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This is a very interesting presentation from Cap Gemini's Rick Mans (@rickmans) - well worth flicking through: "11 Social Media Trends" for the enterprise.  The presentation aims to identify the top Social trends set to hit the enterprise scene in the coming years and how to apply these changes in order to "initiate cost-reductions, increase innovation, increase customer satisfaction and enable top line growth."

What's important is that those four obejctives are fundamental to devising corporate strategy and Social media will impact all four.

11 Social Media Trends from Rick Mans

Of the 11, there are four of particular importance to the future development of The Social Enterprise: 

1. "Social Data is the New Oil" - companies are slow to identify the incredible impact Social will have on the relationship between producers and customers.  There is an unfathomable amount of data easily and publicly available about what your customers want and more importantly will want - information that is volunteered and equally available to your competitors.  The opportunity is to use it to better understand them and match your products and services to suit them.  The threat is to fail to do so and to instead be out-manourvered by your competitors meaning market share stolen from under your very nose.  As the author says,

"Why not use [Social Data] to predict your customers' wants, needs and how they will behave and improve your products and services pro-actively." Rick Mans

2. Hyper personalisation. We see in particular the opportunity not only to personalise products but to also personalise service.  For too long now, customers have tolerated a high degree of automation and de-personalisation in their communications with companies and organisations - automated communications driven first by mail-merge, menu-driven call centres and then by voice-activiated response services.  No longer is this neccessary and the way that Social media can be embedded into the fabric of your customer relationship management and service desks means that the possibility of truly personal 1-2-1 communications with customers exists today.  However, as before, if the opportunity is not grasped your automated communications will seem dated and unfriendly versus those organisations who have grasped that chance.  Customers will quickly hemorrhage away.  

3. Enterprise Social Networking.  "80 per cent of knowledge work is about collaboration and knowledge-sharing" says Rick - a point that resonates strongly at salesforce.com where more than 150,000 organisations are already using Chatter  to better optimise the way their employees collaborate and work around projects, customers and objects like dashboards, presentations and reports.  Generation Y already see this method of communication as second nature through their use of Facebook etc and as they rise through the ranks they will demand this kind of technology increasingly as the default.  

4. Consolidation.  Rick talks about the consolidation in the market place, but we see consolidation in the enterprise as well, and perhaps more than that - maturity.  Two trends in particular are key in the development of the use of social media in business - Automation and Scale.  Increasingly, organisations are finding that where projects have been largely manual and isolated to date - "a Gen Y with a copy of Tweetdeck" - the lessons from those projects have been that Social needs to be formally and technically embedded into the fabric of the organisations' systems like CRM, ERP and HR; while at the same time great scale needs to be added to the operation of Social, with all employees empowered to use it for both internal and external communication.  This requires far greater investment than merely a small point solution in the marketing department.

For more on the tools that can assist address these challenges like Radian6, Chatter and The Service Cloud - visit The Social Enterprise resource Centre.