HorizonWatching

Six Social Media Trends for 2010

David Armano recently provided a post on his personal blog, Logic "+ Emotion, that he titled:  Six Social Media Trends for 2010.  Armano is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services. 

Armano lists the six most important social media trends for 2010 as:

1. Social media begins to look less social. 
2. Corporations look to scale.
3. Social business becomes serious play. 
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced).
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline. 
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail. 

You can check out Armano’s full “Six Social Media Trends for 2010” blog post at  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/11/social.html

Google's Top 20 Twitter Accounts

Here’s a list of the top twenty Google Twitter accounts, based on the number of followers that ID has. 

Notes: 

• The following information was pulled on October 20, 2009. 
• #DLSP represents the number of days since last the last post on Twitter.
• The columns might not match up with the column headings all that well.  Seems to depend on the browser.

Category	Account	Description	Followers	Tweets	#DSLP
General	Google	Google's main account	1,780,160	774	0
General	YouTube	for YouTube fans	163,883	1,101	0
General	GoogleReader	from Google's feed reader team	29,952	209	15
Ads	AdSense	for online publishers	29,931	103	5
General	GoogleNews	latest headlines via Google News	24,699	2,333	0
Earth	GoogleMaps	uses, tips, mashups	22,509	534	0
General	Blogger	for Blogger fans	22,248	461	0
General	GoogleVoice	updates & info on Google Voice	21,174	134	7
General	GoogleAtWork	solutions for workplace productivity	18,724	891	0
Developer	GoogleResearch	from Google's research scientists	14,637	66	61
General	GoogleCalendar	user tips & updates	12,972	93	0
Developer	app_engine	web apps run on Google infrastructure	12,880	176	5
Developer	GoogleCode	For Google developer products	10,638	88	6
Developer	GoogleIO	Google's largest annual developer event	8,830	258	0
General	GoogleStudents	news of interest to students	8,819	273	0
Earth	GoogleEarth	updates from the Google Earth team	7,724	130	0
Ads	GoogleAnalytics	insights for website effectiveness	7,552	33	4
Culture	googlejobs	the voice of Google recruiters	7,324	173	1
General	iGoogle	Google's personalized homepage	6,674	89	5
General	GoogleImages	Google visual image search	6,483	28	72

A Unique CrowdSourcing Event: The Smarter Cities Scan

Do you live in a large urban city or in one of the sprawling suburban environments on the fringes of a large city?

I wanted to make you aware of a really interesting collaboration / social media project launched recently in support of the Smarter Cities effort.  And I wanted to ask for you to participate if you have some time...and/or...ask you to invite people in your network that might want to participate.  Anyone interested in improving the quality of life in large / sprawling urban environments is invited to participate. 

The social media brainstorming project is called the Smarter Cities Scan (http://smartercities.tumblr.com).

For this exercise in collaborative innovation and hive intelligence to succeed, significant numbers of people need to contribute their diverse thinking over the next few months.  That will generate the very large, complex data set that can then be analyzed and processed into a useful model that can then be used to improve urban environments. 

You can find more information on how to participate is attached below.  For more detail behind this project, you can point people to this post   The Smart Cities Scan:  Let's build an open model with shared imagination and deep analytics

How to participate in the Smart Cities Scan

• From the homepage – http://smartercities.tumblr.com – simply click on Post Your Ideas to start contributing images, video, links, quotes, text or any combination of all of these.  You can even  submit a post by email, or via a mobile phone, by sending your thoughts and ideas to smarterplanet@tumblr.com.
• You don’t need to have a Tumblr account to submit a post, but please include your city and country and any descriptive tags at the bottom of your post so that your ideas can be tagged for others to find. You can also easily create a free Tumblr account if you like this easy-to-use, multimedia microblogging tool.
• You‘re always free to scan all posts, search on topics and tags, soak up some of Smarter Cities background and inspiration material in the about section, or find answers in our Help & FAQ section. 

If you want more information, send any suggestions, questions or problems to smarterplanet@tumblr.com

Smarter Cities Prediction Market

My colleagues at IBM have asked me to invite you to participate in a unique prediction market experiment called the “Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets”.  

Prediction Markets harness the collective intelligence of a community to gain predictive insight, and often even outperform the experts – as was the case in the 2008 US Presidential election.  They utilize stock market principles where participants get play money to “trade” ideas.

IBM’s Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets will allow you, along with other thought leaders, to further explore questions, ideas and opportunities that emerged and help determine which ideas may have the greatest chance for success. 

Participation is easy. Just visit the Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets http://smartercities.ibm.spigit.com Web site and register.  Once you’re registered, you can choose a market and begin making trades. The markets are open till September 13th, 2009 11:59 EDT.   Please feel free to share this invitation with other individuals that might be interested in participating – all submissions will remain confidential and only aggregated trading results will be shared across the community.

Complete details are on the Smarter Cities Predictive Idea Markets Web site.  Participation requires less than 5 minutes and every participant will receive a full set of results and insights at the beginning of October. 

Take advantage of this unique opportunity to take part in this experiment, share your insights, and see the collective opinions of your peers on the future of Smarter Cities. 

Study On Social Media Use By Fortune 100 Companies

An interesting study released from an analysis by Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital of the Fortune 100's use of Key Social Media Channels, including Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages and Blogs. 

The results of the study shows that Twitter surpassed blogging here in 2009 as the social media platform of choice – at least among the Fortune 100.   The study looked at the top 100 companies in terms of revenue as compiled by Fortune Magazine's annual Fortune 500 to understand how active those compa nies were on three key social media: Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.  .

Some highlights from the study include

• 54% of the Fortune 100 were using Twitter to reach out directly to stakeholders, 32% were using a blogs, and 29% were actively using a Facebook Fan Page to engage.  
• 21% of companies are using only one of the three surveyed social media channels, and of those companies, 76% are using Twitter over Facebook and Blogs.
• 40% of companies are not using any social media channels, while 21% are using two channels, and 17% are using all three.
• 94% of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts distribute company news updates and announcements while fully 67% are at least partially serving a customer service function.
• Reasons companies use the three social media sites differs.
  • Twitter is most often used for news and announcements (94%), customer service (67%), promotions and deals (57%), and job postings (11%).
  • Facebook fan pages are more consumer focused, with promotions, product information, and philanthropy and community service announcements.
  • Blog content falls into categories of current projects, external initiatives, and community involvement.

For more information, see this post on Burson-Marteller’s site.  And there’s a pdf file available on Slideshare of the report findings:  “Social Media Use by Fortune 100 Companies”.  

TripleTree: Collaboration, Communities, & The Extended Enterprise

I’ve been interested this year in understanding how the disruptive social computing trend will impact business processes, workflows, and decision making processes.

Triple Tree, LCC recently released a report that caught my eye: Collaboration, Communities & the Extended Enterprise .  The report takes a look at the growth of collaboration tools and the emerging importance of these technologies on the future of enterprise application and infrastructure platforms.   For those of you selling the concept of embedding collaboration and communities into enterprise applications, I suggest you take some time to read the report.

For a quick view into the report, the major sections in the table of contents of the report are labeled

• Growth Despite Fragmentation
• Internal Collaboration
• External Collaboration
• Collaboration Platforms
• Users Prefer Less Fragmented Approaches
• The Powerful Differentiation of Communities
• Other Impacts on the Extended Enterprise
• Cloud Compuiting

The premise of the report is that social computing will have significant impact on business processes.  Tripletree says that as social features are applied to business computing solutions, it is increasingly important to understand the technical and organizational impact of collaboration platforms.  The report discusses how collaboration functions embedded into enterprise applications can improve user adoption and productivity while also enhancing business workflows.  Tripletree says that these embedded collaborative functions go beyond “just improving communications between knowledge workers and partners, and includes a growing appreciation for the importance of user-generated content, consumerism and transparency.”

In fact (and this is a very important point), TripleTree asserts that collaboration features will become the very core of every enterprise application suite and that business functionality will become a secondary part of the platform.  

The main takeaway of the report for application providers is that if you are not engineering  and embedding collaborative capabilities into solutions, you are telling the world you have decided to remain a legacy application vendor.

You can check out the report here  http://www.triple-tree.com/research/collaboration_q1_09.pdf

Tripletree also recently held a webcast on this topic. Slides and a mp3 replay are available.  Moderated by TripleTree, this webcast centered on a discussion and debate on the usefulness of collaboration and community-centric solutions, where user adoption is being influenced by consumerism, and how a Collaboration solution ROI can be measured through the lens of improved information management.  During the webcast, Tripletree introduced the topic and the report discussed above.  There were three panelists on the call, who each gave a short presentation on the topic of embedding collaboration capabilities into business processes.

• Dan Carmel, CEO – SpringCM
• Oren Michels, CEO – Mashery
• Alex Van Deusen, Collaboration Specialist - Cisco WebEx

For more, check out the webcast Audio (MP3) and Slide Presentation (PDF)

The Consumerization of IT as a Disruptive Force

Back in the late 70’s when hobbyists really starting building and playing with computers at home, they did not realize that they were starting a trend that is having a huge impact on IT today.  When the IBM PC was announced in 1981, the trend received a huge adoption kick.  The Consumerization of IT was born.

The consumerization of IT remains one of the most significant forces affecting enterprise IT at this time.  Although many enterprises have started to understand the challenges posed by their employees' expectations of access to and use of consumer technology and applications inside the workplace, they have yet to reconcile these with the issues of control, security, governance and change management that they introduce.

Today, more and more enterprise workers are opting to buy their own laptops rather than accept the ones corporate IT are handing out.  These employees also want to tie into corporate networks via non-traditional devices like the Blackberry, the I-phone, and the I-touch.

Falling prices and broadening distribution have made IT an accessible and affordable commodity for consumers.  An increasingly pervasive communications infrastructure is encouraging new acquisition and delivery models and increasing the importance of Web-provided content.  The combination of affordable communications; low-cost, easy-to-use devices; and content (information, entertainment and applications) destabilizes the balance among enterprises,
producers, consumers and government.  This force challenges the basic assumptions of technology scarcity and uniqueness long held by enterprise IT.  Affordable access to technology and content increases the power of individuals and how they interact with the enterprise as customers or employees. 

Add to this the explosion in growth of web2.0 enabled social media and online virtual communities, these changes will cause significant disruption in business today.  Corporate IT now has to consider how applications like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are impacting corporate business processes.

Consider the kids in school today…they are all digital natives.  They have been around computers their whole lives.  My 14 year old daughter has been playing computer games since she was 3 (Freddie Fish!).   And today, like all teenagers, she is embracing social media applications as a way to communicate and share content with friends.  When she eventually (hopefully!) makes it into the job market, she will expect to IT tools in the enterprise to reflect the types of tools (gaming, texting, social networking, 3D, video) she has grown up with.

Some things to think about….

• How will the consumerization of IT impact business processes in the future?
• How can IT managers and business leaders manage the impact of the consumerization of IT on their business and operating models?
• How will the consumerization of IT affect social relationships and interactions among individuals, enterprises and governments?
• What new opportunities will arise from the consumerization of IT?

For more reading on this topic, check out

• Wikipedia Consumerizaiton
• Ars technia Analysis: IT consumerization and the future of work
• Gartner Special Report Consumerization of IT

Deloitte’s Research on Social Networking and Communities

Deloitte recently published the results of a research study to understand better how enterprises are leveraging online communities.  They call this their "Tribalization of Business" study.  The study involved more than 100 companies with revenues of $1 million to more than $40 billion.

The study found that a number of enterprises are actively using online communities and social networking tools to engage with employees, customers and partners in brainstorming, idea generation and product development.   The findings in the study also identified key success factors and obstacles to effective community development. 

Key Findings

• Why Communities?  The study found that people join communities to help others.  They also join to seek information, recommendations and community feedback on projects of interest to them.  39% said “idea generation” is the main purpose of their online communities while 19 % cited “new product development” as the key goal.
• Openeness:  60% said their communities are open for public interaction and feedback.
• Success Factors:  53% said that permitting users to connect with like-minded people was the top feature contributing to success, and 43 % said that permitting people to help one another was the second-most-important feature contributing to community success
• Obstacles:  45% said that finding enough time to manage the community is one of the biggest obstacles to making communities work. 
• Effectiveness:  Poor management of online communities is a critical barrier to their effectiveness.  Facilitation (25%) and quality of the community manager (34%) are two features that greatly impact the community’s effectiveness.
• Responsibility:  The CMO is increasingly responsible for the development and implementation of communities.  The CMO often becomes the lead transformation agent, empowering the sales, customer service and product development functions with the community’s intelligence and participation.   42% percent indicate that the marketing organization is now responsible for driving online communities.

For More Information

• Download the Executive Summary (294 KB)
• Download the Detail Report (760 KB)
• Press Release: Deloitte Study: Enterprise Value of Online Communities Yet to be Realized
• Webcast: Tribalization of Business: Transforming Companies with Communities and Social Networks