Gartner released 5 predictions about how enterprises will use social software in the future. Use of social media and technologies that connect people has been increasing rapidly, with Facebook announcing more than 500 million active users, and enterprises are keen to interact and grow business through these channels.
“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business,” said Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner offers five key predictions for social software:
1: By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
2: By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
“Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on.”
3: Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
“Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.”
4: Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
“Gartner expects more end users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on [mobile] devices.”
5: Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.
“For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.”
This is an interesting collection of predictions, and I think they get it pretty right. No matter the form it takes, enterprises will increasingly adopt social media and social software in general.
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