10 social media and technology mega-trends to watch

A great, ever-expanding vista lies beyond Facebook fans and tweeted links

I just read a fascinating (and lengthy!) report from McKinsey on tech-enabled business trends to watch and thought it was important enough to summarize for our community. Here are some highlights from this excellent report:

1. Crowd-sourcing moves into the mainstream

In the past few years, the ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 percent of executives recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities.

2. Making the network the organization

Companies are pushing substantially beyond crowd-sourcing to build and manage flexible employee networks that extend across internal and external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility.

3. Knowledge worker productivity

Knowledge workers typically are high-paid employees, so increasing their productivity is crucial. Collaboration technologies are emerging to do just that.