Where will the corporate 2.0 breakthrough come?
Jinfo Blog

14th October 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Either get into web 2.0 or retire was the blunt message from Special Libraries Association President Elect Stephen Abrams, of library technology company Sirsi Dynix, in his opening keynote http://www.internet-librarian.com at the recent Internet Librarian International conference. He’ll be posting his presentation on his own blog http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com/ so you can judge for yourself. But does his contention that the baby boomers won’t survive professionally if they don’t have a Facebook account or a presence in Second Life matter in a business environment? It’s not difficult to find people who claim that it does. Wagner James Au is writing a book on Second Life, and in the blog of GigaOmniMedia Inc, a San Francisco-based technology news and analysis company http://digbig.com/4tsqc he lines up seven reasons why Second Life should matter for business executives. It’s the most successful application so far in the rapidly growing MMO (or massively multiplayer online game) market, he points out. It’s effectively a ‘3-D wiki’ and its use of virtual currency means that it can be (and is) used as a prototyping platform for products and services prior to their launch in real world business. Well, with his background and San Francisco address he would say that, wouldn’t he, conveniently ignoring the fact that graphs don’t go in the same direction forever – something that should strike a chord if you’ve been mis-sold an endowment mortgage. Elsewhere, the messages about corporate embracing of 2.0 applications are still mixed. Take the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ a news blog started by the author Arianna Huffington and profiled recently http://digbig.com/4tsqd in the FT. It may be the brainchild of an established mainstream baby boomer but it has the attitude more commonly associated with the millennial generation. ‘None of this “on the one hand, on the other hand”,’ Ms Huffington says. But she’s not convinced the advertisers yet. ‘Advertising agencies are increasingly taking notice of the audiences attracted by a few elite blogs,’ the FT continues, ‘yet many are still wary of the free-for-all, uncensored perception attached to them.’ Perhaps personal profiling is safer territory for corporate 2.0 applications. The Telegraph has reported http://digbig.com/4tsqe that recruiters are starting to use sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn aggressively. ‘At LinkedIn, the average age of users is 39, significantly higher than on sites such as Facebook,’ the Telegraph says. ‘Its members therefore tend to be more work and career-focused.’ You may not want to recruit directly via a social networking site – but, with easy means of finding out who worked at a company at the same time as your recruitment candidate, it’s excellent for reference checking. The 2.0 revolution may not have gone corporate yet – but some executive search agencies are starting to worry.

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