McKinsey Research on Web 2.0

The recent McKinsey report on the business benefits of Web 2.0 suggests that collaboration tools, especially networks a.k.a social networks, are better positioned within the category of Web 2.0 technologies and tools rather than as a stand-alone "application," especially a customer focused one!

In their study, social networking is the highest ranked technology being used to acquire new customers, followed by blogs, video sharing, and podcasts.

In terms of customer service, another mission critical application area for most companies these days, wikis move into fourth position with blogs moving into the first position.

These and other charts are available as part of a new interactive tool on the McKinsey site.

On the other hand, last month William Band at Forrester Research wrote about a study whereby executives ranked "application importance to business operations" and customer communities platforms came in dead last.
The Band article in Customer Think noted "Although enterprise feedback solutions, customer community platforms, and customer forums are viewed positively by the respondents in our survey, none of these three are considered "critical" to success. Therefore at this time, business value discounted for uncertainty is low." By the way, Customer Think folks advocate the term social CRM which is yet another example of Web 2.0 technologies being pigeon-holed into existing monster applications.

It is clear that confusion reigns in what to call these people networks, what use they are being put by B2B and B2C clients, and what applications category they fall into making it difficult to know what research to use in assessing their value and risk.

Three observations:

When I hear early adopters talk about their experience with people networks, they talk about how community is being tapped to drive change in product design and development and in the practices (and headcount) of other departments, especially customer and technical support.

Yet confusion exists among vendors, consultants, and clients as to Web 2.0 terminology and the uses for the technologies/tools resulting in divergent viewpoints.

However, the success and value of integrating Web 2.0 tools to address mission critical business objectives in the more traditional application areas of contact center infrastructure, customer service/support, business intelligence, and product development/management is why early adopters are gaining a competitive advantage and not talking too much about it. Just ask their customers.