The Gartner Group have published their Social Media predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Gartner analysts acknowledge that a lot has happened with social software and collaborative software in 2009, and that there’s been a growing use of Facebook and Twitter by business.  But their predictions for beyond 2010 don’t read so encouragingly.

The five predictions are:

1. By 2012 over 70% of IT department led Social Media initiatives will fail

• similarly, only 50% of business led social media initiatives will succeed
• but, even to enable these successes the Gartner analysts warn organisations that they will need new skills sets around designing and delivering Social Media solutions

2. By 2012 over 50% of organisations will be using microblogging.  But, only 5% of these will be stand-alone/single purpose enterprise microblogging applications – the rest being consumer services like Twitter

3. Post 2012 social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of Social Media on business and society

4. By 2014 social media will replace email for 20% of users for business communication

• essentially, microblogging is better than email for status updates and expertise location within the organisation
• therefore, Gartner recommends organisations must develop:
  • long-term strategy for collaborative and social networking software services, and
  • policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes

5. In terms of analytic’s, by 2015 some 25% of enterprises will utilise social-network analysis to improve performance and productivity.  Social-network analysis (and here)  is used to examine interaction patterns and information flows among people and groups within the organisation, and among business partners and customers.  The Gartner analysts claim that this is an untapped source of insight – but requires trust and buy-in, due to privacy & confidentially concerns

More information available from Gartner: “Predicts 2010: Social Software in an Enterprise Reality” – http://www.gartner.com/resid=1243515

It’s official: “Salesforce Chatter accelerates the demise of Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus” – so claim’s salesforce.com in their press release of 17th February 2010.

The SaaS leader buys time with the launch of this beta that offers real-time feeds from consumer services “Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz” (though, in a ZDNet post, this is clarified by salesforce.com: “Chatter at this time doesn’t integrate with Google Buzz.  Google Buzz was used in the press release as an example of a popular social consumer network.”)

There will be 100 companies in this private beta program, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion.  Chatter should be delivered sometime in 2010.

For more on Chatter see my earlier post “You won’t be able to get too much Chatter.”

This has been a title for a post since well before January – I’ll now delete the draft!  Enjoy …

Charityhowto.com have further video training guides for nonprofits on YouTube (here)

The Social Media Governance (tagline: Empowerment with Accountability^TM) has a database of Social Media Policies, and Social Media Research.  Both worth a thorough review.  There’s also currently a free report called Analysis of Social Media Policies: Lessons and Best Practices (Dated December 2009) by Chris Boudreaux.  Chris’s blog is here.

My current limited use of Twitter has been to merely notifying people of my latest blog post.  Starting in March this will all change.  In March I shall become more sociable – twitterwise!

After all, Twitter is a Social Media tool.  Another channel by which I can connect with people and share ideas and relevant information.

I’m setting myself some goals – for I’ll need a clear reason to make this work.  Firstly, there will be monthly goals.  These will be translated to a weekly action plan, and then daily tasks.

In terms of logistics my plan will start with me allocating 30 minutes a day to twitter.  Each day I will allocate:

• Early morning: 10 minutes
• Midday: 5 minutes, and
• End of the day: 15 minutes

Overall, the 30 minutes will be used, approximately, for 10 minutes of:

• retweets of relevant tweets
• tweets of new information
• responding to tweets

With the objective of having some 10% quality tweets per day.

In accepted of best twitter practice, I’ll NOT be marketing myself, but providing value …

But I will be:

• giving more than I expect to receive
• sharing expertise and tips
• leaving at least 15 characters free in each tweet – room for those retweets!

The plan is initially to find some 20 influential people per week to follow.  By influential I mean twitters that tweet about information that I genuinely want to follow.  This will translate to me focusing on 1-2 people per day.

Now, this is not a popularity contest.  So I don’t have to read every tweet, I don’t have to reply to every tweet, and I’ll stop following people that don’t add value.  This is business – I’m branding myself.  I’ll be using my business twitter account – I’d be keeping my personal account (if I had one!), and my personal tweets, quite separate.  One objective is to build a solid interactive community.

For starters: before I follow anybody, I always check their twitter profile.  So, I must review my own profile – my “One Line Bio”!  Similarly, I must add “Follow-me on Twitter” to my email signature, and include a retweet link in any document I send out … I already include twitter links on my web site, on my blog, …

How do I find these experts, these influential twitters, to follow?  For starters I’ll use hashtags, and keyword searches – but this has global reach.  So, as a small business, I also need to focus on people in the same area as me – London, UK.  For this I’ll be using the advance twitter search, and nearby tweets.  These influential twitters should provide me with links to great resources, articles, and blog posts.  For the blog posts, I’ll leave a comment, and retweet.  Obviously, as this develops, I should expect to be following more than one “topic” – and, for this I’ll use twitter lists.

Some of the twitter tools I’ll be exploring along the way are:

• Twitter advance search: http://search.twitter.com/advanced
• Nearby Tweets: http://nearbytweets.com
• Hashtags: http://hashtags.org/
• tweetbeep: http://tweetbeep.com/
• twilert: http://www.twilert.com/ – back in February …
• Alterian SM2: http://www.alterian-social-media.com/
• backtweets: http://backtweets.com/
• twitalyzer: http://twitalyzer.com/
• tweetdeck: http://tweetdeck.com/
• refollow: http://www.refollow.com
• twelloe: http://twellow.com
• SocialToo: http://socialtoo.com/
• Twitter Karma: http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
• And, of course, good old reliable Google, with: “twitter for …“

But my blog posts can’t stop.  So, I must to continue to:

• submit good and original blog posts that are concise, timely, and relevant
• join challenging conversations, and
• talk with passion about what I’m doing …

I hope you have time to follow me, and give me advise …

Today (Tuesday 2 Feb.) an enterprise collaboration tool from SAP, that is based on Google Wave, will enter public beta.  With the informative beta name 12Sprints, the application will allow “users to collaborate on solving business problems in real time.”

Being dependent on Google Wave, SAP will be following Google’s classic approach with 12Sprints having a beta period that will “never end.”  In acknowledgement of this, David Meyer (senior vice president of emerging technologies, SAP) has stated that the “… whole idea is to learn from [its] usage.”

Why is this interesting?  Software giant SAP have plans to launch web-based sales management software (i.e. SaaS) in the middle of 2010 – they will be competing directly with their long term rival salesforce.com.

Of course, there’s the obligatory YouTube video’s (there are 13 in all) for 12Sprints:

And, you can become a friend on Facebook, and follow the beta on Twitter …

12Sprints is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool – a tool that enables decisions based on the response from multiply persons within the organisation.  But, essentially it employs the same tools used to make a decision as “normal” business group might.  However, SAP appear to be taking Enterprise 2.0 serious.  Below is a brief video of part of a round-table held by SAP titled “Enterprise 2.0 – A Look into the Crystal Ball” (this video is about Gravity a forerunner of 12Sprints).

Observe, 12Sprints is an excellent example of the use of Google’s Wave within the organisation, but it’s not a replacement for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc (i.e. unlike salesforce.com’s Chatter – which is yet to become available in the wild.  In beta, or otherwise!).