Seven reasons why Companies Need Web 2.0!

Web 2.0 becomes the need of today as there is emerging a new generation of potential employees and customers that are accustomed to a variety of technologies being available. These employees expect to see and use the technologies in the corporate world.

These technologies are not only interesting for personal use but they also help the corporate world to search better employees for them. Whether and how we deploy these technologies likely will have an impact on our ability to attract new talent to our companies and to find and retain customers. All these technologies fall into the loosely defined category of “Enterprise 2.0.”

Rather than dismissing these technologies right out of the gate, these techniques can be best use in the right way. If neglected, it can lead you to a competitive disadvantage.

Here’s a sampling of these technologies:

1) RSS (Really Simple Syndication): It automatically feeds you information you want. RSS can be used to push order-status information directly to a customer’s company intranet.

2) Social networks: Facebook and MySpace like networks help the employees to introduce themselves to the company. These can also be a resource to help employees find a potential car-pool mate, someone with a background in product design or specific experience on a product you are thinking about launching. It extends your network to a wider zone and can be helpful to reach your target place.

3) Quick Messaging technology, Twitter: A quick messaging technology, such as Twitter, provides a wider reach of the message (a “tweet”) as compared to e-mails. It lets people know what you are doing at an instant. For example, if someone putting out a Twitter message that says, “I’m updating the marketing plan; does anyone have any info on X?” The tweet may have a wider reach and generate a better response rather than sending out an e-mail that gets lost in everyone’s inbox. Twitter and FriendFeed are communication and collaboration tools. And when your research project is done, share it via FriendFeed.

4) Social networking: Social networking technologies such as FriendFeed can be used to share a variety of information. The technology lets users share Web pages, photos, videos and music with friends and family. This is an easy way to exchange the data.

5) Instant messaging: Instant messages are exchanged for quick replies.  E-mail is so “last decade.” Instant messengers are available to give a better solution. This technique not only provides a better way of communication but reduces the wastage of space in Inbox on the e-mail server.

6) Wikis, blogs and mash-ups to share, collect and edit information: Wikis and blogs can be used for training and collaboration on large projects while Mashups provide a good overview of the operations. It can bring together production and operations data from a variety of sources, allowing a production manager to get a good overview of the operations.

7) YouTube-style videos: These videos can be used for training or distributing important messages such as the CEO announcing a new product launch or Joe, the IT help desk guy, receiving an award. This technique is providing visual trainings which is much better than textual one.