“Web 2.0 for Corporate America” says Mercury News

Categories: Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on October 9th, 2006

Someone sent me this interesting overview of Business embraces Web 2.0, Tools hitting Corporate American allow users to share and access materials easily, and found success at sites such as wikipedia from the San Jose Mercury.

“Social networking, for example, was until recently confined mostly to youth-targeted sites such as MySpace, where people create online profiles and form virtual links to their friends’ profiles. For years, Visible Path in Foster City and Spoke Software in San Mateo have offered similar services that allow workers to manage relationships with colleagues and clients, but only in the past year or so have large corporations begun to buy in.”

To me, this is confirmation
nearly 10 months ago I wrote a White paper: Business and IT must work together to manage new “Web 2.0″ tools (PDF) with Dennis McDonald about this.

At Hitachi Data Systems, we’re exploring and understanding the changes. We’ve rolled out social media programs, and even held a Lunch 2.0 a few weeks ago for this emerging market. It was a lot of fun and there’s more to be had as we progress.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 7:34 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thanks for that! Hope to see you at office2.0 this week!!

Posted by deb on October 9th, 2006 at 5:19 pm

We all know you can generate business from social websites, such as myspace, but can you open your business website and make it social?

What I mean by this is the that most professionals are scared to jump into the social community and expose themselves.

I’ve built a few websites for clents that don’t want anything to do with forums, blogs, or comments…I try to explain how this can benefit their business, but many clients are just too scared about negative remarks.

What do you recommend to businesses that are jumping onto the internet, but are scared about negative comments?

Posted by Matt on October 9th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

Why yes Matt, we certainly can do this.

It’s about enabling a conversation. Marketing as we know it is no longer uni-directional. The advanced marketers realize that marketing is about conversations (dialogue)

Proof point: I’ve lead this for Hitachi Data Systems!

Blogs: (anyone can leave comments)
http://www.hds.com/company/blogs.html

Forums: (anyone can leave a comment)
http://forums.hds.com

Wiki: (for a while this was wide open, due to vandals we’ve restricted membership to trusted community members)
storagebloggers.pbwiki.com/

RSS: (Users can subsribe or unsubscribe at will)
http://www.hds.com/company/syndication.html

Your Question:
What do you recommend to businesses that are jumping onto the internet, but are scared about negative comments?

My Answer:
If busineses want to hide from what folks are saying about them they can close their eyes, but in reality this will NOT make it go away (Dell is a good example of a company that ignored what folks were saying, also check out krypotonite) by not paying attention and responding, it can be a disaster.

Check out all my thoughts on “Community Marketing” by clicking on the categories section on right. Also check out “Social Media”.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on October 10th, 2006 at 1:54 am

About businesses that want nothing to do with social media - the options, as Jeremiah points out — are to close their eyes or do try to harness the new forms in ways that benefit individuals and their companies. In any case, the debate reminds of stories I used to write for Computerworld in the mid-90’s when CIOs debated whether to allow employees access to the web. It seems hilarious now.