Enterprise Web 2.0

Social business adoption is growing around the world as organizations continue to apply social media to the way they work. I’ve spent the week in Australia learning about the challenges and opportunities of applying social strategically to businesses here.

With Facebook preparing for its IPO this week, some major changes are coming for the company. This same changes create competitive opportunities and all new challenges for the company. Here’s how going public will affect the social media industry.

As social media becomes more strategic to the way organizations operate, does this mean it’s time to move the function to the C-suite? Does centralizing make sense, or should responsibility for it be spread across the business?

New forms of customer relationship management are moving to the forefront of enterprise capabilities as companies begin a new era of investment in the function, says new data. But are companies really ready to get more social and mobile, or they just reacting to seemingly irresistible customer demand? The companies that understand how to employ new CRM trends strategically seem most likely to benefit.

Even though the media industry is being profoundly impacted by the rise of new forms of digital and social media, that doesn’t mean they can’t use these technologies effectively. As we continue our series on large-scale social business success stories, we examine what News Corp. has accomplished with its internal social network, OurNews.

Concepts from the gaming industry have become increasingly useful as a way of improving and optimizing how we get work accomplished for our businesses. While many in the enterprise world may not be ready to adopt these ideas yet, gamification increasingly looks to be an effective set of techniques that now has an entire cottage industry forming to make it easier to achieve results.

We often think of social business as primarily a Western phenemenon, my trip last week across Asia and Eastern Europe shows that it’s truly global, and sometimes quite different when it comes to platforms, business models, and expectations.