Collaboration and Social Media 2008 shows how social media, based on Web 2.0 technologies, is approaching the tipping-point. First generation tools now in widespread use, such as text-oriented email, websites, and shared workspaces, are soon to be supplemented by social media applications that incorporate blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, rich media, and other innovative technologies.
Co-authored by Geoffrey Bock, lead analyst for cand Steve Paxhia, director of the Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice, the 130-page report combines a national survey of marketing executives with in-depth case studies of 10 companies and a comprehensive vendor catalogue. Nora Ganin Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, led the survey team that interviewed business leaders in medium and large American companies.
“Compared with the high penetration rates for first generation tools, adoption rates for Web 2.0 applications are still at a low level,” says Bock. “But marketing executives who are using Web 2.0 solutions rate many of these new technologies as being very effective. As word spreads, I believe that companies are going to profit greatly from new ways of doing business.”
The case studies illustrate how social media is used to build brands, generate new ideas, and improve the efficiency of the interactions among all stakeholders including employees and customers. Today, companies achieve measurable business results at a fraction of the cost and time previously required. “The new generation of collaboration and social media solutions are bringing companies closer together as well as closer to their customers,” adds Paxhia. “This often represents a fundamentally new way of doing business.”
“We first found serious enterprise use of blog and wiki technologies, in our report published in March 2005; clearly things have come a long way.”, said Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group. “It will be fascinating tracking enterprise use of social use as it reaches a new scale in 2008.”
Collaboration and Social Media 2008 was sponsored by EMC, SAP, Near-Time, Octopz, Awareness, MindTouch, WetPaint, and Zoho.
Collaboration and Social Media 2008 is available at no charge for immediate download at http://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html.
