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By Stowe Boyd, GigaOmPro | September 25, 2012

Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a new class of social tools based on the principles of open social networks like Facebook and Twitter but oriented to the specific needs of businesses and professionals. This report provides a brief synopsis of the business context for work media technologies, with special attention on how businesses are confronted with a set of disruptive forces and how they are responding by heading in new directions, which we call disruption vectors. Work media is an element of those vectors, and work media products will be judged based on their utility therein…

We should expect that more-focused products —those that satisfy one specific kind of communication among well-defined communities —are most likely to succeed. For example, consider Yammer’s integration of idea management by a partnership with Spigit instead of building in idea management natively. Likewise, IBM and Socialcast were early innovators in backward integration with earlier nonsocial enterprise-software solutions. However, that strategy may have only a limited utility as more and more enterprise-software companies acquire or develop their own solutions. As a result, these three vendors are rated the highest in this category.