Blogs and social networks and wikis, oh my!

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in-house staff at Avenue A/Razorfish, but the company plans to begin selling the product to customers shortly.

Avenue A/Razorfish is also beginning to sell a separate enterprise product based on social networking that will allow corporations to build relationships with their users, enabling, for example, a travel company to offer its customers a place on the Web to create profiles and--depending on where they want to travel (the U.K. or Bulgaria, French Polynesia or Kenya) and what they want to see (soccer hooligans or Byzantine ruins, sparkling coral or giraffes)--to market more intelligently to those people.

All of these social networking tools are extensions of the pre-Internet practice of polling thousands or millions of users to make better decisions. Think about the accuracy of Zagat Survey's restaurant ratings, which are based on nothing more than customer surveys. Now the concept can be applied to a variety of places in the enterprise.

Indeed, Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research in San Jose, predicted this in a recent report: "Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, e-mail address--and a URL for their blog. The company would give all of its employees a personal internal blog where they could provide project updates, trip reports, and market intelligence, anything that they think others should know about the work that they are doing."

All of this activity isn't going unnoticed by large technology companies. Mark Levitt, a vice president of collaborative software at technology research firm IDC, says the large companies that dominate content management software--including EMC, IBM and Microsoft--all have internal programs to incorporate wikis, social networks and blogs into their products.

But Traction's Lloyd, for one, isn't afraid of the large technology companies' products cutting into his business. "Our solution does 80 percent of what the larger solutions do and it costs 20 percent of what they cost," he argues. "Also, it doesn't tie down users to the desktop and is 10 times easier to support."

Socialtext's Mayfield adds that many big tech corporations are constitutionally incapable of developing these types of revolutionary products. The reason: Like the personal computer, spreadsheets, e-mail and instant messaging, social media applications entered the enterprise from the bottom up. "None (of these software applications) entered from the CIO saying this is a great idea, let's do this," Mayfield says. "Regular rank-and-file people used them as consumers and brought them into the company."

Of course, big tech companies can always buy the technology they need by acquiring social media application startups or partnering with them as they begin to penetrate the corporate arena.

Either way, "We're just at the beginning of the blog and wiki era in corporate use, and it won't take long before these tools are used as often for collaboration as e-mail is today," predicts Lauren Wood, who recently left Textuality Services, a Vancouver-based consulting company, to join Sun.

As more companies develop and then deploy these social media tools, companies such as Ingersoll-Rand will learn that blogs, wikis and social networks have the same power to improve companies' bottom lines as to protect their reputations.

Story Copyright © 2005 The Deal.com. All rights reserved.

[chasen51]

Social networking, a great tool.

Hello,
I am a member of a new and small social network called NetQuesta.com and I have to say that it really is a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family. I recently moved from my home state of Michigan out to Arizona and a good friend made this site so we could keep in touch. Its probably one of the best things for me right now as I dont know many people out here. I really think that this is a wave of the future as more and more people move away for jobs and such. I guess as long as the sites stay clean and keep the rif raff out, they can really be a great tool. NetQuesta.com has become that tool for me and it brings that little piece of home to me that I miss.