In this video Stowe Boyd interviews Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell). Use it to re-energize your Enterprise 2.0 plans. Some of the enlightening quotes are:

• “it won’t go very far without an executive champion”
• “when you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared”
• “when you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, [...] and if you let them do it freely, that diminishes the gate-keeper role. [...] and if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big stick of dynamite in that”
• wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. [...] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. [...] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”

Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”

Posted on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Blog.

Althought this was for a legal conference, just view the slides and remove the (few) references to firm and practice. It applies to any large organization. Lots of good information. Slides 9 & 10 has a good list of the types of Web 2.0 tools.

One example of an enterprise social network is NewsGator’s SocialSites. It built on top of Microsoft SharePoint and provides a dynamic space for communities, expertise location and “work streaming”. Two screenshots from NewsGator Profile Page and Community Site.

A few of the key messages from the report are:

• that consumer Web 2.0 products are not long-term solutions for enterprises, especially free or ad-supported services
• IT continues to be the gatekeeper preventing Web 2.0 applications from being leveraged in the enterprise
• business areas are asking for these tools and bypassing IT if they find a service that will help them in some area
• IT is worried about scalability of these applications
• IT budgets are primarily focused on maintaining legacy applications with little capacity to look at these new tools
• younger employees growing up with these tools will want something similar when they arrive at your doorstep to work
• IT is concerned about the security of Web 2.0 applications
• major enterprise players (IBM, Microsoft, etc) will make Enterprise 2.0 a feature of their monolithic solutions
• major growth in the enterprise will not happen until the baby boomers retire from the executive ranks
• social networking tools that allow customer interaction, profiles and participation in discussions and blogs will receive significant investment

Read a good review of the Forrester report.

Enterprise 2.0 Spending - Forrester

Via ReadWriteWeb.com

So what makes a successful corporate blog?

First and foremost is the realization that a blog is for the customer’s benefit – not for the company’s. It’s important to remember readers will only come back if there is value for them. That’s right value for them. Not value for the company. Readers don’t care if you are providing a nice, efficient press release site.

Rick Burnes reminds us of the real reason for corporate blogs in a posting at ZDNet.

Blogs for Customers, Not About Companies

If you look closely at the search results you pull up every day (and even some of the Alltop corporate blogs), you’ll see that an alternative model of corporate blogging is beginning to emerge. Instead of writing about themselves, companies are following the lead of the other company blog in the Technorati Top 100 — Signal vs. Noise. They’re beginning to create content that’s not about their business, but that appeals to their buyer personas.

Whole Foods is going beyond their blog and publishing recipes. American Express is publishing small-business advice. Indium Corporation is writing about thermal interface materials.

In each of these cases, the company is attracting a broad audience by focusing on content that is interesting to the demographic it serves rather than content about the products it sells.

Every company that is considering starting a corporate blog should spend some thinking about how this effort can support their brand. Otherwise publishing the blog could be wasted effort.

Watch the video at Government Technology where Vivek Kundra, CTO for Washington, D.C. talks about using these tools while acquiring a new police evidence warehouse.

This is Procurement 2.0, using the services available on the internet to move to a increased transparency for the duration of a systems acquisition. This short interview will change your opinion of how the public sector is using these “consumer” tools.

Source: Government Technology

In case you hadn’t heard about it, some companies have begun blocking RSS feeds at the firewall. The rationale for this short-sighted, counterproductive bit of paranoid stupidity ranges from bandwidth worries to productivity concerns.

For Immediate Release” podcast from an IABC colleague who informed us that his company has a policy against watching or listening to any streams at work due to bandwidth concerns; they also are forbidden from downloading MP3 files. So employees here can’t determine whether a citizen marketer has made a negative commercial about their company and posted it to YouTube or listen to a business-focused podcast during lunch. Brilliant. And all to protect precious bandwidth.

These decisions around bandwidth are so yesterday. Any organization that is concerend about bandwidth in this manner, has not entered the Internet age.

But many companies haven’t figured out yet that today’s web isn’t the same web around which they built their in-house capabilities back in 1999 or earlier.

The Internet is the #1 information and communications tool for any business. Controlling access goes against all good business sense.

I’ve covered the reasons this philosophy represents the height of cluelessness, but to recap…

• An employee’s home computer is a personal tool, but it gets used for work all the time. Work-life integration is the name of the game today. If you expect me to take work home, then expect me to live part of my life at work.
• The measure of productivity is how much work is getting done, not how much time an employee spends on non-work-related activities. Employees will stay late, come in early, or take work home. They won’t simply let it slide. Nobody wants to lose his job so he can check sports scores on ESPN.
• Nobody ever got fired for checking sports scores at work in the New York Times. The web is the new newspaper.
• Telling employees you don’t trust them—any of them—is a great way to earn some of the lowest engagement scores in the business world. (Trust is a key determinant of engagement and commitment.) Companies with large populations of highly engaged employees earn double-digit growth. Those with large populations of actively disengaged employees earn zero or negative growth. So which is preferable: locked down computers and no growth or open access and double-digit growth?

Arstechnica is reporting that teens prefer using real-time and community communication tool rather than email. Teens say e-mail is for old people. This shift is slow but needs to be watched.

Virtual NYC has about 12 different routes ranging from Wall Street to Columbus Circle and Central Park.

Signup for free and try it out.