How to get into Enterprise 2.0

After the recent reporting by the BBC of the Forrester market forecast for a $4.6 spend on global enterprise 2.0, friends that I have not heard from for some time came out of the woodwork asking me how they could get a slice of that money.

Even though I agree completely with Euan Semple, with whom I have been working closely, that these things should not cost that much (our enterprise wiki cost about GBP16k for the year!) I do feel that there will be plenty of work for consultants so I got thinking about how to gain the experience that will be needed. Here are my ideas:

Step 1. Get accounts at all of the following, use them become very familiar with them:

Digg

Flickr

Facebook

Virb

Linkedin

Twitter

YouTube

Last.fm

Del.icio.us

Wikipedia (become a wikipedian)

Skype

AIM

GMail

Upcoming

Technorati

MyBlogLog

2. At the same time - start blogging (I suggest you start with a free account at Google - blogger)

3. Study enterprise Wikis (there are only two worth looking at: Socialtext and Atlassian Confluence).

4. Perform a couple of wiki roll-outs for charities / public sector for no pay.

5. Look at personal pages like Netvibes, iGoogle and Pageflakes

6. Having become familiar with bookmarking from step 1, look at enterprise bookmarking (Cogenz is one example)

7. Read the books: The wisdom of crowds, The tipping point, Wikinomics.

8. Read everything on this blog: http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/

If anyone has other suggestions, please leave comments.

Good luck!