The trends are unmistakable - social media, an obscure phenomenon only a few years ago, is taking hold of global business at a blinding pace. In a recent Melcrum survey of corporate executives, 55% were either already using blogs or planning to start within 12 months, 63% were using online video services, with other social media also drawing heavy usage. The vast majority of the surveyed noted that social media usage "improved employee engagement ... improved internal collaboration" and created "a two-way dialogue with senior executives." Major corporations such as IBM, BBC, and Sun Microsystems are encouraging social media communication within their companies, and even more use social media to communicate with clients and other interested parties.

As a new generation of employees, comfortable and proficient in social media, enters the workforce, it will form a bond with a new wave of customers that with each passing year uses blogs, social networks, internet video, photo exchanges sites, and other tools at an increasing rate. At this customer-employee nexus, called Enterprise 2.0, a new marketing force will emerge, to be exploited by the most successful of modern companies.

Robert Scoble, a notable blogger and former Microsoft technology evangelist, has become the prototype for effective corporate utilization of the social media. On his blog, "Scobleizer", he discussed information regarding his company's products, issues, and initiative, and addressed the competitive environment and challenges facing it. His blogging, as well the follow-up discussions he conducts in the comments section, gave an acknowledged "human face" to the company. Together with Scoble, more than 2,500 other Microsoft employees were blogging by March 2006, all of them ready to distribute "calm news and information." A similar pattern is emerging at IBM, where over 3,000 employees are blogging either in the intranet or outside of it, and at multiple other major corporations.

While mass, company-wide blogging is an important and growing occurrence, a very notable trend is emerging as top company executives begin to utilize blogs to discuss corporate issues in a manner more effective than traditional PR. For example, Dell's corporate blog, Direct2Dell is maintained by several of the company's top managers, who regularly discuss issues ranging from global expansion to environmental responsibility, product development, and customer service. Cisco has used its corporate blog to discuss an impending lawsuit with Apple over the iPhone trademark, drawing a long chain of positive comments from readers appreciative of the company's openness and transparency in such a sensitive issue. Airline companies have begun integrating their websites with blogging to convert their service from mere reservation engines to a tool where customers can also find information, reviews, and advice on their destinations of choice.

There are many examples of corporations using blogs to gain a competitive advantage, and as the blogosphere grows in scope and influence, there will be countless more examples. The bottom line is that any blog has the potential to reach an extremely wide audience, whether internally or externally. As more people learn the tools of he web, traditional PR strategies will continue to lose traction, while blogging will provide a tool capable reach a wide audience with a personable message. Enterprises will not only market through their own corporate blogs, but will also attempt to cooperate with private bloggers whose opinion is regarded by many readers. There have already been examples of this, such as when Microsoft and AMD giving Ferrari laptops loaded with Windows Vista to several notable bloggers, perhaps with the hope that they would spread positive feeling about the companies to their readers. While such measures remain controversial, it is clear that features of the blogosphere such as commenting and interlinking will enable companies to sync and communicate with outside bloggers and create a true online marketing network.

These same features also have the ability to change the way workers communicate internally within a company. For instance, commenting functions on blogs could more efficiently serve the same purpose as email does, and yet with the same level of privacy if the blog is hosted on the internal network. Further, just as management in top companies has begun to use blogs to communicate with consumers, it could do the same with employees in the company. Blogs are a much more effective and broad-reaching method of delivering communiqués to employees than traditional paper methods, especially in large companies where transport presents a logistical challenge. They are also more efficient than email because they provide a greater opportunity for two-way interaction and feedback. With more proficient employees and forward- thinking managers dedicating to improving interaction, blogs will soon become a major force in internal corporate communication.

While the blogosphere has gained much attention in recent years, the growth of wikis has represented a more obscure, but no less significant development in enterprise social media. Exemplified by the tremendous online encyclopedia "wikipedia", wikis are collaborative open-source websites that can be edited by their users. They can act as repositories for data storage, communication exchanges, or procedure details. Today, wikis on the web are dedicated to subjects ranging from the exact sciences, to fantasy literature, gaming, and radical political groups. However, organizations have also recently started to adopt wikis to their benefit.

For Nokia Corporation, wiki usage began as a grassroots phenomenon in 2004, designed to collaborate knowledge on limited and specific product design product-design problems. Soon, it spread to multiple departments and more and more employees began seeing the tremendous collaborative opportunity presented by the wiki. Today, according to BusinessWeek, "Nokia estimates at least 20% of its 68,000 employees use wiki pages to update schedules and project status, trade ideas, edit files, and so on."

A similar movement occurred at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort, where the IT department began using a wiki tool called Socialtext for an internal task, and soon the program spread throughout the company to the degree that an official corporate wiki was launched, and "by October, 2006, the bank's 5,000 employees had created more than 6,000 individual pages and logged about 100,000 hits on the company's official wiki."

More than 20,000 employees at IBM currently use wikis, while Sony used wikis in coordinating its Playstation 3 in its production stage. Microsoft began a wiki for partners wanting to help in program development. Intel has set up its Intelpedia with more than 5,000 pages and more than 13.5 million page views. The Intelpedia is not to be confused with the Intellipedia, which is a classified wiki used by the U.S. intelligence service to collaborate in their secret missions.

The wiki's utility has been realized by many organizations of very different market sectors and structures. A tool with tremendous flexibility, it can be kept fully internal, classified, or completely open to the public. It has a tremendous capability for data storage, and is very easy to navigate and modify. It is ideal for any enterprise seeking to consolidate its procedures, communications, news, and data flows in a single repository, to encourage increased collaboration among its employees, or even to create a single data bank that customers can use to obtain information about products, services, or contacts within the company. Other Social Media in Enterprises

Blogs and wikis are only two of the many types of social media in use today. Utilities such as social networks, video and sharing sites, RSS feeds, and podcasts are increasingly popular and used by millions of people daily. All of them have potential to be successful enterprise communication tools. Social networking sites such as LinkedIn, for instance, are already being utilized by top companies for recruitment purposes, while innovative companies like IBM have begun to integrate communication between employees and customers into a social network format and distribute information in the very convenient, popular podcast format.

As social media grows in popularity, more and more enterprises will seek to create social networks for purposes of employee interaction, customer service, business contact, recruitment, and advertising. Shared videos, RSS feeds, and podcasts will provide an attractive, accessible, simple tool for distributing key service and product information. New social media functions such as Makovsky and Company's practice, Online Fluency, will help companies develop transparent, credible, business to business marketing efforts. In the near future, more social media tools will be developed, and will be heavily used by both customers and businesses.

Just as the growth of the World Wide Web in the 90s signified a revolution in the way businesses conducted their both their internal and public affairs, the growth of social media in this decade is also revolutionary. Blogging, for instance, has already shaken the foundations of traditional media and become a dominant force in communications worldwide. Soon, together with tools such as podcasts, RSS, video sharing, and social networking, it will create an environment that encourages mass popular accessibility to information, and a cheap, efficient means of communication for companies. Undoubtedly, it will replace and revise the role of traditional public relations methods. Companies that successfully capitalize on these tools will gain a great competitive advantage in this new global market. Those who fail will find themselves increasingly isolated from customers, partners, and recruits.

Wikis, meanwhile, will represent a significant improvement in informational storage and sharing methods. Successful use of wikis will foster an internal collaboration culture and will save companies money, time, and effort in handling the flow of information inside the organization.

A successful enterprise in the era of Web 2.0 will do more than just begin sporadic use of individual social media tools. It will need to develop a comprehensive, integrated scheme designed to maximize the market advantages through the entire social media. Techrigy Inc, with tools such as Social Media Manager (SM2) is devoted to helping companies create such complete policies, and eliminating the compliance, confidentiality, and credibility risks that today deter many businesses from adopting Web 2.0 technologies.