Alan shares his view on what will happen with the social business space in 2013, with the main theme being “less talking, more doing.”

“My thoughts about 2013 are based on the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with social business product vendors and customers over the last twelve months. Below I’ll list my top predications for 2013, but if you only have a moment here are the main ideas that I want to share:

For customers, 2013 will be a year of taking action. Over the last few years organizations have invested a great deal of resources into learning about the technological and cultural shifts required for social business transformation. Now they can move past the struggles explaining “Facebook for the Enterprise” and instead focus on implementing the social features that will help their employees get their jobs done.

For product vendors, 2013 will be less about creating shiny new features and more about helping their customers (and prospects) derive real business value from their platforms. Yes, of course there will still be innovations in user experience, mobile access, analytics and many more, but for the next little while the “competitive feature wars” will be less important than proving they understand how to help organizations succeed.

In other words, “Less talking, more doing.” “

Alan then lays out a variety of specific areas:
– Collaborative applications for specific business processes.
– Information will be structured around projects.
– Personal task automation helps employees get their jobs done.
– Keep track of information from multiple applications (aggregation).
– eLearning makes a comeback as social learning.
– … and more.

Alan is an industry analyst at the coalface of what’s going on, and I recommend that you read through Alan’s projections for next year.

Michael’s Comments
1. I like what I’m hearing here, especially the main theme. I look forward to seeing this play out.