This week's Three To See is solely social with posts on the decline of the website as the single point of online audience engagement and the need for organisations to embrace Enterprise 2.0.

My first pick comes via Sinead Bunting at Digital Recruiting.  Aden Hepburn posted Losing To The Social Web: Visualized to the Digital Buzz Blog.

Hepburn provides some interesting graphs, such as the one above, that shows the rise in social media traffic (red line) against the decline in traffic to destination websites (blue line) and suggests that the reasons for these trends are:

1. "Social Networks (obviously) are growing and most people prefer to hang out there instead of searching the big brands websites for content to interact with. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter share what you’re already interested in. Everything is relevant and you don’t have to leave to get the best content from 10 of your favourite brands / websites.
2. Off-Site Content Distribution is rapidly growing, I’m talking RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels, Facebook Fan pages and so on… All the best brands and websites now actively push their content (the same stuff you use to get from their website and still want to access) to as many various “off-site” sources and platforms as possible.So naturally this removes unique visitors from their main sites, channeling them into a maze of various networks, feeds and tweets…Oh, and ofcourse, widgets/apps – we’ve only just seen the start of these."

In the post Hepburn goes on to make observations about what organisations need to do to connect with target audiences in an increasingly distributed environment and what that means for the corporate website and microsites.

In The Uber-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 posted to Harvard Business Publishing this week, Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd put forward an excellent case for organisations sponsoring use of social media, citing three business benefits:

• Access to social media improves productivity
• Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce
• Millenials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media

The last of these points reminded me of something that I heard at the HR Technology Conference - Day 1.   In the HR Technology Doesn't Stop In a Down Economy session a panellist was describing a conversation with a candidate who was adamant that he needed access to his social network at work, explaining that he had attended a top University, then completed his MBA at another prestigious institution and not having access to such a valuable support group could hamper his performance.  I think its a great point - by the same token, would organisations stop employees from interacting with peers in other organisations such as professional bodies?

If you don't buy the arguments put forward by Meister and Willyerd, there are useful references to related research in a recent whitepaper from Messagelabs: Is Social Networking Really Bad For Business?

The whitepaper (available through Computing.co.uk) not only suggests some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 but also highlights some of the risks in terms of productivity, cost, security, legal and brand impacts.

The paper concludes that use of social tools in the work place is unavoidable and that organisations need to accept this and develop sensible and acceptable ways of mitigating the risk.

The majority of HR-related-posts about the "evils of social media" tend to be based around the issues of trust and productivity and so I have to ask - are these the concerns of organisations that lack appropriate performance management processes?

This week's Three To Read has an unashamedly techie bias with a look at how HR is using technology to tackle its Service Delivery priorities, a post on Enterprise 2.0 - the buzzword for institutional use of social media - and a timely guide to technology jargon past and present.

According to research by Towers Perrin, more than 60% of organisations are intending to maintain, or increase spending on HR technology in 2009.  In the post Has the Financial Crisis Shifted HR's Priorities, Towers Perrin go on to assert that Talent and Performance management systems are the number one priority, with a number of other service delivery issues following closely behind, as illustrated in the chart below:

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet shared his views on why social networking tools will go enterprise: All your employees are using them.  The post draws on Forrester's Third Annual Social Technographics Profile which indicates that more than 80% of US internet users are now active in social media.  Dignan points to the table below showing the social activities of users and suggests that we're close to the tipping point where the use of social tools in the workplace becomes inevitable.

What I find interesting when looking at these studies side by side is that the use of social tools is not featured in HR's current list of priorities, despite the hype surrounding them.  Perhaps Gartners forecast that mainstream adoption of 'social' in Human Capital Management (HCM) is 5 to 10 years away helps to explain this?

To finish off this week I've found something for those of us feeling overwhelmed by talk of virtual desktops, VoIP and 'the cloud'.  Carolyn Duffy Marsan's post 12 words you can never say in the office is a helpful way of 'joining the dots' on technologies old and new.

I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more please browse my bookmarks.

This week I've been working on making StepStone Ideas available to the ETWeb and EasyCruit customer communities.  I'm excited that all StepStone Community members are now able to post ideas for product enhancement and to discuss and vote on the ideas of others. 

The aim?  StepStone seeks to benefit from 'the wisdom of the crowd' based on the belief that two heads can be better than one and that 5,000 heads can be better still.  We feel that crowd-sourcing, is one of many ways to engage with customers and to get a deeper understanding of the pains and priorities in managing talent so that empathetic solutions can be found. 

Collaborating with customers is not new - however with the advent of social media, tools now exist to do it in a more transparent and engaging way.

StepStone Ideas has been designed to give community members an opportunity to share challenges, priorities and potential solutions so that StepStone can continue to develop products that meet the needs of customers.

Of course, collaboration is a two-way street, without engaging customers, suppliers cannot focus on finding ways to help.  This is as applicable to providers such as StepStone as to HR practitioners yet I regularly read that HR needs to prove its relevance and its value to other business functions.

In the current market, organisations are turning to HR departments to use the expertise in macro-level people management to get structures into shape and employees primed to deliver above average performance.  How is HR responding to these challenges? 

How does HR engage with its customers to understand what is needed? What techniques are HR practitioners using to design solutions to these challenges?  How are the ideas evaluated and selected?  How is success measured?  Do tools like StepStone Ideas have a place in your HR function? 

It seems like every other post that I've read in the past 7 days has related to Twitter in one way or the other.  Whether it be reports from the ERE expo, Sarah Radwanick's recent post at comScore about the explosion of Twitter traffic not being being driven by the usual suspects  or Ben Parr's 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends the blogosphere has been jam-packed with content - perhaps down to the rumours earlier in the week that Google were about to buy Twitter. 

I'm a Twitter newbie (there's probably a tw-erm for that) and I find the whole thing incredibly interesting.  Today the little lexical definition that appeared on my Twitter home page grabbed my attention: tw-histor-i, an ongoing and hypnotic social experiment.  For me that definition about sums it up. 

Thats not to say that organisations cannot benefit from using Twitter - in recruitment advertising the likes of Twitterjobsearch and TweetMyJobs have sprung-up to bring organisations and candidates closer to each other and in the customer service and support world Twitter is being used to reach-out to customers.  A posting to Read Write Web a year ago on how to get customer service via Twitter gives some great examples of organisations proactively reaching-out to respond to a 'cries for help' and begs the question - how many organisations do the same with confused candidates or with employees on the verge of resigning?