Web 2.0: A Partial Tour (With Unsolicited Advice)

About a year ago I was told to develop a keen, spontaneous interest in the enterprise implications of Web 2.0, a contentious beast that continues to draw a lot of attention. This I duly did, and as a result I have lots of wisdom to impart. I'm going to focus here on the social (i.e., no Rich Internet Apps or mashups) manifestations of Web 2.0. Space is limited: Wikis, blogs and social networks are all we'll cover. Hold tight—this'll be terse.

Wikis are shared editing environments. The most famous is the Wikipedia, which weighs in at more than 2 million articles (compare the Britannica at 65,000). According to Don Tapscott, 2,500 people contributed to a Wikipedia article on the London bombings of July, 2005. This "brains per deliverable" ratio is outrageously compelling to business. Problem with enterprise wikis: Participation. Approach: Make it people's day job (don't ask them to contribute in their "spare time") and (to get their feet wet) have them create a wiki deliverable on a deadline rather than a "living document" with no due date. (The "spare time" approach can work in a sufficiently large enterprise--if you have thousands of people aimed at a wiki, some of them will probably contribute something.)

Blogs, you know. The challenge: It's ferociously hard to find compelling things to say, day after day. I've watched a lot of executive bloggers discover this awkward fact. Solution: Share ownership of the blog with a few people as charming, nuanced and interesting as you are. Also: Give an entire group ownership of a blog--let them entertain each other. And get people to use RSS--this notification mechanism (rarely-used outside the tech world, in my experience) will free them from having to poll blogs for new content.

Social networks: Young—they're generally young—people's social networks are rolodexes--lists of potentially useful contacts. They're bigger than older people's rolodexes, and they're better maintained, too. People with large rolodexes bring in lots of customers—and they job hop a lot. Temptation for large enterprises: Create your own, internal social network (there's plenty of software out there). Problem: It'll exclude younger employees' rolodexes and hence hold little attraction for them. Solution: Encourage use of an external social network (Facebook/LinkedIn). (I assure you that many of your employees are already doing this.)

Left out for reasons of space: Folksonomies, crowd-sourcing, idea markets, podcasts, microblogs and probably some other stuff—it's easy to argue about what belongs; I said Web 2.0 was contentious. More in a future post.

A weblog is an online, semi-personal journal offering the opinion and commentary of the author on conversations and stories that appear elsewhere on the Web, along with links to relevant websites and articles. The following content is the personal opinion of Ed Gottsman, a senior researcher with Accenture Technology Labs. Ed’s blogs can also be found at ZDNet.com. The opinions of the writer do not necessarily reflect the position of Accenture on this subject.