MIT Sloan Management Review

Given that technology-based social networking has been transforming social norms for the past decade, will social networking and social software have a similarly transformative effect on business? Are they already doing so? How are enterprises benefiting?

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte asked thousands of managers about how their companies are using social media tools — and how important those tools are becoming to their organizations. Here’s what they said.

In 2006, MIT Sloan’s Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ as shorthand for collaboration and sharing tools would mean for enterprises. In a recent interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, McAfee looks back at the past six years and reveals what he’s learned about the triggers that generate CEO interest in social networking, what he misread and why the idea of controlling information flows is becoming obsolete.

Many companies are trying to leverage the power of Twitter to connect with customers and promote their brands and products. This article identifies factors that increase the likelihood of “retweeting” so that a company’s tweets will be shared with recipients’ networks.

There are several practices that don’t work well. The most important to avoid is blatant hard-sell messages. Twitter may be better suited for building brands than for building markets for new offerings.

The big potential for social media is to be a tool for mass collaboration, say Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald of Gartner, Inc. The challenge for companies: look beyond the obvious uses for marketing and communicating.

Customer relationship marketing was supposed to be a “new paradigm,” yielding more loyal customers and much more profit for companies. It hasn’t. What should managers do?

The Web has made it easier than ever to reconnect with long-lost professional colleagues. Does it pay to do so? New research says yes — and suggests that every smart manager will try.

Virtual worlds have been slow to catch on in businesses — but employees familiar with the technology may help.

Companies need to understand and manage the rising threat of online public complaining. There is ample incentive, because the best ways to respond, and to prevent complaints from recurring, apply not just to the Internet.

Looking for business lessons from the presidential election? Here's a key one: Effective use of Web 2.0 technologies can give an organization an important competitive advantage.

Depressed about the state of the real-world economy? Maybe you should attend tomorrow's Virtual Goods Summit 2008, an event in San Francisco looking at the growing business of buying and selling "virtual goods" in online games and on social-networking sites — for real-world money.

Who has time to keep up with more social networking sites? There's an interesting dialogue going on about that question at the New York Times'  Bits blog. Reporter Claire Cain Miller raised the question of whether new Web 2.0

It can be hard for fledgling technology entrepreneurs to get a chance to connect with potential investors — and fellow entepreneurs. To address that, a new network called the OpenCoffee Club encourages locals to organize drop-in meetings for those involved in the start-up scene in their city.

I had probably greeted Tom in passing more than 50 times before we actually met. A new student at the MIT Media Lab, he worked just a few doors down the hall from my office, but I was a busy doctoral student and didn’t have much time to cultivate relationships.