Five Social Software Predictions from Gartner
2009 saw an explosion of growth in the use of social media by business users. According to Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner “A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business. Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business.”
Gartner’s report, “Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond” makes five predictions about how social networking will transform business in the coming years:
By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
“The rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode. Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While email is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services.”
By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
The huge popularity of the consumer-microblogging service Twitter, has led many organizations to look for an “enterprise Twitter”, that provides microblogging functionality with more control and security features to support internal use between employees. Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on.
“However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter’s scale is one of the reasons for its popularity,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner. “When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single-purpose microblogging products.”
Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, email, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70% failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. 50% of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20% of IT-driven initiatives.
Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime anywhere, Gartner expects more end-users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use. The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use.
Just as the iPhone impacted user interface design on the desktop, the lessons in the mobile phone collaboration space will dramatically affect PC applications, many of which are derivatives of decades-old platforms based on the PBX or other older collaboration paradigm.
Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.
Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.
You can read more about the report here.
140 Twitter Conference LA Recap; From Tony Robbins to Dr. Drew to Chris Hardwick
photo credit: Randy Stewart
After previewing online the two day conference agenda and the speaker roster for the “140 Twitter Conference” in Los Angeles, run by the Parnassus Group, I was hesitant to sign up. Although I really enjoy using Twitter and believe both individuals and businesses of all types can get a lot of benefit from it, the agenda gave me pause to register—it was heavy with a seemingly “entertainment focus”. And my interests primarily center on what I could learn that would best benefit my clients. But I went ahead and registered.
Well, I was very pleasantly surprised. And I was most surprised by Tony Robbins. I really wasn’t looking forward to his day two keynote address. His talk was informative, insightful and yeah—it was pretty motivational. He was supposed to speak from 8:30 am till 10 am. Instead his talk was nearly two and a half hours and he had his audience of 400 business people and Twitter users clapping, jumping, play acting, giving each other massages, and quite mesmerized by his free form talk. He said he was giving the talk for free because he “wanted to give back.”
Robbins views Twitter as an “Intelligent browser that teaches what people say about your brand and is a brief way to connect, share and trigger.” That’s how he says he uses it. Robbins has more than 1.36 million people who follow him on Twitter now—plus one. According to Robbins, “Twitter is the crack of the tech world.”
Other surprises came from the celebrity panel and the musician panel which included a number of power Twitter users including television host Dr. Drew Pinsky, professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, actor Levar Burton, singer Tyrese Gibson, rapper Chamillionaire, musician Mark Nubar, Tears for Fear singer Curt Smith, and comedians Chris Hardwick, Tucker Max and Loni Love. The panelists debated how they used Twitter, what were the right ways to engage their followers, their feelings on letting others “tweet’ for them and whether they should financially benefit directly from the Twitter conversations.
They all agreed that the overriding principle that should be honored on Twitter is “authenticity.” They also agreed to have someone else tweet in your name was dishonest. Chamillionaire talked about how “Twitter can be an active conversation.” He likes to start arguments on his account and enjoys lively debating his followers over who is the best athlete of all time—Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.
photo credit: Randy Stewart
Curt Smith likes to use Twitter not primarily for pitching his music but for engaging others to talk about politics, his kids and everyday life. Curt is now working on a song with someone that he met on Twitter. What he seems to enjoy most about Twitter is its ability to let him be direct and not have his words translated by a record label or a reporter. Levar Burton mirrored Smith by explaining that for him, “Twitter has created an environment that is absent the gatekeepers ad it has leveled the playing field.”
For Mark Nubar, “Twitter’s elegance lies in its simplicity. I love its 140 characters.” Mark also spoke about his band’s evolution with social media, “MySpace was the gateway to Facebook and now Twitter. We now have a global family. My band would not be alive without social marketing.”
Tony Hawk believes that what he learns from Twitter about his own brand is “the best focus group.” For Mayor Newsome, Twitter marks “the beginning of the end of how things have been done with governing. Twitter is changing the world of government. We want to lead the world. It’s about government 3.0 not just 2.0. ”
What was impressive at the conference, was not the continual updates or “tweet” being noted by the 400 attendees and flashed up on screens, but the eagerness and willingness of the Twitter users –both celebrity and business users– who enthusiastically sang its praises. Instead of quickly escaping once their panels had finished, both celebrity and technology luminaries stayed and sat in the audience to learn more from each other.
The two day conference can be summed up pretty well by Tony Robbins, “Twitter is a community. We are a culture on the surface but we have the tools to go deep. Twitter allows you to understand someone’s blueprint in seconds. Look at what they write and what they share.”
Fighting Breast Cancer One Tweet at a Time
Last month Health.com took a look at whether Twitter and Facebook could help in the fight against breast cancer in an article by Sally Chew and Heather Mayer. Chew and Mayer reported in the beginning of their article, “Twitter and other social media sites are often perceived as the ultimate navel-gazing tools. Seemingly a narcissist’s dream, many think that Facebook status updates and the 140-character Twitter messages (known as “tweets”) are really just boring play-by-plays of daily life—I had granola for breakfast! I’m stuck in traffic!”
The reporters described how Laurie Brosius, 31, a business analyst in Dallas, raised $6000 through Twitter for a walk for breast cancer to honor her husband’s deceased mother. Brosius raised 50 percent of the money through strangers that found her original tweet through the power of re tweets, people sending out her original tweet requests to their followers.
photo credit: Steve Beger Photography (Beger.com Productions)
In their article “Can Twitter and Facebook Help Fight Breast Cancer?” Chew and Mayer write:
In a busy world, Twitter posts are succinct and to the point, and that’s one of the main reasons they’re so successful in charity promotion, says Adam Hirsch, the chief operations officer of Mashable.com, a social media blog. Navigating websites can be time-consuming, notes Hirsch. Twitter, however, states a user’s case in no more than 140 characters. “It’s a message you know people will read because, face it, it’s only 140 characters,” he says.
With Twitter, users can interact one-on-one, but they can also broadcast a message to many followers. Even if an individual doesn’t have a lot of followers (say, just family and friends), those people can re-tweet that message in outgoing concentric circles of social contacts—potentially reaching thousands.
In the article, Chew and Mayer also write about breast cancer survivor Sharon Adams who took on Facebook after the social media company took down photos Adams had posted “of her ropy red mastectomy scars” in the hope of shocking her friends in England into “checking their own breasts for cancer.”
What ensued was an avalanche of media attention and a 3,000 Facebook member protest. Facebook eventually relented and allowed her pictures to be posted. Adams saw the whole controversy over her photos as a benefit. More people became aware of her story and the need to do breast exams than would have if Facebook had not removed her pictures.
You can read the entire article here.
Have you used any social media sites to raise awareness for a cause that you believe in?
Check out these 10 Free Social Applications for Macs
Have a Mac? If so, check out Barb Dybwad’s article “10 Fabulous Free Social Apps for Mac” on Mashable. Barb writes, “In this post we’ll take a look at 10 gratis programs for connecting to your social world via OS X. From file sharing to instant messaging, from Twitter (
) to social television, there is very likely something on this list for you.”
photo credit: mark sebastian
Here’s an abbreviated breakdown of the top 10 applications from Barb’s article:
- Dropbox. “Looking for a dead easy way to share even large files with people quickly? Check out Dropbox (), a great utility app for the Mac (it actually runs on Windows and Linux (
) as well) that essentially gives you 2 free GB of unrestricted cloud file storage.” - Skitch. “We really can’t rave enough about Skitch () (we recently profiled it in our fun image generators list). Part screen capture tool, part easy doodling app, Skitch is also a dead simple way to quickly share screencaps, images and illustrations with others.”
- Tweetdeck. In an informal survey I conducted on LinkedIn back in March, Tweetdeck won hands down as the favorite Twitter client. Enough said.
- Gruml. “Gruml is a desktop application that synchronizes with Google Reader () for feed reading and brings many of the social features of gReader along with it.” Gotta check this one out.
- NewNewsWire. “If you don’t already use Google Reader and are looking for a good desktop RSS and Atom client for the Mac, check out NetNewsWire.”
- Flock. Flock is a social web browser that Mashable recently reviewed here.
- Adium. “If you use more than one instant messaging service regularly, you’re going to want a chat client that can support multiple protocols and accounts seamlessly. Not only does Adium () deliver that, but its default sound when your contacts log in or out or send you a message is a quacking duck.”
- Boxee. This one sounds great, “Boxee is basically a socially-enabled media center for your Mac, allowing you to browse both your personal media collection as well as your favorite online video services in one convenient and easy to use interface. It’s designed to give you a great experience for internet content on your television screen, and works with the Apple Remote control that ships with a number of Mac models (and is available for purchase separately).”
- Hulu desktop. “If you’re a television and/or movie buff with a penchant for streaming content, the desktop app offers a nice fullscreen viewing experience as well as support for operation via the standard Apple Remote.”
- Skype. “Skype () is one of the leading voice over IP (VoIP) services on the web, and you can use it to make free voice calls between any two computers running the software. For an astonishingly small amount of money you can do a lot of other cool things with Skype too, like send text messages from your computer, get low-cost international calling to landlines around the world, forward calls to your cellphone, get a “Skype In” number your friends can use to make a local call to you from regular phones, get voicemail services and more.”
What other free social applications for Mac do you like? What’s missing from this list?
Should Your CEO Have a Blog?
One of the central questions to ask when developing a social media strategy is whether the CEO of your company should have a blog. In Klaus Kneale’s article “CEOs Say: how to Be An Executive Blogger” on Forbes.com, Kneale takes a look at the art of CEO blogging and what it takes to get blogging right. The sub heading of Kneale’s article, “The Blogosphere can be a Minefield for Unprepared CEOs”, strikes at the heart of whether your CEO should be blogging.
photo credit: whiteafrican
Kneale writes about Donato Montaro JR., chief executive officer of TradeKing, an online discount brokerage. Monato was an early adopter of blogging and has taken some steps to make sure he is getting his corporate blogging right. One of the steps he has taken was hiring a director of online content whose job is to ensure that “everything on the TradeKing Web site is clean, accurate and consistent with the company’s values. Including her boss’s online persona.”
Kneale reports:
But you’ve got to do it right or you shouldn’t be doing it at all. How do you do it right? It’s an open secret of corporate communications that many e-mails from CEOs aren’t actually written by CEOs. As social media take off in the corporate world, that’s not true only of e-mails. Blogs, too. Montanaro is ahead of the game in this. He has Jude Stewart draft blog posts for him (not all of them), based on meetings they have. Montanaro edits the drafts to make sure they sound like him and to add details Stewart didn’t have.
He’s careful about what he posts, too. His blog contains bits about spearfishing in the Bahamas, but it also is kept in line with the company’s marketing and customer service strategy and any legal regulations. CEOs always have to keep such things in mind when blogging.
If your CEO decides he is interested in starting a blog, there are other items he also needs to consider. Legal for one. The company needs to decide what role legal counsel will play. Will the CEO run all his posts through legal before publishing? Will the CEO coordinate with marketing and public relations about the message? How many hands will actually be involved? How will the company coordinate the publishing of each blog with its overall social media strategy? Will your CEO have an editorial calendar in place that can keep him on track?
Finally, Kneale writes that once everyone is on the same page –what becomes most crucial to the success of your CEOs blog are the headlines. “The best way to get your blog posts spreading to Facebook, Twitter, Digg and e-mail, and ultimately getting read, is by having good headlines.”
Is your CEO blogging?