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Rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Strategic Organization. Every new technology has its skeptics. In the 1980s, many observers doubted that the broad use of information technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to remake processes would pay off in productivity improvements—indeed, the economist Robert Solow famously remarked, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Today, that sentiment has gravitated to Web 2.0 technologies. Management is trying to understand if they are a passing fad or an enduring trend that will underwrite a new era of better corporate performance. Podcast The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday McKinsey Global Institute senior fellow Michael Chui discusses how leaders can prepare for the new business environment as well as the latest results from McKinsey’s survey of global executives on their use of Web 2.0. New McKinsey research shows that a payday could be arriving faster than expected. The findings Web 2.0 technologies are now more widely used. Do we really need to be social on social media?

There's no shortage of 'social media gurus' out there, always keen to hail the advantages of interaction, engagement and conversation as the vital pillars of any social media strategy. But, I wonder if these words have lost their meaning as they are bandied around so much by the great and the good of the marketing industry. Because, the simple fact is, social media channels can be used for 'push' marketing. Twitter can be used to broadcast messages out to an audience, blogs can act as glorified news feeds and Facebook can merely become a distribution channel for product or service updates. But, it doesn't mean they should.

Tech brands aren't using social media to be social If research we've published today stands up, this is exactly how many brands are using social media. It's impossible to tell what the impact of this is for the businesses assessed compared to the resource and effort they put in, but it does raise the question: do we really need to be social on social media? Connect:

A world of tweets. On Social Business, at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit. By Jon Kolko - March 11, 2010 It’s both amazing and hilarious to consider that being human, or treating people well, or interacting with one another, is now in-vogue in big business. We did a turn with quality (“we need to make things well!”)

In the 80s, optimization (“we need to track the supply chain and distribution chain!”) In the early 90s, the internet (“bricks and mortar is dead!”) In 2000, and now it’s All About Social. But when you unwrap “social”, you start to realize that it’s a container for some major, powerful, and fundamental aspects of human life. It’s not a business construct, as was six-sigma or ERP. I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit, and I’ve heard from some very eloquent speakers in some very impressive positions at the large brands in our lives. But the most fundamental talk, and one of the best talks I’ve heard in a few years of conferencing, was the kickoff from author Doug Rushkoff. The Muppets meet the Internet. Welcome to the Site-less Web. Posterous is a new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Delicious.

Posterous is one of a host of new services that automate the once-tedious manual process of cross-posting information to multiple websites and social networks. Other pure-play entrants in this category include Ping.fm, Dlvr.it and the WordPress plugin Supr, but the basic capability to cross-post information across multiple social media is rapidly becoming a part of nearly every Web application.

Google Buzz, which was announced just this week, has some of the same functionality. These are the first ripples in a wave of new technology that will make the Internet effectively site-less. By that I mean that the metaphor of the Web as we’ve known it for the last 15 years is breaking down. The Internet is increasingly not about sites but about content and people.

Only it’s becoming more difficult to figure out where the fish are. The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy. By Josh Bernoff What do most companies do wrong when they enter the social world? No, it's not that they're being fake, or don't "get it. " It's that they don't really know their objectives. Is your company doing its social strategy backwards? If you started by saying "we should do a blog" or "we should create a page on a social network" or "we should create a community" the answer is probably yes. In any other business endeavor we start by figuring out what we want to accomplish. Social technologies are not magic. To help clients with this fundamental idea, we invented a little acronym called POST. P is People. O is objectives. S is Strategy. T is Technology. This may sound simple to the sophisticated readers of this blog.

Or, feel free to ask us for help. it's what we do. Social Media: Buy Organic. We were in a pitch earlier this week with a name-brand company. High pressure. After the dog-and-pony part of the meeting, in the afterglow as we were saying our good-byes, we got some candid feedback from one of the prospective client contacts. She said: “This presentation was different than the others we’ve been hearing. I smiled. When evaluating a prospective partner’s Social Media expertise, or when doing your own planning, I advise keeping Forrester Research’s POST methodology in mind.

Put the people first: who are they, where do they hang out, what do they care about, what do they avoid? Once you know these fundamental attributes of your audiences, the obvious parts of the program (the where, when, why) readily present themselves and all that’s left is a burst of creativity to make the ideas for engagement (the how) really sticky, impactful and fun.