Social Overload? Web 2.0 Expo, Forrester Report Underscores Choices for Social Media in Enterprise

Wired Magazine highlights the unabated growth of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week, with over 250 speakers on 9 separate tracks and more than 9,000 attendees expected for the event (I'll be at their fall event in NYC). Meanwhile a new Forrester Research report highlighted in InformationWeek predicts that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 products will reach some USD 4.6 billion on Web 2.0-related technologies by 2013, with much of the spend going to a few major players such as IBM and well-established social media installations from SixApart. It all sounds very reminiscent of the dot-com days the online world burns hot while enterprises try to get new technologies under control via their I.T. departments, diluting their ability to make the most of them in the short run and eventually tying them to platforms that aren't necessarily in their best long-term interest. This doesn't mean that your typical Fortune 500 company is missing out on anything big as people try out Twitter and hundreds of other products to communicate with their brethren, but as Tim O'Reilly noted in his own weblog ,

Web 2.0 is becoming real for mainstream business in a way that was unthinkable only a few years ago. As Claburn said [in InformationWeek], "Web 2.0 has won." Everyone understands that this is the new game, not just something for consumer startups. Everyone in the computer industry, everyone in mainstream business, needs to learn the new rules, exploit the new opportunities, and help to invent the future.

In other words, if the Web changed how businesses work internally and how they talk with their markets, then social media is doing the same at a pace that's likely to outstrip the pace of change in the original Web revolution. I think that the outpacing is likely, as social media was an inherent part of the Web to start with: email is a crude but oftentimes effective technology for social media, instant messaging systems have been made compatible with enterprise compliance requirements and weblogs and Wikis are being installed on already robust Web server infrastructure. The incremental technology investments needed to implement many new social media services is going to be relatively small, especially as "software as a service" plays such as Salesforce.com draw more and more enterprise content out of the I.T. department's clutches altogether.

More to the point, though, it's going to get increasingly hard for enterprises to succeed without getting their people and their content involved in "the commons," the broad swath of social media content services that enable them to be a part of a broader professional community that's in touch with the latest news and ideas in their marketplace. Social media can do a lot to improve communications and knowledge-building behind corporate firewalls and to improve outbound official communications via weblogs and corporate-branded online communities but it's going to be at least as important for major enterprises to learn how to enable their staffs to be ongoing members of social networks and services that stretch beyond the traditional bounds of corporate control. If, as the old adage goes, "It's not what you know but who you know," then the "who" of social media is creating a stronger online reality for the power that individuals can bring to an organization - a power that's not easily packaged by traditional corporate I.T. departments.

While Tim O'Reilly's enthusiasm for social media is probably not shared with many I.T. managers,
increasingly business information providers are locking into social media tools as a way to add productivity to enterprises of all sizes. I think that what we'll see over the next few years is increasing efforts to create not just technology tools but social media content services that integrate with both enterprise platforms and SaaS platforms. Expect this to accelerate the rate at which social media changes enterprises well before they go to consider major I.T. expenditures on social media. Expect this also to give rise to more services that add structure to social media and that filter it into meaningful patterns that can lead to good decision-making in enterprises.