Posts Tagged 'social networking'

Biz Stone is here

By the time my loyal RSS readers will see this, I’ll be on my way to meeting Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, visiting Israel for a quick 24 hours, keynoting The NETWorking event, the Alumni event of The College of Management (where I did my BA). Although Israel is A Start-Up Nation, it’s not often we get the chance to meet in person (along with 1,200 people) a founder of a service that changed the way we communicate with each other.

Since its creation in 2006, twitter has become a force in the digital world, influencing every industry – from IT, to entertainment and film, sports and news. With Oprah, Ashton and CNN twitter hit mainstream pretty fast, growing at an astonishing rate of 1,400% a year (!). However, 2010 will be a pivotal year in twitter’s life, as the micro-blogging service is trying to monetize on the vast amounts of data it holds, trying to prove that unlike facebook or YouTube – twitter can make money (and much more than $4m).

Biz is holding a closed breakfast for CEOs, graduates of The College of management, followed by a press conference, that should start at 10:45am IST (Israel, GMT+2). The main event will be at the evening, at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv Harbor, as Biz will be the keynote speaker at the NETWorking event. TheMarker Editor-in-Chief will do a one-on-one interview with Biz afterwards, and a stand-up show with Adir Miller will wrap-up Biz’s 24 hours in Israel.

#bizil is the hashtag for keeping track of Biz’s day in Israel.

IBM’s ‘Facebook’

Enterprise social software is gaining momentum in Israel towards the end of 2008, a trend that I believe will become stronger in 1H 2009. In a great timing, just before our KM and Collaboration User Forum, where we’ll demo IBM’s social software solution, TheMarker IT published a great article discussing enterprise 2.0 examples, from Deloitte, IBM and Best Buy.

The implementations vary from one company to the next, but the goals are similar: higher employee retention, knowledge sharing, win young talent, support global operations, shorten development cycles and others.

IBM’s Beehive, is a natural evolution of the company world renowned BluePages solution (employee directory), an inhirint part of IBM Intranet (w3):

“Very early on, we recognized the importance of connecting people within IBM and moving beyond a static view of the individual,” says Jeff Schick, vice president of social software. The heavily used directory includes 450,000 employees and gets 6 million lookups per day.

Although Beehive is still experimental, there are already some 38,000 employees (in just 9 months!) actively using Beehive, with actual benefits:

For Michael Ackerbauer, a manager in the CIO’s office at IBM, the results are already in. He learned about Beehive a year ago, and “I quickly got hooked,” he says, especially since he manages a team of developers who work remotely. “It’s valuable for the team to get to know me on a personal level, and I like to get to know them.”

Jeff Schick, VP, Social Software, IBM SWG, provides an advice for companies looking at social software solutions:

“Knowledge workers today have no time to add new activities to their day; they’re looking for how to work smarter,” Schick says. “Poor user adoption is rarely because users didn’t know how but rather didn’t see why.”

If you RSVPed to our user forum event Sep. 8, you’ll have the opportunity to epxerience Beehive first hand, along with Lotus Connections – IBM’s social software for the enterprise solution, which is based on our internal experience. Seating is limited, so RSVP now.

Update:
TheMarker IT artilce is a translated (with permission of course) version from The Industry Standard, ‘Social Networking Behind the Firewall‘.

Links:
TheMarker IT: IBM’s ‘Facebook’ (Hebrew)
Event: KM and Collaboration User Forum, Sep 8th, IBM Israel
The Industry Standard: Social Networking Behind the Firewall
IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business
IntranetBlog: http://intranetblog.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2008/7/7/3781562.html
IntranetBlog: Beehive builds buzz at IBM

40% Y/Y growth for Enterprise 2.0 market

According to a Wainhouse Research study, recently released, the Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) market will reach $2B by 2013, with a projected 40% growth Y/Y.
The study, The Enterprise Social Networking Landscape, Volume 1: Market Dynamics, Sizing and Forecast, states that the ESN market is still in its infancy stages, reaching ‘only’ $200m.

Wainhouse Research conclusion (emphasis by me):

Social Networking in enterprise is inevitable. This conclusion is based on the benefits enterprise could achieve from using social networking technology and tracking historical adoption patterns of similar technologies.

This study is a complement report to IBM’s Strategy for Taking Social Networking to the Enterprise: An Inside Look at Lotus Connections report, released earlier this year.

In Israel, the market is still trying to understand what enterprise 2.0 is all about, and how they can harness those solutions to generate revenue. Probably the local ESN growth rate will not be 40% in 2009, but I’m positive Israel will discover enterprise 2.0 in the first half of 2009. We have excellent partners already working with a limited number of customers on adopting such solutions, building the business cases and best practices.
Wanna be an early adopter of enterprise 2.0? Now is the time to do so.

Links:
MarketWatch – Enterprise Social Networking Market Expected to Reach $2B by 2013
Wainhouse Research – Enterprise Social Networking reports
Adopt enterprise 2.0 – I want a facebook thing. I think.

[photo from Flickr.com]

The IBM Social Software story

Israel and Sagi from Blink IT held a workshop earlier this week at TheMarker Com.Vention, focused on Web 2.0 for the business, or Enterprise 2.0.

Blink IT are a Web 2.0 consulting company and IBM BP, working with customers on strategy, web 2.0 adoption, enterprise 2.0 adoption and design. They started off their workshop with some examples of web 2.0 technologies (facebook, twitter, wiki, etc), and then moved on to Enterprise 2.0 best practices – and IBM is leading the pack with several slides.

You can see a social software dashboard on slide 19 (look closely at the picture…), social networking quote from John Rooney on slide 33 and another quote by my close friend Arjan Radder on slide 34. If you want to read more on IBM’s story of Social Software adoption, head over to IBM ‘getting into’ social software case study.

The complete Blink IT presentation (Hebrew/English) is available at slideshare.net.

Breakfast with Jeff Pulver @ Tel Aviv

Went to my first Jeff Pulver’s Breakfast clubs, at Tel Aviv harbor. I met Jeff last month, lecturing at KM Summit – he was at the hotel, doing back-to-back meetings (I think it was something like 30..). The concept of these breakfasts is very cool, and Jeff really got this down to a form of art. Upon arrival you get a little welcome package, with stickers to write your name and tagline, and another blank sticker that serves as your personal ‘tag cloud’ – so people you meet can tag you.
Jeff explains it better in this video.

The most interesting thing for me was meeting couple of 12 year old kids, who came with one’s mom, to see and learn what social networking is all about. The kids are familiar with blogs (although they don’t write any), know what facebook is (but use Ning instead) – but social gatherings are not IN yet. If you think about it, that sounds strange, since the first groups are formed in pre-school and high-school, so the transition to social networks should be quite natural. That’s not the case here. The kids were quite the attraction – Jeff also spoke with them, and interviewed them, so did Kfir Pravda.

Generation Y seems so real all of a sudden…

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.