Results tagged “gartner” from Trends in the Living Networks

Gartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.

This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Last week I dropped in to the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, and managed to catch the session by David Cearley talking about the distributed social web, one of my favorite topics.

Overall it was a very good presentation, swiftly moving from the basics to a quite detailed view of the distributed social web, including pertinent views on the challenges of data portability. The presentation was entirely from a corporate perspective, looking at how companies should be thinking about integrating open social networks into their websites and customer interactions.

This issue is only now getting onto the radars of consumer marketing companies, and it will be a while before we see significant corporate initiatives in the space, with the social networking platforms themselves still working out where the space is going. However the open social web will become an increasingly prominent topic for consumer-oriented companies over the next few years. David’s conclusion - that the biggest risk is to fail to engage - is absolutely correct.

The style of David’s presentation, as for many research vendors, was to throw out a lot of detail, clearly to convince their clients that they can’t work it out for themselves and need consulting assistance. I suppose this is probably quite true in this particular space, where it’s extraordinary difficult for people even at the center of what’s happening to get their arms around it. However I will have a go myself over the next few months, in creating a successor to the Web 2.0 Framework that will look at the layers of social platforms and how to engage with them.

Below are the notes I took during David’s session: