I wanted to kick off the new year by outlining a few of the things that we expect to see happen in the world of enterprise social software and communities in 2009.  We learned a lot last year, and are eager to apply these lessons to this new year.  From our perspective, here are the top 5 things to watch for in enterprise communities for 2009:

1. Marketing will become more of a team sport 

For a while now, we've all been talking about how "markets are conversations" and how marketing is shifting from a company-controlled monologue to a dialog.  Ok, got it.  This next year, I believe we'll talk less about conversing with customers and more about collaborating with them.  This goes beyond applying traditional marketing techniques to social channels, and even beyond listening to and talking with customers.  Increasingly, customers will be thought of as part of the team.  In a down economy, the advantages of this are actually quite significant.  Businesses can grow in this environment without more resources if their customers roll up their sleeves and help: help provide support, help design new product offerings and innovate, help nurture loyalty, and help attract new customers by word of mouth.  As more and more companies figure this out, we expect...

2. The market's focus will shift rapidly from technology to business value

Last year's conversations tended to focus primarily on the soup of enabling social technologies that make communities possible and secondarily on connecting the dots (usually loosely) to the business benefits.  Next year, I anticipate this emphasis and order will flip.  We're starting to see this shift already.  Folks (and their RFPs) are less often starting with, "I need a blog... I need a wiki... or, do you support voting?" and more often starting with "I need to increase customer loyalty... I want to enhance how I attract, learn from, and care for my customers... and, perhaps most importantly, here are the things that are different about my business that a community needs to address".  I believe that this shift is, in large part, due to a maturing enterprise social software marketplace.  The macro-economic climate will accelerate this shift even more.  With greater attention on business value...

3. Customer communities and employee communities will be increasingly recognized as different markets

We've all been told that the same generic suites of social technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, etc...) can power employee communities and customer communities alike.  I don't believe this to be the case.  Our experience this last year strongly suggests that employee communities and customer communities are *distinctly* different markets: they have different buyers, different value propositions and use cases, and the technology ecosystems that surround them are quite dissimilar.  As the available social software suites/platforms continue to mature next year, my hunch is that this will become abundantly clear.  The greater the divide becomes between these two business uses of community, the greater the recognition will be that...

4. One-size-fits-all communities no longer fly

Our experience suggests that all business-purposed communities are unique.  And this uniqueness is more than skin-deep -- it includes the shape and feel of the community, not just the look and logo.  White-label social suites might work for internal collaboration (employee communities).  But to effectively engage and interact with customers, a richer set of capabilities is required.  We're finding that new and different kinds of community activities need to be supported.  I believe that this year, more and more folks will demand true fit and flexibility as they realize that a one-size-fits-all community isn't enough for their business, their brand, their customers.  And then, we'll come full circle...

5. Greater pressure will be put on technologies to fit and adapt

A shift in attention away from technology to business value, compounded with a challenging and dynamic business climate, will actually put more pressure back on the technologies involved.  The value of a community that can cost-effectively fit a business's unique needs and adapt to a changing economic environment will overshadow the desirability of any specific feature bell or whistle.  As a result, the differences between different social software offerings (their advantages/disadvantages) and vendor approaches will become more acutely visible.  True community "platforms" on which unique customer communities can be rapidly and easily designed and built (from the types of information shared, to the types of member interactions, to the overall user experiences) will win over white-label "web suites" offering a limited set of pre-integrated generic social applications.

So those are the top 5 as we see them.  I'd love to hear your thoughts as well... what would you add to the list?

Finally, if you haven't seen it, a related must read is Peter Kim's "Social Media Predictions 2009", which includes the thoughts of many forward-thinking individuals in the broader social media space.