Web 2.0 @ Work

Hi, my name is Matt Greeley. I'm the founder and CEO of brightidea.com and today we're going to talk about Web 2.0 at work.

A lot of companies are planning their web 2.0 strategies and planning how they are going to integrate these tools into their business blogs, wikis, forums, social corporate networks and it turns out it's not as easy as it looks. In fact there is a couple of pain points that we're hearing from customers.

Number one, what's the business case? If you've got someone blogging in the corner, "How do you justify that time?" management wants to know.

Number two, adoption. You're introducing a new tool, people need to get up to speed, how do you get them to adopt the new tools?

Finally number three, fragmentation. Someone might have started a wiki in the I.T. department, someone else a totally different wiki in the marketing department and it's just a mess. You can't search across wikis. They're on their own little box.

So these are the pain points that companies are dealing when it comes to web 2.0 at work.

We've found there are five key areas to make your web 2.0 initiative a success.

Number one, senior management. If you can tie this to the corporate charter or some key mission bullet points that's going to get you going.

Number two, communications. You might have 100,000 people in your company, you need to get your word out that these tools are available and what they should be used for.

Number three, culture. Some things are going to change when you bring these tools into the work place. You might look at customer feedback and ideas differently. You might share different information on a blog with your customers. So you're going to have to look at what values have to change and what values are core and always stay the same.

The next one is incentives. Now this is rewards, recognition, set up point systems. These are new technologies, you need to create incentives for people to jump in with both feet and embrace them.

Finally, infrastructure. The right tool makes any job easier so if you have the right tool you're well on the way to making this a success.

By aligning these five areas, we've found that customers have been very successful deploying web 2.0 tools at work. For those of you who are looking to deploy a web 2.0 platform at your company we've got some considerations.

Most companies come in silos. You want your web 2.0 platform to be able to operate across silos, but you also want it to be silo aware. If somebody is working with customer support and somebody else is working on developing patents you certainly don't want those data to merge.

You want your web 2.0 platform to be able to reach out to customers, obviously enable employees and also reach out to suppliers. Because it's that collaboration and that innovation that's driving this adoption of web 2.0 by companies.

The last thing is make sure you're tying your initiative to a critical business process. Maybe it's customer support, maybe it's product development, maybe it's the trade show marketing group. You don't want people blogging for blogging sake, you want them blogging about a product launch or doing a wiki around a new innovation or new invention that they are going to patent. This is the real value of web 2.0.

In summary, focus on a critical business process, this is key. Align your initiative with senior management's goals and objectives. Make a strong business case before you start talking about coolness of blogs and wikis and forums and social networks. This is the way to drive web 2.0 into your enterprise.