Big Blue has announced that they are working on a new product called “Lotus Connections,” which is targeted for a late 2007 release. From the IHT:
“IBM is planning to introduce a set of social software tools Monday that will bring the kind of blogging, idea-sharing and war-story-swapping typically associated with sites like MySpace to the corporate world.
And you thought social networking was all about, well, social networking – and mostly among bored teenagers.
Called Lotus Connections, the new software, which should be available to companies this year, will let employees set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues within the company and exchange ideas with them, all in the name of improving productivity.
The idea, said the IBM vice president for social software, Jeff Schick, is to “unlock the latent expertise in an organization.”
This is fantastic validation of this market.
(In related news, we have been seeing a ton a traffic here and on the Haystack network from the Lotusphere2007 domain today. Welcome!)
Bonus e-Book link: Social Networking for Businesses and Associations (12 page PDF) (online slideshow)
Bonus list: The Top Ten Ways Businesses, Associations and Organizations Can Use Social Networking
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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.
