Five Must-Have Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

Sure, it’s a buzzword, but “Enterprise 2.0” does identify an inevitable trend: the integration of social-media culture and technology into the corporate workplace. The goal, of course, is not simply to encourage idle chatter but to leverage the connections that social networking encourages.

Because most social technology has emerged first in the consumer space, employees may come to work already understanding the culture. Yet enterprise tools still need to integrate these practices in ways that benefit the organization. Let’s look at some of the most important of these technologies.

Unified Identity

In the social Web, people define themselves however they want. They may use their real names, they may use nicknames, or they may use many different aliases that vary from one online community to another. But in the workplace, individuals need to be accountable -- not just for oversight purposes, but also so that they can effectively collaborate across multiple mediums, from wikis to blogs to instant messaging.

Implementing a technology like OpenID, or choosing Enterprise 2.0 tools which leverage this technology, can provide single sign-on convenience for workers while maintaining a consistent identity across the range of social media venues. To be fair, this technology is still evolving and therefore not yet a turnkey solution. Still, organizations should take whatever steps they can toward a unified identity system.

Social Search

Today, traditional enterprise search tools only access a couple of information “silos” such as e-mail and Web pages. But with Enterprise 2.0 principles encouraging a much wider range of communication venues, useful and important data is accumulating that lives outside the reach of those legacy search tools. Emerging products like Coveo aim to expand search through a range of collaborative tools, so that all the collaboration your enterprise is encouraging isn’t simply lost to the ether.

Enterprise Workflow

Precisely because Enterprise 2.0 embraces many venues, the challenge arises that both hard and soft information need to be disseminated and tracked. Corporate blog posts might be promoted through corporate publishing tools like RSS feeds, or consumer media tools like Twitter, or both. Response and click-throughs need to be tracked, and feedback potentially driven to a Web-based community.

Pushing “idea objects” through this life cycle is the job of enterprise workflow components in tools like SharePoint and Spigot. Without a strong workflow solution in place, enterprise collaboration becomes more like random shouting than a coherent conversation.

Social CRM

Although many Enterprise 2.0 principles emphasize internal collaboration, most businesses need to extend these technologies to interact with customers and clients as well. Platforms like GetSatisfaction put a consumer-friendly face on building customer relations using familiar social networking behaviors. Crucially, embracing social CRM gives your business a human face enabling real relationships with customers. To put it quite bluntly, organizations which don’t integrate social CRM will quickly become second-class citizens in consumers’ eyes.

Community Management

The second and equally important half of the customer-facing equation is building an online community. Whether through message boards or a more Facebook-like social platform, you want customers to interact not only with your business but with one another. But communities don’t just happen spontaneously. You need active management to spur and guide participation as well as manage participant behavior, whether your customers are retail consumers or other businesses.