In my last post, I provided an overview of Awareness, an enterprise 2.0 platform for managing social media, formerly known as iUpload. Here some of the ways it is being used.
Northwestern Mutual Life has a workforce that includes over 7,000 financial representatives, and has been named 'America's Most Admired' insurance company by Fortune Magazine for the last 24 years. Now they are experiencing a growth in the number of older workers as us baby boomers mature. A number of researchers, such as Dave DeLong and Robin Athey, have written that dealing with this demographic shift could make or break established firms. Northwestern Mutual launched a company-wide initiative using Awareness to better capture and share important employee knowledge. This is effort is initially focused on building a corporate memory through blogging. I think this is a great choice. Because they promote the personal voice, blogs have been shown to invite increased participation, in both work settings and corporate learning networks, supporting the extended capture of quality knowledge. Their personal voice also allows for an intimacy that enhances knowledge transfer. At the same time you are building a searchable archive that others can comment on.
Shifting generations, Awareness is also used at MTV in Canada, an alliance between CTV, Canada’s top television brand and MTV Networks. The enterprise is increasingly defined by its customer relationships and Awareness works both inside and outside the enterprise for this reason. Using Awareness, MTV created a unified community for their younger, tech smart audience to generate its own content, including video blogs. MTV now harvests the best of this user-generated content for its own programming and allows the makes the rest of the posted content available on their site for wider viewing.
A senior executive at McDonald's, used a personal blog through the Awareness platform to speak directly to employees and receive feedback. Once a week between 11AM and 1PM the blog is open to comments and he was able to respond quickly, creating an almost real time exchange. MacDonald’s sponsors a corporate social responsibility community blog called Open for Discussion that connects their executives to their customers. There you can “get personal perspectives on the issues, meet the people behind the programs, and hear open assessments of the challenges we (MacDonald’s) face.” The July 17 post reviewed a podcast by Tom Freidman, the flat world guy, interviewing Dov Seidman on corporate social responsibility. Comments are allowed on the posts and but it is unclear how much they are monitored. Some moderation is necessary, of course, to keep out inappropriate comments, spam, and/or flamers.
Organizations can also integrate web 2.0 functions through Awareness. For example, Newsweek uses the Awareness platform to integrate comments and ratings within many of their online news stories. The Discovery Channel is also integrating comment and photo upload capabilities through Awareness to obtain more user-generated content from its audience. A NY Times regional group is using Awareness to promote user generated content by both providing for comments on their stories and soliciting stories from readers, encouraging citizen journalism. These examples demonstrate that web 2.0 applications can be developed for useful business applications and show some of the spectrum of opportunities. 
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Bill, for your further analysis, Forreste hosted teleconference on
Selling Web 2.0: A Quantitative Look At Web 2.0 In The Enterprise.
You can download PPT here
http://www.forrester.com/Teleconference/Previous/Overview/1,5158,1964,00.html
Posted by: Tomoaki Sawada | August 27, 2007 at 01:18 AM