Corporate Web 2.0 in Russia

According to a recent Comscore study , Russia ranks first in the world (!) In terms of the intensity of using social networks. Why do we have developed general social networks such as classmates, and intra-corporate — so popular in the West — have not yet become widespread? One of the possible reasons and our reflections on corporate social networks - in this post.

Corporate networks allow you to combine the efforts of employees located at a remote distance, using all the well-known tools such as blogs, events, bookmarks and communities. Strangely enough, but in contrast to the traditional web 2.0 that is widespread in Russia, we are still far from the West in the area of ​​using corporate social networks. Even on Habré we could not find a significant number of notes on this topic.

The benefits of using corporate web 2.0 are obvious.
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The first is saving on communication costs: there is no need to organize conf calls, meetings of employees, pay for expensive business trips. For large companies, the savings can be millions of dollars.

Secondly, corporate social networks, built on the principle of user-generated content and collective intelligence, allow solving problems in a non-trivial way and in a shorter time. However, a lot has already been said about the wisdom of the crowd in Habré.

Finally, information is protected from illegal use, for example, from being intercepted by competitors. Bringing internal discussions, exchange of opinions, internal and confidential materials to external networks is sometimes simply dangerous, no one can guarantee the safety of data and their protection. Unlike ICQ or external social networks, all information in corporate networks is stored on the company's servers. This moment allows to solve the problem of identification and authentication of users in corporate directories. Chief Accountant Inna Fedorovna Petrosyan will be Inna Fedorovna, not KisaPopsik.

The review of one of our products for building for corporate social networks has already been published on Habré.

IBM Lotus Connections allows you to create employee profiles, personal blogs, communities of interest and virtual “rooms” for collaborating on projects, social bookmarking. All this in a rather attractive design, which is important for office staff.



How Lotus Connections works can be viewed in the video on our website .

In Russia, the situation with corporate networks is the opposite. The typical answer that can still be heard is: “And what will they do there? Should they create more classmates, and also pay money for it? ”Therefore, the Russian corporate web 2.0 is limited to an inanimate corporate forum, shared on a server, negotiations on ICQ or access to classmates via anonymous surfing services. Many can see this with the example of their company.

There is a subjective observation (which can naturally not be supported), that when they are fed up with friends and searching for acquaintances, employees of companies increasingly use social networks and instant messengers they are used to, but for business purposes. All this happens in the conditions of corporate web 2.0 vacuum, where instead of specially sharpened products are used services designed for personal, non-working communication. Perhaps it is precisely with this that such high positions of Russia in the intensity of use of web 2.0 are connected. In addition, Comscore statistics do not take into account the time spent by Western users in corporate social networks, and this is quite significant.

And finally, another advantage of corporate networks. It is not so important how much time users spend on social networks - general or corporate. It is important - how they spend it. Only corporate networks have the ability to control and suppress the misuse of working time. But for the time being, most Russian companies for this purpose prefer to work in the old manner, blocking classmates.

We would like to remind you that we will discuss the prospects for the development of corporate social networks at the upcoming IBM Lotus Forum 2009 forum . Registration is still open!

Ps. Inna Fedorovna Petrosyan (KisaPupsik) is a fictitious name and nickname. Any matches are just matches and nothing more :)))