Just back from meeting one of our clients, RM2 who set up employee share schemes for companies - as a former accountant you’d think that being on top of the most efficient tax schemes would be second nature, but from talking to Colin and Geoff you realise just how quickly your knowledge goes out of date. For all those web entrepreneurs out there, its probably something worth thinking about - the Inland Revenue isnt especially web2.0, but you can be savvy and work out the best way to maximise your gains when your social networking project turns into the next Bebo or Facebook.

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I was asked last week to provide feedback on the online community that the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW) has set up and of which I should confess I am a paid up member from a former life as bean counter.

I think they have done a great job at IT Counts (what the site is called) and thought it would be worth publically sharing my views:

The challenge with any community site is finding sufficient fresh interesting relevant content that its users find sufficiently compelling to encourage them to want to return on a regular basis. If the content and the topics are too broad the site tends to lose the interest of its readers as it doesn’t address their issues; if it is too narrow, it presents challenges in terms of producing sufficient quality content.

 

A simple way for me to judge content suitability is the measure of how many comments get left on posts on a regular basis – what I observe on IT Counts is that there is a good flow of comments and postings which are a good indication of the content being suitable for the audience.

 

 

The site design is simple and effective – it uses all the space and allows for a consistent mental map so that I can continue to find key information as I navigate through the site

 

IT Counts is a great initiative to get CA’s more connected and sharing information – the web is happening all around us and the advantage I believe moves with the innovators – ICAEW have taken a great step with this initiative.

 

I look forward to seeing how the site continues to develop and engage with its members (not always the most innovative of thinkers from my experience!)

 

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Not much to do with the web, but a great clip - Euan had it on his blog, so i thought I’d replicate it as a note to self too.

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Full marks to Jon for keeping the blog rolling - for me its been a busy few weeks and as every blogger knows, you need to find time to keep that information fresh.

So, back to our core context of finding value from web2.0 for businesses - and how is that value realised or monetised.

Well, clearly, we have a lot of ideas which we share with all our clients, but its always interesting to see different takes on web2.0 - the latest is in the BBC site today on Web 2.0 is set for spending boom.

The prediction in the article is:

Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools. Forrester Research state in the report behind this that ”consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonald’s, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank will drive much of this growth and have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking”.

Forrester analysed seven Web 2.0 categories:

- blogs, mashups, podcasting, RSS, social networking, widgets and wikis.

What we are seeing and continue to fervently believe in is that it is not so much the technology and the applications, but the behaviours that exist around the technologies. Much of the work we are doing is deriving business intelligence and data from the vast amount of data, tools and applications that exist out there - there is a complete glut of information and tools (and this continues at a growing rate). The key value is knowing the Why and the How - why are these tools valuable, why would your organisation use them to either save you a £1 or make you a £1, and how do you use them.

Either way, we agree 100% - the big value in social networking and the web is about businesses and not the consumer side of life (a la Facebook).

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