In January 2007, 2,847 executives worldwide responded to a survey conducted by McKinsey on business usage of web 2.0 technologies. Key conclusions were:
- Identify web 2.0 technologies as strategic
- Plans to increase investment in web 2.0 technologies
- Less reliance is placed on well know web 2.0 trends such as blogs
- Greatest importance is placed on technologies that enable automation and networking such as web services.
According to the survey results, the most popular web 2.0 trends in order of popularity are (with brief explanation of various technologies):
- Webservices – allows disparate software systems to communicate with each other automatically
- Collective intelligence – taps the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions (e.g. wikis and common databases)
- Peer-to-peer networking – sharing files (music, video, text) over Internet or within closed set of users
- Social networking – e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn
- RSS – allow users to subscribe to online distribution of news, blogs, etc
- Podcasts – regular audio and video recordings.
- Wikis – allows collaborative publishing (allowing many authors to contribute), e.g. Wikipedia
- Blogs – on line journals
- Mash-ups – aggregation of different services to create new services
According to the results, most companies are investing in above technologies to maintain market position, either to provide a competitive advantage or match the competition addressing customer demand. I for one agree with this conclusion. More than anything above technologies enable further engagement with customers, trading partners and the wider stakeholders by increasing the interactivity.
Tags: McKinsey, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, podcasting, RSS, social networking, web 2.0 trends