Selling the business benefits of Web 2.0

February 21, 2008 | Internet Marketing

According to the Forrester paper Social Computing Dresses Up For Business published in September last year, enterprise Web 2.0 can improve five important activities that every business does on a regular basis.

- Content creation and publishing. Web 2.0 technologies allow faster, richer, and more collaborative content creation, as well as simple tools and processes for publishing content. Blogs and wikis improve how people collaborate, because content creation, editing, approval, publishing, and management can all take place within the same application.

- Team co-ordination. Using the multi-editor capabilities in wikis, people can add basic structure and use the tool as a simple team workspace. This is more structured than sending file attachments through e-mail and is more accessible than traditional team spaces like Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus QuickPlace.

- Proactive information delivery. RSS feeds allow people to pull in the information they deem relevant to their job, whether from enterprise applications or external sources.

- Information location. As with Del.icio.us on the public internet, tagging provides the ability to mark the location of information as with a bookmark. In business, tagging allows a piece of content to be marked multiple times providing multiple paths to find the information later. Over time, content can be defined by the tags assigned to it, and tag clouds can be generated that provide a visual indication of the subject matter that people can use to quickly and easily establish context and relevancy.

- Communities of interest. Building communities of interest and practice to improve learning and innovation across departmental, geographic, and hierarchical boundaries is one of the key benefits Web 2.0 brings to a large organisation. Public-facing technologies like Facebook have proved effective at building communities of interest and similar functionality help business.

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