have limited resources and understanding to drive a successful Web 2.0 project,” is the greatest issue we have recognized. A simple example of this is a company blog. You pay for it, designate the person or people who will contribut to it, then proudly proclaim your use of social media, web 2.0 tools.
Not long after that, the blog dries up: Contributors become discouraged. Confidence in what to write about and why anybody cares starts lacking. Nobody comments, not many subscribe, you know the drill.
Understanding how to track and identify key influencers, and where the relevant conversations are taking place online is an essential practice to avoiding that problem. Then you must understand how to interact with those influencers in order to actually join the conversation (as opposed to trying to create a new one).
There are many moving parts to all of this, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying: The tools are half the battle. How they work with other pieces of your business, and what to do with them is the other half.
Bill Ives wrote @ February 27th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Jason - you raise excellent points. I see so many company blogs that have good content and few responses or inbound links from other sources. They do not take the extra steps, including those that you describe, to become part of community. As a bit of self promotion :), I am working with a number of firms to help them take these extra steps that you list and others. If firms are not committed to taking these extra steps with blog, it will have limited effectiveness and I think they will be disappointed in the end - unless, of course, they are only doing the blog to simply say they have one and not to reach an audience. Bill
Alan Dix wrote @ February 27th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Just reading the intro to the report gives a slightly different take on the results presented here.
The Awareness report indicates that the survey went to 60,000 people and of those 112 people completed the survey. So let’s bear in mind that this is 2/10 of 1% that responded. Don’t get me wrong - I am pro Web 2.0, am evangelising within my own company, and follow the Fastforward blog with a tremendous amount of interest - but you need to give me and the other readers the correct info. By leaving out the response rates you have made the findings overly positive, which is not the case, much as I would like it to be.
That aside - keep up the good work - I find the Fastforward blog required reading
Bill Ives wrote @ February 27th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Alan
You raise a valid point about the response rate. However, there is no way of knowing if that inflated the results pro enterprise 2.0. It just raises the margin of error. You could make a case in each way that those with a view to push pro or con enterprise 2.0 views could be more motivated to respond, especially if threaten IT people were motivated to respond. I am very glad you enjoy the blog. Keep up the comments. Bill
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
