com last week for over $300M signaled a shift in the CRM vendors' strategy to quantify the value of social networking over time. Salesforce.com is a leading provider of hosted CRM systems on the SaaS platform and has been one of the leading vendors creating social networking-based applications for business customers. Their acquisition of Radian6 signals a view they have of metrics and measuring performance of social media applications being critical to the long-run success of their business. This also signals a shift in the market Dr. McAfee wrote about in the context of Enterprise 2.0, which is the observation of collaboration, communication, cooperation and strength of coordination will eventually be quantified and reported on from a metrics standpoint over time (McAfee, 2006). Blog Post 3: Charting the Transition to Web 3.0: Why Contextual Search and Semantics Matter More Than Ever

From the highly collaborative nature of Web 2.0, which is in the midst of a transition to Web 3.0, which includes contextual search and semantically defined Web applications (Kavanagh, 2010), enterprises are in for a major series of disruptive innovations in the context of enterprise computing in the next several years (Bernoff, Li, 2008). Semantic and contextual search will redefine how enterprises manage their many diverse databases, systems of record, and the many forms of content that pervade throughout a business. The role of semantic web applications and contextual search will also lead to the development of entirely new knowledge systems for managing customer relationships, making it possible to get a true 360-degree view of all activity (Beck, 2011). This will also lead to the development of Web Services that will lead to an entirely new level of disruptive innovation occurring in how customer requirements are capturing and transformed into new products and services as well. The concept of a true customer listening system based on Web Services technologies will be attainable with semantic and contextual search being pervasive across the Web. The same will hold true in enterprises where Web Services that can unify and parse through massive amounts of data to define contextual meaning will become more commonplace as well (McAfee, 2006). The long-term effects are that...

The framework for succeeding with an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is more dependent on measuring the level of profitable collaboration and less on just measuring communication flows and velocity (McAfee, 2006). Long-term companies need to focus not only on the integration across departments to ensure communication, they need to also bring in the Web 3.0 requirements of contextual search and the use of semantic techniques to get the most value possible out of the knowledge they have accumulated over decades of operation. There is also the need for managing the creation of new insights and knowledge over time, creating a new system of record that is as agile if not more so than those enabled through the use of Web 3.0 technologies. The reliance on Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the development of scalable data structures that can stay aligned with the needs of companies as they grow is critical (McAfee, 2006). The long-term payoff of companies staying focused on Web 3.0 design principles is that they will have the opportunity to transform their most valuable information assets into a competitive advantage over time (Kavanagh, 2010).
References

Beck, K.. (2011, January). Thundering into Social Media. Customer Relationship Management, 15(1), 37-38.

Bernoff, J., & Li, C.. (2008). Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(3), 36-42.

Eric Kavanagh. (2010). The New View: Web 3.0 Will Change Our Perspective: With semantic understanding, we'll unravel the complex world of unstructured content. Information Management, 20(5), 56.

Andrew P. McAfee. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(3), 21-28.

McKay, L.. (2011, January). Most Vendors Embrace Social CRM. Customer Relationship Management, 15(1),…