Organisational Use of Web 2.0 Technologies: An Australian Perspective

This paper is a discussion of an exploratory research on how organisations use Web 2.0 technologies to improve capabilities for achieving a competitive advantage. Web 2.0 technologies are commonly referred to as social media in organisations. The research in this paper was accomplished via case studies with Australian organisations from different industry sectors to establish the use of Web 2.0 technologies in a context different from personal social networks. Major findings indicate that Australian organisations have realised the opportunities of Web 2.0 and are increasingly adopting this new media, although at this stage adoption is ad hoc. The most popular technologies in organisations include blogs, youtube, myspace and flickr, which are successfully combined with other types of Web 2.0 technologies to support the nature of work in specific industries. This paper also highlights that Web 2.0 technologies can add to organisational dynamic capabilities by engaging customers to promote products and extend cost effectively market products and services and lifting their brand. However, it identified an undesirable outcome that not all comments from customers are positive. Thus with Web 2.0 there is an urgent need for real time analysis of the large amount of data in terms of customer responses to cull out negative comments and sustain the organisation's good reputation and competitive advantage.