Technology News: Wikis: Collaboration and the Productivity Revolution.Collaboration is one of the underestimated facets of Web 2.0, but it’s one that businesses should not ignore, writes PBWiki CEO Jim Groff. The real opportunity of Web 2.0 is allowing business-to-business collaboration, which improves productivity.

The Web 2.0 revolution has spawned hundreds of cover stories, thousands of companies, and millions of words of hype. But there’s one thing it hasn’t brought: Profits.

With the coming of the credit crunch and the global recession, hype won’t pay the bills. That’s why the next wave of Web 2.0 will be using collaboration to help businesses do more with less.

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Either your customers already use social networking tools or you have an untapped, online audience. So get out there and network on Facebook, MySpace, and any of the other popular destinations. But do it on your own terms with whatever feels right; everyone can see through a business trying to co-opt new media. Here’s how to make the most of one of the current favorites, Twitter.

Be yourself. Twitter lets you post blurbs of up to 140 characters; it’s good for a quick note about what you’re doing. But you can also use it to build buzz within a fanbase by referencing things that aren’t quite public. (Or let customers track your sales.) People will follow you on Twitter if they think you’ll reveal news first, and that audience is likely to blog about it somewhere.

Connect to Customers with Twitter – Business Center – PC World.

As the recession rapidly sucks the momentum out of Web 2.0′s heyday, with it may go one of the era’s most defining terms: the job title “social media expert.”

For the past few years, people who identify with that title–as well as social media consultants, social media strategists, and social media marketers, depending on what they want to call it–have been unavoidable in the Web 2.0 social scene. You’d meet them at the endless litany of industry cocktail parties, at Tech Meetup events on both coasts, and at the likes of the Web 2.0 Expo. A search for “social media expert” on business networking site LinkedIn yields 175 results. “Social media consultant” yields nearly 400, and “social media strategist” about 300. Read More on CNET

According to Dictionary.com, trust is partially defined as “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.”  This definition is a good description of how many younger employees, those who grew up with Web-based social networks, see Facebook, Twitter, and other sites dedicated to meeting friends and sharing experiences across cultural and geographic boundaries.  This new approach to socializing becomes a problem when these meetings and this sharing include participation by ‘friends’ with social engineering in mind. More on TechRepublic…Technorati Tags: social media, social, risk, security, twitter, teens, youth, adolescents, safety, internet