The big innovation to accompany Wimbledon this year is that you can follow every shot in Second Life. The natural reaction to this is perhaps a dismissive “So what” (that exact conversation is happening on the Melcrum blog).

Second Life is an example of the “Social Media” - the collaborative internet, or ‘web 2.0’ - about which an enormous amount has been written over the past 12 months. It’s in this context that I’d like to consider the Virtual Wimbledon experiment – i.e. have the social media really entered the mainstream? And, as an extension of that, are the social media going to really start to have an impact on our day to day (working) lives?

A research document published recently describes how internal communication professionals can “use Social Media to Engage Employees”. This “ground-breaking report on integrating social media tools into your communications” covers everything from blogs ( like this one ) to wikis to Second Life. But what of your real world experiences? Has your organisation embraced the social media? Do you have a collaborative employee engagement strategy in place? Or is web 2.0 just another communications fad that will pass into obscurity like KM

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences – an ipod nano to the most deserving contributor every month.

Rachel