It’s not just your kids, employees and friends flocking to user generated media, social networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia. Here is yet another indication that businesses are using these so-called Web 2.0 social networking (social media) capabilities to communicate with both employees and customers and to market to prospects and customers. This time a McKinsey study confirms that businesses are keeping up with the Web 2.0 trend.
McKinsey’s survey “How businesses are using Web 2.0” ($$) released March 2007, has some interesting findings.
- Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and they plan to increase investments.
- The ubiquitous blog is not the 2.0 technology of choice; the majority of the 2,847 executives surveyed are partial to technologies that enable automation & networking.
- Rethinking Web 2.0 investments: 42 percent said they invested at the right time, but should have invested more in their companies’ internal capabilities.
- 24 percent felt they should have invested sooner in technology that in the meantime had a significant impact on their industry.
- More than 80 percent are considering investing in Web services (see definitions below)
Source: 2007 McKinsey survey on Internet technologies
Here is a summarized version of McKinsey’s definitions of nine (9) technologies that are in Web 2.0:
1.) Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below.)
2.) Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. This includes collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.
3.) Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. (Example: a program pulling apartment listings from one site and displaying them on a Google map to show where they are located.)
4.) Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. P2P saves the bottleneck result that occurs often when many people try to access the same file at once.
5.) Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed via an aggregator such as iTunes. (iTunes offers both files for purchase and free of charge. Most business Podcasts are free of charge.)
6.) RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.
7.) Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge or preferences. Examples include Facebook and LinkedIn (for business people). Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.
8.) Web Services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with each other automatically to update information or conduct transactions. Example: a retailer and supplier might use Web services to automatically update each others’ inventory systems over the Internet.
9.) Wikis such as Wikipedia are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion. (My note: companies are using wikis internally to manage projects such as product development when the team is geographically dispersed. Also companies are inviting selected customers to participate in selection, fine-tuning of feature/functionality for new product or software service releases using a Web-based wiki.)
Source: 2007 McKinsey survey on Internet technologies
This McKinsey survey confirms the University of Massachusetts/Inc.500 study about the rapid adoption of social media, social networking (see my earlier post here) by businesses.
So, the Web 2.0, social networking, social media trend in business really is more than a bandwagon. What are your company’s plans to adopt social networking or other Web 2.0 capabilities?
Leave a Reply