The latest in the ongoing string of research studies on Web 2.0 use in the enterprise comes from McKinsey, whose recently released global survey report Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise is based on a June, 2008 survey of 1,988 executives.

The report packs a lot of food for thought into a small space. Much of the data will be head-nodding material for readers of this blog, but in several areas there are items that jump out. First, though, a quick overview.

This survey focuses on what Web 2.0 technologies are being adopted, on which areas of business they are deployed, on techniques to support adoption, and on the executives’ level of satisfaction with the results. Helpfully, the report provides consistent comparisons to McKinsey’s last report on this topic, the April, 2007 How Businesses are Using Web 2.0. The report is also helpful once again in identifying differences in E20 patterns among regions (e.g. executives in India and Asia-Pac are more than twice as likely as Europeans to cite blogs as a tool of real importance to their companies).

The McKinsey authors focus their commentary on several core messages.

1) There are more executives now reporting dissatisfaction with their E20 investments and programs (although Asia-Pac bucks the trend).

2) There is an emerging gap between some 20% of firms who are satisfied with their experiences, using the tools widely, and achieving positive results, and another 20% of firms going in the other direction – dissatisfied and reducing their use of the tools.

3) While internal uses of E20 like managing knowledge and promoting collaboration are marginally more common, externally-facing uses like improving customer service, acquiring customers, and integrating more effectively with suppliers and partners are almost equally popular.

4) Among the tools themselves, there is an increasing array of choices and some changes already in the popularity of individual tools. Wikis, for example, are much more popular than they were a year ago, while peer-to-peer networks have dropped by 50% or more.

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Turning to the items that jump out I’ll focus on the tools area. One major datapoint is the ascendancy of social networking to the top of the E20 tool list, roughly at the same level of importance as blogs in most regions. (While McKinsey includes “Web Services” as an E20 tool, and it is by far the most important to the surveyed executives, I’m ignoring it here as an apple among oranges.) I suspect that this sudden jump in importance for enterprise social networking is more anticipation than reality, more Facebook fallout than widespread internal deployment. But it’s a first great example of how the public web experience is driving expectations for the enterprise.

The next datapoint of note is the sudden appearance of video sharing as a Web 2.0 tool already surpassing podcasts and closing in on wikis in level of importance. This is clearly a second great example of how public web experiences, in this case YouTube, drive practice in the enterprise.

Another surprise is the low level of importance the executives assigned to rating as a tool. In this case, a technique widely used on many different kinds of public web sites (from Amazon to TripAdvisor to eBay) appears to be falling below the radar for the enterprise.

In one of the bigger “ouches” for fans of socially-generated knowledge, tagging appears to be another casualty in the McKinsey research. Tagging rates even lower than rating in the tool catalog. It would appear from this data that anything that asks the user to thoughtfully execute one more click, or type one more word in an adjacent box is not acceptable in the view of this executive audience. Or perhaps a larger issue is that both rating and tagging require some degree of strategy and an ongoing “harvesting” program in order to capitalize on their enterprise value. The executives’ lack of enthusiasm may be a reflection of their understanding that they are not invested in providing that kind of strategy and oversight at this time.

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We’ve known all along that relatively small numbers of people are interested in tagging, but one of the best things about this tool is that even a small percentage of a knowledge workforce can produce major added value to a content collections of all kinds. You’d think that the easy knowledge ROI offered by tagging should get any exec’s attention.

Overall, the McKinsey survey provides another proof point that use of the E20 technologies is increasing. That it also shows lumpy adoption experience and shifts in tool use is something we should expect from an emerging set of practices. The fact that the data establish that the successful firms are increasingly successful and have been building up a set of best practices for adoption represents a real transformation over the past 12 months.