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New communication behaviours in a Web 2.0 world
Appendix C: Examples of corporate involvement in Web 2.0
Internal communication and collaboration methods
Employee behaviours are changing. There is no longer a great difference between work and
personal life and as a consequence an increasing amount of home and distance workers. This
increases the need for virtual social interactions inside corporations. Web 2.0 offers an effective
platform for facilitating these interactions. A corporation can now create its own platform to
do all this or capitalize on existing social networks, such as Facebook, where various teams can
have their own groups (for work planning and execution) and all groups together are part of the
bigger corporate group.
Giving everybody in the organization the chance to participate and contribute their own
knowledge could bring tangible benefits. For example, that collected knowledge could be turned
into business ideas for a given area such as R&D, marketing or corporate strategy.
NASA: driving research through a virtual world
America’s
NASA
has built a virtual 3D centre where people can meet and
collaborate and, as a result, boost NASA’s research efforts. NASA already
connects 37,000 end‑users from inside and outside the organization. This is
bringing such benefits as better social relationships among the members,
the introduction of new ideas coming in, and a decreased need for
physical presence. NASA’s virtual environment increases its effectiveness by
making use of wikis, blogs, mash‑ups and social information tagging.
(Kash: Agencies advance use of online social networking tools, GCN – Government
Computer News; Nov 1st 2007, at www.gcn.com)
External communication
Web 2.0 provides an opportunity to combine one of the traditional uses of the internet (offering
or selling products to a customer) with a new approach. Rich internet Web services now
allow corporations to transmit to customers not only product information but experience and
emotions.
The features of Web 2.0-adapted corporate and product Web presentations are expanding.
We can expect them eventually to include such features as free demo versions; free trials or
promotional packages; the chance to connect with like-minded people, to share experiences of
products or to rank products; all information stored in one place; and interactive applications
that can attract and influence customer opinions and responses.
Field service applications
Field service is the sort area that has been crying out for Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 can help
to meet its need for a rich user experience, performance and high functionality, as well as the
capability to deal with network interruptions.
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Summary of Contents for Web 2.0 services
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