As enterprises are racing to adopt social media, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there are some areas where Web 2.0 technologies are having a more dramatic impact than others.  Over the recent weeks, I have been actively engaging with friends, customers, partners and industry experts to understand and discuss where businesses appear to be seeing the greatest traction with regards to their social media initiatives – and I thought I’d share my findings.

1.    Collaboration inside the organization > This is the use case that has the largest footprint – and is currently the most prevalent use of social media in the enterprise.  The widespread deployment of this solution is likely because intranets and knowledge management systems were key IT initiatives over the past 10 years as companies started to drive internal organizational efficiencies, and as a result, expanding these wins further by employing social media technologies was certainly the least expensive and lowest risk approach for organizations starting to make forays into enterprise social media realm.  While it is the low-hanging fruit, and certainly offers indisputable advantages to the enterprise, this is also the use case that is most difficult to measure in terms of value, ROI, or tracking results.

2.     Brand management, development and tracking > A quick aside – “Brand” is a highly misunderstood term even by marketers.  It is not a company’s logo, signage, taglines etc.  Nor is it what the enterprise wants to project about itself.  The brand of an enterprise is what people (customers, employees, media, etc.) believe about the company – and the values, image and attributes that they, as a collective, confer upon the enterprise.  While I can’t get into a more detailed discussion of “brand”, I felt a clarification on brand was critical to this discussion on social media.  Tracking, managing and developing one’s brand is perhaps the most obvious and valuable use cases for social media for the enterprise.  “Listening campaigns” that follow the “chatter” about the company in social networking forums such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, etc. are very important in understanding what the real brand perception is.  This in turn enables the enterprise to address issues, and manage, control and steer its brand.  For this reason alone, this area is going to be one of the most popular and critical areas where companies will invest in social media initiatives.

3.     Demand Generation 2.0 > Given the economic headwinds, and the overall recessionary climate, deploying a successful demand generation campaign via social media has enormous benefits.  Besides the obvious potential for driving incremental revenue, a demand gen campaign will result in increased net market-share (at the expense of competitors), an automatic positive impact on the corporate brand, and greater traction with core constituencies such as customers, key employees, partners and the media.  Also, the natural outcome of a successful demand gen campaign would be an increased propensity to fund and extend the enterprise social media initiative to other solution areas that may be less easy to measure.  Companies such as Zappos.com, Dell, and Amazon, to name just a few, are shining examples of how to social media-based demand gen can be a phenomenally profitable initiative.  This particular solution area is the new frontier in enterprise social media – but I expect this area will get a lot of interest and focus as businesses grapple with economic challenges, and seek more innovative ways to counter that downturn.

4.     Projecting thought leadership and domain expertise>  Closely related to the earlier discussion on brand development, the use of We 2.0 tools such as blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter, Yammer etc.) and rich-media and wikis (audio and video podcasting, interactive web sessions, etc), moderated community forums etc. enables the enterprise to educate its audiences in the areas of its expertise.  This ultimately serves to establish the organization as a domain- and subject-matter expert, and thought-leader in the market, resulting in downstream benefits such as driving demand.

5.     Improved Service Level >  A more tactical use of Web 2.0 technologies is their use in offering a more timely, richer and more complete service level to customers, partners, suppliers, vendors, employees, etc.  Examples of such initiatives include sophisticated sales agents, automated technical support, employee self-service etc.

While the use cases above are the most widespread and popular deployments of social media in the enterprise context, there are numerous variations and specialized instances of how they are used by business.  I always find it of great value to start with the basic understanding that social media is ultimately nothing more than a highly sophisticated and effective manner for people to exchange ideas, information and content – and given that foundation, one can conceive of addressing and improving almost any challenge that involves interaction among people.

There is a lot of talk about Enterprise 2.0 – a term originally coined by Andrew McAfee in 2007 was then somewhat ahead of its time.  That time is now – and enterprises are rapidly embracing this paradigm.  The central idea behind Enterprise 2.0 was the adoption of the social web, and all its attendant capabilities based on the Web 2.0 revolution.

For one to truly understand and harness the potential of Enterprise 2.0, it is key to understand the underlying paradigm of Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 is simply the natural next step in the evolution of the web.  But I would like to think of this evolution as almost a big leap forward (almost a mutation!).  Whereas Web 1.0 was essentially a universally-accessible static-content publishing platform, and the next step forward (think of it as a Web 1.1 to 1.3) was adding core transactional capabilities (such as shopping carts, payments processing, etc., – primarily driven by the growth of e-commerce), Web 2.0 is a major leap forward.  Web 2.0 enables individuals to become contributors – thereby allowing for the web to tap into the expertise, knowledge, tastes, opinions, and talents of a large community – while preserving individual identity and role.  Web 2.0 is about enabling the “aggregate-individual”.

How does the Aggregate-Individual impact an enterprise?  Here is a very simple way to look at this – from a business enterprise’s standpoint, every customer, partner, analyst, executive and employee is an individual – and beyond their narrow interactions with that enterprise, they are interacting and contributing to the pool of knowledge (POK) on a continual basis.  This means that each individual that touches the enterprise in any capacity impacts the POK associated with that enterprise.  This is the social marketplace.

Above all else, this social marketplace has the greatest impact on one of the most critical assets of an enterprise – its brand.  For many, the concept of brand has a narrow definition – associated with the visual aspects of the company’s identity, and the message that the company is pushing out to the market.  In reality, your brand works exactly the opposite – the company’s brand is no more than what the world outside (the market, customers, employees, partners etc.) confers upon you (the enterprise).  It’s all about what others think of your company that forms your brand – regardless of what you’d like that perception to be.

The social marketplace and workplace impact the brand of an enterprise immensely.  Participating and controlling (to the extent possible) the dialog on the company’s brand is clearly critical.  Additionally, “listening” to the “chatter” on the company helps address widely-shared concerns and issues with the company’s products and services.  Such a listening campaign can also enable the enterprise strategyby finding areas of opportunity and unmet need.

Implementing effective social marketplace strategies offers many other areas of value.  These include enabling and educating the channel and partner ecosystem, reaching out to new and hard-to-target markets, and enabling the virtual enterprise – the ability of the enterprise to extend its reach and influence well beyond its areas of physical presence.

An equally important facet of the social web revolution is the potential for enterprise efficiencies facing inwards – focused on employees – and commonly referred to as the Social Workplace.  In this context, one of the most path-breaking and previously unrealized benefits of the social media paradigm relates to an harvesting of enterprise knowledge latent within the organization.  Employees have areas of expertise that is largely untapped – studies have determined that most businesses utilize no more than about 10% of the total knowledge available to them internally  – and the ability to tap into this well of internal knowledge, expertise and skills, uncorks a tremendous asset for the company.  Indeed, the sheer monetary value of this asset can alone be extraordinary.   Variations of this concept include areas such as Corporate memory, and internal brand development.

Finally, with the increased focus on corporate message, governance and transparencies, the Social Workplace enables more efficient compliance.  These compliance capabilities fall into two broad categories – “soft compliance” i.e., internal compliance to conform with corporate message, policies and guidelines, and “hard compliance” – compliance with regulatory rules and requirements.

Ultimately, the entire social web paradigm is all about tapping into the participation of the individual – and thereby enabling the aggregate message.  The ideas discussed above are where the most compelling values are being seen for the enterprise – clearly, as these competencies become more mainstream and widespread, we’ll find increased variations and adaptations to these concepts.

The Early Majority phase is a critical one – by the time we are in this phase, the trend is already established, taken root, and in the process of growing to an irreversible, critical mass. From a business standpoint, this is also the point where there is the greatest risk of competition getting ahead – conversely, it also represents a valuable opportunity to gain competitive strength by being a innovator.

The social media/marketplace trend started in earnest in 2005 – and through 2006, we were in the “innovator” phase. This was the time MySpace, Facebook, etc were taking hold – and were largely viewed as “interesting, but I don’t get it!”. 2007 and the early part of ‘08 was the “early adopter” phase, and many savvy enterprises that were able to see the power and lasting potential of this social computing revolution got on board during this time. This was a particularly important phase of evolution – it defined and shaped the movement of these technologies from an enterprise standpoint, and also moved them from being consumer-centric and casual, to serious and business-value linked.

Since sometime mid-2008, we are definitely in the Early Majority phase – and the downturn in the economy, with the resulting pressure on costs and increasing productivity and efficiency, will almost certainly result in an acceleration of this phase. And businesses need to pay very close attention – this phase could easily end-up defining who wins and who loses.

… as they say, the game is just starting!

… then again, you notice that some of your favorite websites are starting to make some pretty fundamental changes – kinda hard to figure out what these changes are all about, and why, but heck, they’re cool! You can tell that these sites (nytimes.com, flickr, linkedin, to name just a few) are giving you more control, and letting you express your opinions, feedback etc, more effectively.

Well – in a nutshell, that’s what Web 2.0 is all about – converting the previously read-only web to a read-write-read-argue-read-comment-read-connect world. And trust me folks – this is a revolution! Suddenly, everyone is an author, a publisher, a photographer etc. – in other words, suddenly YOU are an important participant on the web. The expertise lies not with some paid-expert, but within the community. You can be the expert in what you know best, and others find that valuable and credible. That’s social networking – and it’s tremendously valuable.

Take some examples – Facebook for starters – if you’re not already on there, try it, and be forewarned – it’s addicitive. So is LinkedIn – for the professional part of your life (the distinction between personal and professional parts of your life will blur quickly unless you are very deliberate and careful).

There are a ton of tools and buzzwords (yes, more jargon) surrounding W20. But that can wait – the key is that you get how powerful and revolutionary the concept is – and how exciting this can be in terms of a force of change and influence in your daily experience and goals.

Stay tuned … more later …