Shel Holtz, Communicator

What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.

The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:

Increasing speed of access to knowledge            68%

Reducing communication costs                           54%

Increasing effectiveness of marketing                  52%

Increasing speed of access to internal experts     43%

Increasing customer satisfaction                          43%

Decreasing travel costs                                       40%

Increasing employee satisfaction                          35%

If Dennis Howlett had waited a week or so before posting that Enterprise 2.0 is "a crock", he would have found the results of the latest McKinsey survey of 1,700 executives who collectively demonstrate that there really are business benefits to bringing social software behind the firewall. This excerpt is from the FastForward blog. The full McKinsey study is here.

Other interesting results include the top-rated internal technologies, putting video sharing at the top with blogs, RSS (not dead yet) and social networking close behind. I'm predicting a rapid rise in the use of employee-generated video.