I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

News has just broken that the people of Iceland have just produced a draft of a new constitution – developed collaboratively via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Althing, Iceland's Social Media-Savvy Parliament. Photo: Wikimedia

Iceland had its share of financial debacles in recent years, and, as a result, decided it needed to re-invent its government to incorporate a better system of checks and balances. However, the new constitution isn’t being written by a group of men holed up in a room somewhere — it’s an open process involving the latest social networking tools and technology.

A 25-member Constitution Council drafted the new constitution by engaging Iceland’s 318,000 citizens through social media sites, which helped keep everyone up to date on the document’s progress, as well as solicit feedback. The Constitutional Council posted daily interviews with delegates, and meetings were broadcast live on the council’s webpage and on Facebook. There were also schedules for all meetings, all minutes from meetings of groups, the Board and the Council as well as the Council’s work procedures. The webpage also has regular news from the Council’s work as well as a weekly newsletter.

If social networking tools can help transform a nation, imagine what it can do for a company.

Just a few years ago, engagement with social communities was an experiment that some bold individuals in bold organizations were conducting to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now, social or virtual communities are the fabric of day-to-day business. It is transforming the way information is disseminated outside and inside organizations as they connect with customers, partners, and industry players. But for some industries, it is disrupting or  destroying — or if you look at it another way — enriching information gathering.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the news business.

The question is then: Is the news business a victim or a beneficiary of the social media explosion?

That’s the question I and co-author Dr. Bill Gibbs of Duquesne University recently took up in a chapter in a new book on the implications of social networking, titled Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena.

The book, compiled and edited by Ben Kei Daniel of University of Saskatchewan, explores how over the last decade, virtual communities have evolved from massive experimental, educational, technological, business, and social environments to normal, day-to-day operations for a variety of organizations.

Chapters cover studies on various types of virtual communities, and in our chapter, we explore how global online communities now include hundreds of millions of members, able to communicate almost instantaneously.

Increasingly, traditional news organizations are finding they are being outpaced in coverage of world events by cadres of “citizen journalists” reporting in real time via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. While there are valid concerns about the credibility of information being posted on social networking sites, there’s no question that contextual reports are being delivered much faster to global audiences than traditional outlets. In addition, recipients have a wide array of choices from which they can acquire this information.

The news providers that are on top of the game now offer interactive sources that engage people, enable them to build community, and to participate in the news. At the same time, the digital interfaces through which people access the news are continuously evolving, diverse, and oftentimes visually complex.

In the chapter, Bill and I explore trends and developments in news-oriented virtual communities. We review several data collection and analysis techniques such as content analysis, usability testing and eye-tracking and propose that these techniques and associated tools can aid the study of news communities. We examine the implications these techniques have for better understanding human behavior in virtual communities as well as for improving the design of these environments.

The book has an additional 43 chapters as well, intended as a guidebook for executives and corporate leaders concerned with the management of expertise, social capital, competence knowledge, and information and organizational development in different types of virtual communities and environments.

Social customer relationship management (CRM) would seem like a natural act in the era of social enterprise. With traditional CRM, you have a bunch of stovepiped systems with quickly obsolete customer information. Connecting CRM to the fresh breezes of customer information coming in through online engagements would open up such data across the enterprise. But, while there is plenty of excitement about the potential of Social CRM, implementations are few and far between.

Ray Wang, a leading outside-the-box industry thinker, says he recently wrapped up a bunch of discussions about social CRM with 23 business leaders, and explains what still needs to be done. He says that in each of the organizations he has studied, there have been some pioneering Social CRM pilots underway, and has caught the attention of the boardroom

At issue is the fact that “most executives believe that Social is ‘just another channel’ and often liken Social CRM to e-commerce,” or “felt this was just an extension of CRM with a social flavor.” They miss out on the fact that Social CRM is part of a shift to the customer, which requires a whole new way of thinking. Plus, they may be hamstrung by their traditional CRM systems, which were designed for the era of closed, siloed enterprises.

Wang says Social CRM requires significant organizational transformation for success — not just retinkering nwith a channel.  He urges greater alliances and partnerships between all the players in Social CRM scenarios: enterprises, systems integrators, CRM vendors, and most of all, customers.

As previously discussed here at the FastForward blogsite, Social CRM is a market onto itself projected to reach $1 billion in global sales, but can be challenging to role out to self-motivated and self-driven groups as sales and marketing professionals. Still, too, perhaps the phrase “Social CRM” should be a redundancy.

Is corporate social media ethical? Is there a “Tom Sawyer syndrome” at work in which people are suckered into doing work thinking that it’s something to be enjoyed?

Those are the provocative questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the recent South by Southwest Interactive confab. His argument: a key value proposition of social networking is crowdsourcing, in which an actively engaged community contributes new ideas for innovation, or even does some piecework, for little or no compensation. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zittrain argues that these may be morally questionable ventures.

On these pages at FastForward, we have explored some of the opportunities social networking provides for businesses to improve customer interactions, including reliance on influencers to solve customer problems, as well as crowdsourcing. In the former case, a company essentially can be spared hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer service costs as proponents on the network take care of sticky problems with products or services.

As one observer recently summed up the economics of crowdsourcing:

“Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”

Still, Zittrain argued that many social networked arrangements amount to digital sweatshops and opportunities to exploit distressed labor. As he was paraphrased as saying at SWSX:

“Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money. In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay at all, instead offering recognition within the volunteer community or points in the guise of a game. Mr. Zittrain called it ‘a wonderful Tom Sawyer syndrome.’”

However, many crowdsourcing arrangements do have compensation at the end, since many are positioned as competitions. Corporations such as GE and federal agencies including NASA position their crowdsourcing efforts as such, with a cash prize at the end as incentive for the selected innovation.  As such, these activities may be as morally questionable as an essay contest.

A counterpoint raised at SWSX was that unlike digital sweatshops, efforts by participants are entirely voluntary, and end-users can log off at any time. In many cases, the work provides benefit to society.

Along these lines, consider the work of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), which has marshalled more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland. The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. The project is catching all the text that optical character recognition technology misses, and therefore requires manual patching. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.

Also, while the idea of crowdsourcing labor sounds scary, it also is a huge opportunity for many workers as well. Drake Bennett, writing in the Boston Globe, observed that crowdsouring has opened up greater opportunities for workers and companies across parts of the globe. For example, txteagle, which distributes work to mobile cell-phone users across the globe to handle image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle is now one of Kenya’s largest employers, employing a 10,000-strong workforce is a network of freelancers.

In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.

Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.

• Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
• Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
• Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
• Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.

A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton asks if business-centric social networking is a “revolution” or a “ruse.”  Since we’re inclined here at this site to pick the revolutionary option, it’s worth examining why some experts at UPenn’s Wharton School may be skeptical about its power to transform business.

First, there’s the still-uncertain ROI aspect. As Shawndra Hill, a Wharton operations and information management professor, put it: “Social networking in the enterprise sector is relatively new, and better tools can enable people to communicate across an organization. But before this really takes off, there needs to be some proof that these things are useful.”  Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management, echos this sentiment: “I’m a little skeptical about usage, but I’m even more skeptical about benefits to corporations. Companies may use it, but I don’t think it will provide the productivity benefits vendors claim they will provide.”

Ultimately, the success of social networking in enterprises will not be employees and managers adopting sites such as Facebook and Twitter as a separate activity. Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, predicts that ultimately, social networking will simply be pervasive within enterprise software and processes. “Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing,” he says. “We’ll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact.”

What exactly is the difference between “Social Business” and “Enterprise 2.0,” if there is one?

The question came up at in a Quora discussion, and asked again by Ross Dawson in one of his latest posts.

It’s semantics, but important semantics. Many articles and papers are using the terms interchangeably.  You may recall it was Andrew MacAfee who first surfaced the term “Enterprise 2.0″ back in 2007 as a way to describe the application of Web 2.0 approaches and thinking to enterprise settings, but separate it from the consumerist fanfare.

For his part, Ross sees Social Business as an emerging way to describe the transformation that organizations are undertaking as part of their Enterprise 2.0 activities. Enterprise 2.0 as a term may have a more technical cast to it.

In the Quora discussion, our colleague Jevon McDonald also saw Enterprise 2.0 in terms of the tools and Social Business as the outcome:

“Enterprise 2.0 represents a set of technologies and methodologies for IT implementation inside the enterprise. A Social Business uses Enterprise 2.0 software to implement internal social process but also accounts for things such as: external social presence, supporting process, HR issues, policy development and governance.”

Stowe Boyd echoed similar sentiments:

“A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances. Enterprise 2.0 is generally used to represent the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies — like cloud computing, social media, wikis, and the like — and is, as such, principally a technology adoption issue, and not a reconceptualization of business operations.”

John Tropea, on the other hand, sees Social Business as the journey to reach Enterprise 2.0. E 2.0, he says, is more the idealized end state — Enterprise 2.0 is a concept and strategy to do business a different way…  a more transparent workplace, two-way communication, networked/activity centric overlayed on the present process-centric and blended with hierarchy.” As he puts it:

“With social business design we may reach a state of enterprise 2.0 eventually.”

So which comes first — Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business?

Consider the plight of the Web designer.  I saw a comic a couple of years back (author unknown) that really laid out quite well the hair-pulling process of designing, building, and maintaining a site.  It goes something like this:

1. “Everything is cool the beginning.  The client communicates their needs. You set expectations. Enthusiasm and excitement all ’round.”
2. “The client shows you their current Website. You both laugh at how terrible it is.”
3. “You redesign the Website. It looks nice and works well. This is the high point of the design.”
4. “Just a few ‘minor’ changes.”
5. “Minor changes start to add up.”
6. “The client gets others involved:  ‘Looks great, but I want feedback from my friends, co-workers, uncle, pet hamster, etc.’”
7. “All hope is lost.  You begin to fantasize about other careers… “
8. “You are no longer a Web designer. You are a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.”
9. “An abomination is born. The client has completely forgotten that they hired you, the Web designer, to build them a great product.”

The process of Website design and management has turned up many, many abominations for businesses across the land. However, social networking may be sorting that all out.  In fact, the flight from Website abominations may now be fueling the social networking movement for many businesses.

IDC’s Frank Gens, for one, recently issued his predictions for the year ahead, and foresees social networking software growing at a 38% percent clip over the next five years. In addition, more than one-quarter of vendors could be gobbled up in 2011:

“We believe that — as a sure sign of social business mainstreaming — 2011 will be a year of consolidation and convergence for social business software vendors, as well as a year of adoption expanding into small and medium-sized businesses.”

The small to medium size business sector is an interesting and growing sweet spot for social enterprise. In fact, SMB adoption is likely to grow to 40 percent of these companies employing online services to better market their products and services, he predicts. The benefit to small businesses:  it’s cheaper and easier to use free online social media services than to go through the time and expense of setting up a customized Website.

In his 2011 report, Gens observes that Website development has topped out for many small and medium-size businesses. Instead, he says, “small and midsize firms will increasingly flock to Facebook and other social networks to establish a free online presence that improves their ability to acquire, engage, and retain customers without the hassle and cost of setting up a traditional Website. We predict that the percentage of SMBs using social networks for promotional purposes will exceed 40% by year-end 2011.”

More proof that it really does pay — in a bottom-line kind of way — to be Web/Enterprise 2.0 savvy.

New research out of McKinsey & Company shows that companies embracing Web 2.0 approaches are likely to be reaping more gains and market leadership than their less Web 2.0-savvy counterparts. McKinsey spoke to 3,249 companies as part of its annual Web 2.0 survey, and concluded that these “networked enterprises” are more likely to be market leaders and gaining market share, “but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”

The study’s authors, Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, report that 27% of companies overall reported having both market share gains against their competitors and higher profit margins. However, “highly networked enterprises” — those using Web 2.0 inside and outside their organizations in innovative ways — “were 50 percent more likely to fall in this high-performance group than other organizations were,” they report.

The authors predict that in many industries, “new competitive battle lines may form between companies that use the Web in sophisticated ways and companies that feel uncomfortable with new Web-inspired management styles or simply can’t execute at a sufficiently high level.”

Bughin and Chui also report that the majority of companies that have embraced Web 2.0 continue to report that they are receiving measurable business benefits—with nearly nine out of ten reporting at least one benefit. These benefits include increasing speed of access to knowledge (cited by 77% of respodents with internal Web 2.0 efforts and 57% using Web 2.0 to engage external partners); reduced communication costs (60% internal users, 53% external);  and decreased travel costs (44% internal users, 38% external).