IDC recently forecast that social enterprise software will be a $4.5B market by 2016, while McKinsey predicted up to $1.3T in benefits from social technologies. The platform wars are only beginning as all enterprise software mega-vendors have entered the market. User experience will become a key competitive advantage and companies stuck in the old paradigm will perish. At the same time, I expect most innovation to come from the emerging sub-sectors, such as gamification and profiling. Part 2 will cover each sub-sector in more detail.
Enterprise Software
Enterprise software: Disruption through content and advertising?
If you exclude the SaaS subscription model, monetizing enterprise software has fundamentally not changed in the past 40 years. Emerging opportunities in leveraging the underlying customer data and offering targeted advertising however, may change this. Can the incumbents succeed, or is the market ready for disruption?
You just deployed a social media listening platform, now what?
As I reflect on how many companies still deploy social media listening platforms, I can’t help but think how early we are in our respective journeys towards becoming social businesses. For many companies, the impetus is around producing pretty charts to share internally and gain executive mind share, which rarely happens. What I have instead observed is that starting with a purpose for listening (i.e., business objective or use case) and solving for that, not only generates tangible business benefits, but also helps us gain the mind share we all long for.
Social media case study: How to incent the right behaviors
Driving the change required to help your company become social-savvy is hard. Most organizations are either skeptical on the value social media can add to their bottom line, or infatuated by useless metrics such as fans and followers. In both cases, the only way to help your organization cut through the noise is by providing them with an end-to-end service that goes beyond ‘sticks’ and helps to pave the way of changing behaviors. Technology has a key role to play, and this post illustrates an example of how we are approaching this topic within SAP.
My lesson from Enterprise 2.0: People are the weakest link
I decided to use one of the main points Rachel Happe made during her keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara last week as the title of my post not only because I firmly believe this, but also because it surfaced in almost every session I attended. Many (smarter than me) folks have […]