Skip to main content

How Social Media and Web 2.0 Work In Business

The following three posts have a wealth of information, ideas and tips for business managers and CIO's about social media, web 2.0, social networking, and online communities. The fact is, this stuff, social software has to be used to be fully appreciated. It takes time to grasp its power and usefulness. Workplace social software and communities need to be understood from both, a regular user view point and from an administrator (control) view point. You bet, this is work. There are no hurry-up or easy solutions in a workplace or community environment but the benefits are gigantic.

From BusinessWeek, "Social Media Will Change Your Business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later."

From Wired, "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits to You. You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web.

From CIO Insight, by Edward Cone, "Try It, You`ll Like It.

Web 2.0 applications must be experienced hands-on to be appreciated, but most CIOs don't take the opportunity.

If you are not on Facebook, if you have never created and maintained a blog, then maybe you aren't putting enough thought into your job.

...understanding Web 2.0 applications is important to your business, and you need to spend some quality time using them to really get what they're all about. The power of user-driven tools lies in the using. Just reading about them, or spending an hour or two playing with them, doesn't do them justice; you've got to go hands-on to appreciate their power."

Assigning order to a chaotic process. People in businesses are using social software and virtual communities to relate ideas, stories and information to each other in, say, a gigantic learning and development environment. It helps them spot new business opportunities before the competition does, create a meeting place, be open to radical opportunities, break down silos, support experimentation, enable managers to represent the customer vis-à-vis their own organizations, and help everyone move forward.

Where do you start?