Industry TV taps Social Media to keep the attention of the audience

Trying to exploit the behavior of the two screens of the spectators, television network has built a companion website with streaming video behind the scenes, so that will be seen Oscar winners accepting an award from the TV, then saw celebrate in backstage on the stream.

Experiments like these sudden are a priority in the land of television. As more and more people to chat in real-time on their favorite shows — on Facebook, Twitter and a phalanx of small sites — television networks are trying to figure out how to capitalize.

It's as if people are gathered around the water cooler online — and television executives are hovering nervously nearby, hoping to keep viewers talking and, by extension, by looking at their shows.

Experts such as Ian Schafer, the Executive Director of Deep Focus, digital agency say that Twitter and Facebook about shows well may be "the most efficient way to drive in tune." Although it is difficult to show the link, Mr. Schafer sees first hand when a segment of news catch your attention or a basketball game is tremendous. "I'll say on Twitter or Facebook, you tune in ' Nightline ' or ' 60 minutes now ', and then I'll get people saying, ' Oh, thanks for pointing that out to me, '" he said.

The water cooler effect makes it even more great shows great — the Grammy Awards had its highest in a decade on 13 February — and gives small shows a new way to stand out.

The same day as the Grammy Awards, Howard Stern proved that with his stream of Twitter posts during a re-airing of his film "Private Parts." Suddenly, some folks flipped over on HBO2 to follow and Twitter executives were enthusiastic. Adam Bain, such Executive, wrote, "this is what the producers of TV fiction should do every week."

Acts as Mr. Stern make TV more social, even if viewers are in separate rooms (or States).

"In a sense, you are in the living room, watch collection," said Jeff Probst, host of "Survivor", who used Twitter to talk to fans during the show's season last Wednesday while flying from New York to Los Angeles. Mr. Probst plans to make this a habit weekly view this season.

Television executives say that the chat to deepen the interest of the audience in a show, making them more likely to look next time. BET stunned their competitors when "The Game," a sitcom about relationships of football players with women, drew more than seven million viewers, thanks in part to the feverish chatter online last month. Debra Lee, Executive Director of the bet, said "now we can tell when something is a hit almost immediately — by seeing how many of the topics trending on Twitter belong to us."

Twitter usually lists 10 such words trend at a time, and in the evenings, TV shows are represented.

Television networks, as well as some technology companies, Twitter Chief among them, see the benefits for your business from this behavior. Dick Costolo, the Chief Executive of Twitter, said last week at a mobile Conference in Barcelona that online conversations about TV shows become event programs, "which means people will watch as it happens," blunt the impact of digital video recording.

He may have exaggerated the impact of Twitter — digital recording remains prevalent — but it is clear that many people feel they have to watch some shows as they premiere in order to keep up with conversations online.

"We know that people are multitasking while watching TV," said Albert Cheng, executive vice President for digital media for Disney/ABC Television Group, which oversees the ABC. "The question is: how to take advantage of that and create a completely different experience for consumers?"

"We don't have all the answers," he added, "but surely we are trying different things and seeing how people are reacting."

In this television season, ABC introduced iPad apps for two shows, visits by-canceled "My Generation" and the "medical drama Grey's Anatomy," the synchronization of polls and trivia for previews of new episodes. These applications, Mr. Cheng, double as research laboratories.

Jennifer Preston contributed reporting.

Google search makes use of social network photos

If you're out in public, you are fair game, but as you want if a foreigner has taken the image and then ran a search to find out your name, alias online and any information about yourself through this image? We're almost there with face-recognition technology and social media aggregation. Although several companies are exploring that Kingdom, Google recently released a patent in Europe to use facial recognition and social networking combine to give visual search results.

Google Googles is a recognition of image search for mobile phones that allows users curious to take a picture of anything as a reference point, and then do a search for information about the item in question.  A user does not need to type or speak to start searching; It is as easy as opening the app, take a picture and then waiting for search results.

Although in December 2009, Google has decided not to immediately begin using facial recognition technology for Google Goggles visual search in August 2010, Google has acquired Like.com, which is a Visual search engine currently used for shopping. First Like.com helped buyers online, was a Visual search site called Riya that uses facial recognition technology to search images that users have uploaded and tagged. Way back in 2005, Google bought almost Riya. So with the acquisition of Like.com, Google has acquired technology of Riya too. Other patent filings has recently become public, suggesting that Google has worked together to apply the technology visual query to search for faces.

Recent Google patent filing for user interface for the presentation of search results for multiple areas of a Query Visual suggests that it may be evolving Visual search in Google for smartphones. When you lock a photo, often includes many things, such as buildings in the background, road signs or even people. When you run a query that the picture, Google can penetrate the picture all those different pieces and research for each object within the image--including facial recognition search.

Another Google patent, face recognition with Social Network facilitation, was recently published in Europe, even if it was made around the time that Google bought Like.com. The abstract patent describes research of facial recognition to "one or more probably names" of the people in the picture. After this query "potentially" found one or more personal identification numbers for each person, it will scour "communications applications, social networking applications, applications, calendar, and collaborative applications" to create a list of possible identity for each person. The patent description, shows that if the photo has been marked with the name of a person, "that picture could be queries used facial recognition in future to recognize the person".

As regards privacy, Google has several possible scenarios: to send just one "identifiers" to the person; optionally allowing only the subject identified to make public the photos, or to send a request, after which a person is positively identified, wondering if the image can be a result of research aimed to visual query other persons from within their social network.

InformationWeek found that the inventors listed in the patent application shall include "David Petrou, Andrew Rabinovich and Adam Hartwig" who worked also on Google Googles. It seems as if Google is close to reaching its goal of integrating facial recognition in visual search, but Google is certainly not the only company with big plans to use facial recognition search.

The interpreter has suggested other applications such as Viewdlw, with floating facial recognition on the fly could help "stalkers Government." Viewdle allows users label and save "faceprints" of people and then share the "faceprint them with other users of Viewdle so that they can recognize that the person too!" Privacy settings photosharing are integrated with the Facebook privacy settings.

Some people may not have privacy concerns with visual searches that use facial recognition, but there are a lot of people worried about protecting your privacy. For example, when you leave your home and go walking, wearing a badge in public or at the Mall as a visual aide constant for anyone and everyone to identify the user? That seems a little above me, but isn't that similar to tag a picture with the name of a person and then that image search face becoming fodder? Wear a name tag with the name at all times in public is a personal choice, but there isn't much choice, if someone decides to tag in an image.

Dictators and Governments are already identify people based on real names and photos posted in social media. CNN has posted an interview with examples of when the Internet could help a dictator like Facebook people who need to use their real name instead of aliases. Another example was after the Iranian protests were over in 2009, the Government has gone through Flickr and collected pictures of protestors, posted those pictures on the websites of the Government and then unknown faces circled in red ink.

Access time is concerned mainly with the Facebook policy requiring real names, complete and launched the online petition called, "unfriend the Dictators." Yet how much easier it is to identify dissidents when facial recognition software allows a Government to search and compare the faces photographed with their database, or even millions of photos stored on Facebook or other social networking sites?

I'm not saying that all Visual search technology of facial recognition is bad. It might be cool or it could be a dream stalkers. We all have good and bad days, so the ability to use face research could be used accordingly. It could be used for something wonderful like love at first sight and help track down that first alien visa in a crowded public place. Or it could be used for some time irascible as I take a photo to try and track down that jerk that is cut off in traffic. In the case of dissidents, do research could be a death sentence.

New targets nonprofit Tech cooperation, social change

A new non-profit Wednesday launched an advocacy group for tech and co-founder of Twitter will focus on using technology to drive improvements in the U.S. education system and other social changes.

One of the goals of ConvergeUS, the brainchild of TechNet, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, is to convene various groups working on a "technology innovation blueprint," a plan for the use of technology and social media to drive social change, said its founders. ConvergeUS will work with three other groups every year to work on social issues, with a Summit each year, where the top thinkers in technology and social issues will gather in Silicon Valley, said Rey Ramsey, CEO of TechNet.

"We have some things really left to do for America," Ramsey said during an event kick-off. "Everybody in this room understands the transformative power of technology. There is almost no area untouched by technology in our lives. But there is still work to do in the social sector. "

A relatively slow pace of technological innovation in the social sector, relation to other areas of growth, "gnaws at me," Ramsey said.

ConvergeUS is based on a philosophy at Twitter that "doing good" is important, Stone said. "You can really have a positive global impact, it is possible to make money, and you can have a lot of fun along the way," he said. "This is a new definition of success for your business. You have all these three things together, or you don't. "

Julius Genachowski [cq], President of the u.s. Federal Communications Commission has appreciated the effort. "All we can do to support this effort to bring our best minds, our talent, our best technology platforms in space, the space of business and social space will pay tremendous dividends, mutually for the country," he said.

The new group will host an annual Summit at the end of this year, social innovators, entrepreneurs, business leaders, problem solvers and subject experts invited to address social issues. The group will work on other social projects as well as three identified as main focuses each year, the founders, he said.

ConvergeUS Wednesday, announced a partnership with two groups focused on improvement of parts of the U.S. education system, elementary reading campaign, a coalition focused on improving reading competence and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, focused on improving student performance in math and science education.

ConvergeUS has also appointed Babson College as an academic partner. The University of Massachusetts has been rated the # 1 College for entrepreneurship for 14 years running by U.S. News & World Report.

Another non-profit partnership will be announced in a few weeks.

Grant Gross covers technology and telecommunications policy in the Government of the United States for the IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. E-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com of Grant.

Greplin: a one-stop searching through the data flow and the cloud of social network

We are starting to have problems tracking your information through social networks, Web, and within the cloud? If you're a power user who always can't resist a shiny new site useful--or simply cool--Web app, the folks behind Greplin are betting that you would like to get a handle on everything that scattered data.

The idea has also appeal to those who do not have to keep track of an extensive social network across multiple services, but have different ways of storing information that access (and in part) at home, in the Office and on the road. In my case, some are available in Google Docs, more was saved in Evernote and lately I started to use Dropbox to synchronize local files, so they are available to me everywhere.

Then there are my social networks. I've got useful connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; But even with a desktop client like TweetDeck that aggregates the networks, it is not easy to break down through multiple streams to find information on a particular topic. And none of the information that the media is tied in with my data.

With your permission, Greplin will search through your data in different sites up to seven free: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook and LinkedIn. A free account is also equipped with up to 200 M of storage for the search index. (Paid accounts get more storage space and a few more services like Evernote and Google Apps. Additional services, such as Basecamp and Google Reader, I'm at work).

It is exceptionally cheap, but with a problem: I want to really start with no track record, having access to so much of my aggregated data? Even with pedigree of $ 4 million venture funding from Sequoia Capital? Finally, curiosity has exceeded my paranoia of privacy and I signed upon notification that Greplin had finally opened to additional beta testers. (My exclusive status as beta tester was short lived, however, the site is now public, Greplin tweeted).

Greplin's interface is simple, quick and easy. You sign up for an account on Greplin.com and select the services that you want included (see screenshot below). Wait to be able to create an index, then enter your search terms. You have the ability to filter search results from people, streams, files and messages, as well as from individual services. These choices are available from a drop-down menu next to the main search bar instead of having to click off to an advanced search page.

For starters, I added my Twitter account (public anyway) and Google Docs (insensitive in there). With 3152 indexed documents, including my 126 M and 500 or so files in Google Docs, I used less 5% of my store.

My test searches executed very quickly, apparently issues reported from previous beta testers. Results are grouped by type (streams, files) and also indicate the initiating service (and any standard file), with search terms highlighted in yellow.

Twitter search is fantastic. If you use Greplin for nothing else, I'd recommend, to keep up with your Twitter stream. I was surprised to see pull up results from a tweet I made back in July, since research just Twitter doesn't go back nearly so far. Is a quick and elegant way to search for Twitter users you follow (as well as your own tweets)--certainly better than I found TweetDeck.

Search result of Greplin a little differed from the internal search Google Docs. A major plus for searching within Google Docs itself: Google indexes your PDF loaded, while Greplin does not. Greplin did not find a term that was part of the title of a PDF file, which is a little less forgivable than an inability to analyze the actual PDF (lost a PDF with the word in the title surrounded by dashes, but found another that use underscores).

It also seems that the Greplin is more literal than Google, which can be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on whether you are looking for an exact match. For example, a search for "landscapes" scored results within Google Docs for documents that contain the word "landscape", but not in Greplin.

Interestingly, I have not had any correspondence on Google Docs or Greplin when searching for a specific document--until I remembered that info is actually stored in Evernote. I spoke to my need for a service like Greplin.

Bottom line? Before Greplin, I had already begun dealing with the dilemma of how to deal with important personal data, which I had sprayed in multiple locations. Greplin is probably not the complete answer to this--certainly would have been better to have consistent archiving strategy at the beginning. And despite the appeal of Greplin, will be a little if anything would be trusted any startup with sensitive information such as e-mail (in fact, still not yet I trust Gmail with messages that must be really private).

That said, however, the service clearly fills a need. In an era of Web/cloud services and social networks, it is highly unlikely that any user can store all your important data in one place. The data are not yet useful as it could be if you can't find what you're looking for when you need them ...

Greplin seems to have some elegant technology behind it, and I hope that the new round of venture funding helps to achieve even better over time. In the meantime, I look forward to more details on how we can trust the company to keep your information private and secure before adding too many more services to be indexed.

Greplin screenshots:

Choose services to index within Greplin

Search results for sample Greplin

Sharon Machlis has online managing editor at Computerworld. His e-mail address is smachlis@computerworld.com. You can follow her on Twitter @ sharon000, on Facebook or by subscribing to his RSS feed:
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IT support to become a social affair? Service-now certainly hopes so

Service-winter version of Now its on demand software is going to be an interesting experiment in the world of Social Affairs. The general theme: use social networking tools to make support easier and more productive.

The release of the winter was officially available on Wednesday, but was in the hands of some customers from Feb. 4. Key elements include:

Chat functionality so that users can more easily communicate with it. " Groups can also create chat rooms. Hey, get ready for enterprise IT groups "we are fed up with IE6 and XP dammit!".

Service-now Live much like Facebook and Twitter. Users can post things on the wall of IT support. The idea is that users may be able to resolve their problems.

Flows of information that can be tracked with hash tags. IT support and users can follow these streams. Service-now call these flows-the very first zeitgeist IT. "

Add it and this winter release becomes part of the service-now it 3.0 rap, which revolves around making IT service and support business "people-centric".

It is an intriguing idea and one that makes me a little chuckle because I know how many people would rather duck IT support when users are stupid questions. Now those stupid questions can become part of your IT support wall.

We caught up with Director Craig Mr McDonogh, Service-now of product management, to get some other points. Here's the summary:

What gain productivity here? Mr McDonogh noticed that it supports worker can handle requests chat three and five at a time than a call. There will be any distractions? "You could have a situation in which a worker is easily distracted, but I disagree with that," he said. "The benefits are tangible and productivity far outweigh any negative impact".Users will flock to these tools? Mr McDonogh said that the winter version is not a generic collaboration tool. Social tools are specific to the IT Department.What is the biggest victory here? Mr McDonogh said that these social tools can allow users to resolve their problems. "Business users know as much about the technology they are using as your IT Department. We are providing a tool to support peer-to-peer and capture the information in a Knowledge base, "he said. "The community of users has grown dramatically over the past 10-15 years".

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic.

You are exaggerating the role of social media in Egypt?

A lot is said about the role of social media, Facebook, especially mobilizing and fueling the popular revolt in Egypt. Some are already calling it a revolution of Social Media. Wael Ghonim, activist Internet 30-year-old who has become one of the most recognizable faces of the movement in Egypt, dubbed Egypt 2.0 in an interview with CNN on Friday.  It is difficult to say how much of that credit is earned and how much it is pure hyperbole.

But a quick look at some numbers is instructive.

For a popular movement, the basis of Facebook in Egypt is rather small, if considered as a percentage of the total population. The Egypt has currently approximately 5.2 million users of Facebook, according to SocialBakers a site that maintains detailed statistics on Facebook use around the world. That is less than 7 percent of the total population of Egypt. In other words, less than 7 out of every 100 Egyptians are Facebook users.

On the contrary, in Tunisia, close to 21 percent of the population have Facebook accounts, Quatar use about 33%, Kuwait about 21 percent, while in Facebook in the United Arab Emirates is used by 37 per cent of the population. Even conservative of Saudi Arabia has 12 percent penetration, going by the numbers of SocialBakers.

Sure, the Egypt ranks an impressive 23 213 countries in terms of number of persons from a country who have signed up for Facebook. However, when this number is treated as a percentage of the total population, Egypt drops to 127 place in General.

The statistics are not a lot different from another perspective as well.  Only approximately 31 percent of those who have access to the Internet in Egypt have signed up for Facebook accounts--a lot of them the last few weeks. On the contrary, almost 60 percent of those with Internet access in Tunisia have Facebook accounts, while the number is close to 50 percent in the UAE.

What the figures show that is the hallmark of social media in Egypt--at least as measured by Facebook use--Tis less than one might imagine from everything that is said. It would be interesting to look at the numbers of Twitter, if those were available to see how you stack up.

For a tool that allegedly helped to topple a Government, using Facebook in Egypt seems to be relatively small, even compared to countries in the region. Even if it wasn't, that's really beside the point.

At the end of the day, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all other social media services are just tools that enable better communication.  Just as newspapers and radio and TV. They are the means not the message.

Social media has certainly played a role in the dissemination of information about what was going on in Egypt to citizens and to the rest of the world. When the Egyptian police in Alexandria allegedly beat 28-year old Khaled Said to death last June, was the photo of his face changed into a Facebook page called we all Khaled Said, which may have sowed the seeds for the popular dissent. Social media amplified what was happening, because he gave a few citizen journalists a way to show and tell others what they were seeing and experiencing.

The question is how many of those tens of thousands of singing in Piazza Tahir also in recent weeks has seen those images, or messages to Twitter or YouTube videos?  How many still had access to the Internet to know these things? After all, revolutions that occurred throughout history without Twitter or Facebook or TV or newspapers. When people get pushed around long enough, these things tend to happen. And all you need is often only a small spark to turn the whole thing.

This was a victory for the people of Egypt. Not social media.

As collaboration goes social, where it will thrive?

Not surprisingly, when it comes to how they operate internally, early adopters often map social media and Enterprise 2.0 into language that is broadly understood by the business, usually under the aegis of collaboration. Recently at Lotusphere 2011 IBM analyst Carol Gavin turned heads when she underscored the vast size of the still somewhat nascent social collaboration market. It is at least $100 billion, and perhaps more. While Enterprise 2.0, and more recently Social Business, have been the talk of many in the industry the last few years, the perceived importance of better collaboration via social media has never been more acute.

These days you can’t turn around without seeing another statistic on how social media has become a dominant channel for all things consumer. It’s not until very recently however that you’ve had otherwise sober management experts making the same pronouncement for the business world. For example, Bill George, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard University, noted late last year that “social networking is the most significant business development of 2010.”

The problem is that there is still a pretty large impedance between these messages and how most organizations today work and think. A response that I still get too often from senior executives when they hear statements like the one above is that they don’t understand how this could be significant to their business, which has seemingly been getting along fine without social media so far. How then does use of social media, internally and externally, have substantial and positive impact to their business? Where and who should apply it? Where will it likely thrive? These are the questions business leaders want answered first.

Unlike the Web’s relentlessly Darwinian environment, businesses have been — until relatively recently — somewhat isolated from the pressures of social media. That is, until social business becomes a competitive factor, which in my last post I presented mounting evidence that this is now the case.

While the answers to these questions are starting to accumulate en masse today, some of the most convincing research which I’ve explored recently, the fundamental issue seems to boil down to the difference between how healthy and optimally connected organizations function vs. the rigid and traditional hierarchies that make up most companies today. A powerful post last week by well known business visualization thinker Dave Gray sums it up well:

Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end, they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could put our business strategy into the machine, push a button and wait for the results. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your strategy into people if you want to get results.

And today, thanks to social technologies, we finally have the tools to manage companies like the complex organisms they are.

So this brings us back to the age-old problem of the Innovator’s Dilemma, which essentially comes down to how do you disrupt yourself before the real world does it for you, often with undesirable results. Dave Gray also pointed to John Hagel’s recent observation that as the pace of technological and other change has increased, the life expectancy of large companies has dropped dramatically. This then, along with the other impending challenges, is just one of the wake-up calls happening in large organizations.

In the face of this growing evidence, it’s generally understood that new methods are required to deal with the pace and scope of modern business. As a key part of the conversation, it’s become increasingly self-evident to a growing number of credible industry observers that social tools, matched with new ways of working together, aka social business, can be a key solution to the problem. After all, social media was the outcome of countless thousands of experiences on how to connect people together at the scale of the Web and make it usable. We are now in the same, though harder to change, boat in the business world.

The good news is that most large organizations are now well along their way in considering how to apply social technologies to their business problems, even if it’s still fairly early days for some adopters. Not surprisingly, when it comes to how they operate internally, early adopters often map social media and Enterprise 2.0 into language that is broadly understood by the business, usually under the aegis of collaboration. And communication and collaboration are indeed key areas where social tools can connect people and knowledge together better and faster, drive productivity and efficiency, and foster innovation and process improvement.

Fortunately, few if any of the organizations I see are throwing away social tools as unworkable or hard to adopt. Rather, they are having more trouble adapting the general purpose activities in enterprise social platforms to their industry and moving beyond general purpose upgrades such as social intranets. This has recently led to the discussion of of industry-led frameworks for social business. While social tools certainly can (and do) have high impact in general purpose business scenarios, the enterprise software industry has long learned that it’s as you bring software solutions closer to specific, high-value business activities, that you achieve the most value.

Related: Top ten issues in adopting enterprise social computing.

A great interview that IBM’s Carol Gavin recently gave makes this point in spades when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 and social business:

When you go into a healthcare company [with] a homogeneous value proposition across industry, it doesn’t answer their question: “How do I solve my problem? I don’t care about a problem in insurance or in government, I want you to solve my problem.”

And quite frankly, that’s the legacy of [Lotus] Notes. Notes history started with specific, business-partner, industry solutions. And it’s come back to its roots because that’s really where the collaboration portfolio shines within a context of answering specific industry needs.

So I thought that was kind of interesting about the collaboration agenda. It is the right way to go to market for collaboration. And now collaboration is such a hot topic. Twenty years ago it was a bleeding-edge technology like Software as a Service is today. So you have to frame it in the context of a business problem. You can’t go in with technology speeds and feeds and, you know, I have a better mousetrap than you. You have to go in speaking in the buyers’ language: “Solve my problem today. I need to do more with less, and how is collaboration software going to do that for me?”

This starts to answer the question in the title of this post, thought it elides some of the dimensions which I’ll attempt to expand on below. If social business has become one of the most interesting new avenues to explore in how we manage and operate our organizations, where then can we see that it will thrive? Will certain industries be much more amenable to adoption, or addressed more proactively by software vendors? What other dimensions matter and more importantly, when and where should organizations focus their social business efforts?

Figure 2:Benefits of Social Business by Organization Style

As usual in a nascent field, hard data on what’s actually happening can be difficult to come by. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. First, some useful data is now available through social business practitioner communities such as The 2.0 Adoption Council, whose members are perhaps the most representative of what’s taking place today globally with social business behind the firewall. Second, in-depth studies have begun to show that organizations that are connected together differently realize different benefits from the various types of social business activities. Finally, there are enough Enterprise 2.0 case studies (Google search) to do meta-surveys of them to mine them for patterns of adoption and usage.

None of this information was available until fairly recently, and it begins to point us to where the value will be for organizations as they begin the transformation to the next-generation of worker communication and collaboration. In other words, it tells us where social collaboration will thrive.

Taking all this into account, these seem to be the areas where social collaboration will find strong adoption:

Certain industries have adopted social business faster. While virtually all organizations are adding social media to the way they interact within and outside their organizations, certain segments of the economy seem to either be more systematically organizations or earlier in their efforts. Using the latest global membership data in The 2.0 Adoption Council broken down by industry, we find that for large organizations it will be technology firms, financial services, manufacturing, and the healthcare as a whole that seems to be implementing social business most broadly. The first two are no surprise and has been the case since Enterprise 2.0 became a term, while the other two haven’t been on the adoption radar nearly as much. Utilities/energy, retail, and education round out the larger segments that seem to be adopting. While this is not scientific or outcome based, it shows at least where the activity has been happening thus far. Organizations that are fully networked and have a high information flow will thrive the most. The discussion around social business is, of course, more than just internal or external. It’s much more about a continuum of collaboration between all parts of a business. The newest McKinsey research on the specific benefits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise breaks its finding down in a way that gives us special insight into where the value happens. Most notably, benefits are highest in organizations that have broken down the artificial wall between internal and external. Also, the leading benefit is clearly information sharing. In work environments where information is the most potent currency, such as knowledge workers (which are the backbone of the modern economy), therefore social business is most likely to provide the highest value.Environments that have had (often long-standing) unsolved business needs around information and collaboration. This first became evident in Jakob Nielsen’s meta-study of Enterprise 2.0 projects and has since become clearer in my studies of current case studies. Businesses have found that traditional forms of communication and collaboration such as telephone, e-mail, and in-person meetings have broken down. It is almost fashionable now to declare e-mail bankruptcy for example. As organizations become more global, more distributed, and tackle ever increasingly more complex business problems, the need for improvements in efficiency, productivity, and discovery of vital and timely information has become more urgent.

Of course, when it comes to collaboration, social business is now widely perceived as helping just about any kind of organization improve how it operates. But there are clearly areas where social collaboration especially thrives and this includes:

Industries high in either knowledge work or critical/time-sensitive coordination.Organizations that are already networked across silos or receive outsized benefits from faster and better information sharing, discovery, and connectedness.Increasingly urgent, unmet business needs around better communication and collaboration.

It’s also clear that communication and collaboration itself is changing. As Dave Gray intimated above, businesses of the 21st century are becoming more self-organizing, adaptive, and less hierarchical in order to meet changes in their environments more quickly and in scale. Social business brings a mindset and a set of approaches that meshes with the large, global trends that are driving change in IT and business today.

Where are you seeing social collaboration thrive? Please put your comments in Talkback below.

Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality.