What Will be the Biggest Trend or Development in Enterprise 2.0 for 2010?

When I was asked by Jennifer Leggio @ ZDNet to contribute to her blog entry entitled "2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?" , I responded:

"In 2009, a tremendous amount of noise in the marketplace surrounding social media has reached a fever pitch and this threatens to drown out its potential effect to be transformative in the enterprise. Those projects and vendors that customers were willing to experiment with in 2009 will need to tie their efforts to concrete performance improvements in order to remain viable as social media’s sheen of being the new kid on the block wears off."

I realize that Jennifer's request was about social media, and social media does not equal Enterprise 2.0, but I think it's fair to equate the usage of social media technologies within the Enterprise as a loose approximation of the term, and that is what spurred my response.

My perspective is one of an entrepreneur, marketing guy and practioner. I will be applying E2.0 solutions more aggressively in 2010 than I have in the past. I suspect that there are many like me that either "woke up" or had the 2X4 smack in the head and realized the time is now. Case in point, the Pepsi decision to redeploy the Super Bowl budget to support online activities. We're going to see a lot more of this.

For me, 2009 was the realization that social media is not going away. When I think back to this time last year, Twitter did not seem like a critical technology to be dealt with. Now I see it, or other tools like it, as an inevitability. While there are many definitions of enterprise 2.0, I see it as the application of the social media mind set and culture directed at enterprise issues.

Should be quite interesting.

I believe in 2010, people will see that E2.0 has less to do with product spaces, product features, but more about people, teams, communication, working styles and applied information management.

E2.0 is the new paradigm of the new workplace, work culture, of organization - (re-organization really)as forward thinking organizations will begin to discover and act on its significance.

While that revelation dawns over the next year or more, one of the most significant trends in 2010 will be the leverage E2.0 will provide to firms to mature from those simply managing data and information to go further and unlock and orchestrate an underlying organizational working knowledge and translate it into benefits like improved operational efficiency and agility, customer delight, improved sales efficienty, workforce effectiveness and so on.

Integration of Enterprise 2.0 tools with enterprise applications and systems. Vendors will bake E2.0 into their offerings. There will also be continued growth in recognition by businesses that E2.0 is a plausible strategy for internal collaboration and information sharing, as well external interaction with customers.

Big question that will haunt E2.0 in 2010: Where is the ROI, and how do you even measure ROI?

Just wrote a post on this, Three Enterprise 2.0 Themes You Should Be Watching in 2010. The three:

1. Impact of SharePoint 2010

Given Microsoft's market position, and that initial views of SP 2010 indicate a much better social software experience, it's going to have an impact on the market.

2. Enterprise 2.0 Becomes "Like Air"

Charlene Li talks about social networking being "like air". I think the same is happening with social software tools and concepts inside the enterprise. Much more integration with traditional, non-social apps, as Joe McKendrick says above.

3. E2.0 Market Stratifies

The market stratifies into general collab suites and activity-specific solutions.

The general collaboration suite vendors continue on their eventual destiny of replacing portals and intranets. Meanwhile, activity-specific social applications continue to appear and gain traction. These applications go deeper in functionality than general collaboration suites to address specific activities inside companies.

In the last two years (with the culmination of the 2009 holiday shopping season), enterprises have realized that in the web-democracy, one web-citizen does not necessarily equate to one voice. Some are much louder and disproportionately benefit from the amplification of social networks.

From that realization, we believe that identifying influencer networks and gaining a much more granular understanding of opinions and sentiment from customers, prospects, patients, citizens, constituents and students will be the biggest trend in 2010. In addition, collecting and analyzing other types of data, such as real-time geo-localization and mobile information, will be imperative to complete the picture of customer understanding - and help to further enhance and expand dialogue with customers.

In 2010, knowing is important, but acting on that knowledge will be what matters. Enterprises will have an increased awareness of analytics technologies that will further differentiate organizations that apply predictive analytics in day-to-day decisions within business processes and those who do not. In other words, those riding the wave to economic recovery, and those crushed by the curl of that wave...

Experts have talked about this before. How many times have you read about the importance of ‘adding value’ for your audience? How many times have you read about ‘building trust’ with your readers/prospects?

Many, many times. You know it well. Every marketing guru has spoken about this topic. I’m sick of hearing it. But it STILL bears repeating.

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