Tribalization of Business

I came across this presentation “2008 Tribalization of Business Study” which details the findings of a study conducted by Deloitte and Beeline Labs about forming social networking and communities within the enterprise. The presentation goes over everything from reasons for setting up communities within organizations to measuring progress and success to community effectiveness. Take a couple of moments to go through the slides. Do you think that social media in the enterprise is changing the nature of business practices?

2008 Tribalization Of Business Study

view presentation (tags: metrics measurement beelinelabs deloitte)

Google: Aiding in Enterprise Collaboration Once Again

Google recently launched Google Sites, which allowed companies to use this service on their own domains. Now, according to this post on The Official Google Blog, they’ve made it even easier for companies to build websites and share information throughout the enterprise.

Now on Google Sites, organizations can look forward to being able to collaborate on team projects, share information on company intranets, create community groups, forums, updates, and many more things. Companies no longer have to host the service on their domain, they can safely host their website at http://sites.google.com/[your-website]. The best part of all is that it is free!

It will be interesting to see how this will perform against other enterprise applications like Zoho People, which allow human resource departments to keep track of employees through an intranet.

It's not about the technology

In this video, Jay Cross, the founder of Internet Time Group, discusses the importance of enterprise 2.0 in corporations. He stresses that it’s important that the top management be aware of these tools, because these tools work more effectively with practice. Also, these tools aren’t about the technology, but the people and community who use the tools.

Could a New Social Software Suite Knock Out Facebook and LinkedIn?

According to this latest article on paidContent.org Jeff Dachis, former CEO of Razorfish, has teamed up with Austin Ventures to roll out a corporate social software service that will be tailored to the enterprise. AV mentions that it will focus on “creating an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite.” But how successful will this SAAS suite be with competition coming from all corners, and a lack of involvement in social software from the enterprise.

This post on A VC, describes how social software include certain characteristics like open API’s, customizable services, and the ability to upload different media. All of these characteristics are an enterprise nightmare. IT departments will have a field day trying to limit access to these sites, for security reasons.

The real benefit from social networking sites is the input gathered from the community, but how will a brand new start-up instantly gain millions of users? How will this new venture compete with LinkedIn and Xing since they already have a majority of the enterprise social networking market, and let’s not forget that Facebook is slowly closing in with enterprise tailored apps and restrictions. AV and Dachis will have to bring about new innovative concept within enterprise networking to really stray away people from Facebook and LinkedIn. Can they do it? We’ll have to wait and see.

Portals in a Enterprise 2.0 world

Today, I came across a post at Internet Marketing Updates that gave a description of the different types of portals that are in use across the web.

The horizontal portal is the one most of us are very familiar with. It’s a portal that gives us access to the rest of the web. Examples would be Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Most of the time they provide a community, and provide us access to information that would normally take thousands of pages to sort through. These portals make their money from advertising and transaction fees.

A vertical portal provides deep content to the user. It’s a place to connect with others and learn about specific topics in depth. Examples would be WebMD and Web Flyer. These portals make their money through advertising, referral fees, and subscriptions to their content.

An affinity portal is a place where the content is community base driven. It’s a lot like the vertical portal but made for a specific segment. It’s content and community driven. It’s profit comes from the same things as the vertical portal.

So what type of portal do you find your enterprise using the most often? Do you believe there is one that is more commonly used in the enterprise setting?