Content Still King
Yet, here's a sobering statistic for Enterprise 2.0 true believers: For eight of the 13 tools we asked about, at least 20% of companies say they've made the tools available but they're hardly used.

Ellis of Wells Fargo says the tools will matter and get adopted only if they're delivering information people need. "When I look at the intranet and what's going to bring people there every day, it's real-time information," he says. For example, the company is using RSS to deliver news feeds that employees can customize to see the business news that matters most to them on the job.

Wells Fargo also is experimenting with wikis and blogs. It has customer-facing blogs (go to blog .wellsfargo.com for examples), such as ones about student loans. The executive VP of the bank's Internet services group holds weekly office hours for team members to discuss new ideas submitted to a wiki. "We were building tools to share information inside the company, but they were always these very structured things," Ellis says. "A blog is informal, a great way to get away from the corporate thing and let people inside our heads." The company's hundreds of blogs have become the most read nonbanking pages on Wells Fargo's site. A few groups within the company have even started experimenting with video blogs.

	People won't use new tools unless they deliver compelling content, says Wells Fargo's Ellis

Motorola has 3,900 active blogs, 3,300 separate wikis, 3,600 "project workspaces," and 12 million daily instant messages cutting into e-mail's use. That mess of information is organized into OpenText's knowledge management platform that contains some 16 million documents and is growing by 100 Gbytes a day. It's accessible on mobile devices, and much of the info is available outside the firewall, too. Some 8,800 partners have at least a little bit of access. Typically, if you're in a large global company, you can walk by a guy in the hallway and not know he's the finance expert. "You'll never know," says Toby Redshaw, VP for IT strategy. "The forum-wiki-blog environment lets anybody bump into anybody directly and on purpose."

There are standalone wiki and blog software vendors such as Socialtext and Six Apart, and the big vendors are building these tools into their collaboration platforms. Collaborative content portals like SharePoint and IBM's new Quickr add a document repository. Microsoft's SharePoint supports federated active directory services that let, for example, a certain group of employees at a strategic partner see certain areas of SharePoint, providing broader collaboration options.

At design firm Ziba Design, huge project files were too big for e-mail, or partners and customers didn't have FTP access. So the firm is using SharePoint's wiki capability to advance design projects and a SharePoint applet that's put on project pages to show employees and customers how a project is progressing. "We built a virtual studio on the Internet for people to access files and collaborate all in one place," says Dieter Reuther, Ziba's IT director.

Most companies haven't caught the enthusiasm of Ziba, Motorola, and Wells Fargo. More than half of companies don't use blogs at all, and 41% don't use wikis, our research finds. More than 20% make these tools available, but they're not widely used. MySpace-like social networks also are slow to take off.

The tools exist, however. Business versions allow for a professional to post background, projects, expertise, and other information to selected networks, such as colleagues. Business social networking site LinkedIn says membership doubled in the last year to more than 9 million individuals. IBM recently announced plans for Connections, social networking software that companies can use internally and with partners. Elements of SharePoint, such as the My Site personal site feature, do some of the same work. Motorola is considering deploying some sort of social networking to connect people and ideas faster, but the plan's only in the research phase, says Redshaw, who's concerned about the security and access control of such a system.

Virtual worlds similar to Second Life, where people move and interact through video game-like avatars, also could be used to build community and knowledge among customers and potentially even employees in a highly dispersed company. But it's a far-flung idea for most companies. One early adopter, Disney, has built a virtual world for would-be Disneyland visitors with its Virtual Magic Kingdom, a community where people can tour and play games within a digital mock-up of Disneyland and Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. Users can talk with one another and to people Disney hires to work as virtual tour guides in the system. Disney claims 2.2 million users have signed up but won't say how many are using using it on a daily basis. However, the meager population so far on Wells Fargo's Stagecoach Island suggests few companies have the Disney-like power to attract consumers to their virtual worlds.