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Douglas Rushkoff spoke at Pivot, a conference on branding, last year and recently linked to a video of his talk. It's worth watching if you're involved in social CRM or any other sort of social business.

For the first approximately 20 minutes of the talk, Rushkoff rants about the corporatization of the Internet and summarizes his book Life Inc. He explains the origins of the modern corporation during the mercantilist period of European economic development, and how branding came about as a means to put a friendly face on mass production. But during the final 10 minutes, Rushkoff gives some practical advice to companies trying to make sense of the social Web.

We told you earlier today about IBM's strategy of targeting developers with its new enterprise 2.0/social business platform. Part of IBM's strategy is to emphasize open standards such as ActivityStreams, OAuth and OpenSocial.

"Open standards" is a major part of the strategy of several vendors, such as Jive and Socialtext. We published a paper last year on the subject of web-oriented architecture and open standards that was sponsored by Socialtext.

How important are open standards to you as a customer?

We saw in the Twitter stream yesterday a slide for IBM's new social business tool kit that is being unveiied today at Lotusphere. The details are bare but you can see how social business will take center stage this week at the annual event.

The social tool kit is a developer play as pointed out by RedMonk's James Governor in a recent post. IBM is a heavy adopter of social technologies that have been developed in consumer, social technologies. Developing a tool kit is a smart, natural step and a necessary one for IBM. Getting beyond the image of a legacy technology still dogs Lotus. IBM needs developers in order to make the mind shift with customers that Lotus is a platform more than a network of apps.

IT project failure expert Michael Krigsman shared some thoughts on social CRM adoption at Dreamforce last December. Krigsman has posted a video from Dreamforce and added some thoughts.

Frankly, I'm surprised there are enough companies that have tried and failed to adopt social CRM that anyone can deduce any trends yet. It's still such a new technology/strategy. But Krigsman's advice is good. It may seem obvious, but the problems he mentions are exactly the ones that trip projects up.

Today, enterprise social software vendors are in a position of having to both differentiate products in a crowded market and make the business case for social in the enterprise. "Process" has become a mantra for companies trying to make the case for a particular solution, and innovation management software is not immune from this tendency.

This week Spigit, a leading innovation management vendor, announced its new product SpigitFusion. SpigitFusion emphasizes decision making and - you guessed it - process.

Last November, another leading innovation management vendor, BrightIdea, made a similar case when it launched its Innovation Suite.

In its own words, Buddy Media offers "power tools for Facebook." Its service is, in essence, a content management system for Facebook geared towards the needs of large organizations. For example, Starwood Hotels uses Buddy Media to manage Facebook pages for its hotel chains. Each individual hotel can have its own Facebook page, and all the pages for the brand can be centrally managed.

Other companies using Buddy media in ABC, Johnson & Johnson and Target. According to Joe Ciarallo, director of communications at Buddy Media,seven of the 10 biggest brands in terms of advertising spending are Buddy Media clients. Last week, it won the Crunchie for best enterprise startup of the 2011.

Two new reports released from Forrester explore the state of video in the enterprise. "Information Workers Are Not Quite Ready For Desktop Videoconferencing" tells us that most workers polled do not want to use desktop video conferencing. Meanwhile, the "TechRadar For Content & Collaboration Professionals: Enterprise Video, Q1 2011" report looks at video in general across the enterprise.

"Although video hasn't yet taken hold as the way we communicate or work, it will play an important role in connecting the increasingly distributed workforce," says the Radar report. The reports authors cite research showing that 46% of information workers are expected to be telecommuters by 1016.

Yesterday SMART@znmeb (SMART stands for "social media analytics research toolkit"), a SUSE Linux appliance created by Ed Borasky, added sentiment analysis to its set of features. The toolkit now includes texttir, a sentiment analysis package created in the statistical programming language R. SMART@znmeb includes other open source tools that include data mining, dashboarding and data visualization.

Borasky says textir is the first open source sentiment analysis library he's found that he thinks may actually work. "Most of the vendors sell a sentiment analysis tool of some kind or another, and the customers that have tested multiple tools spend a lot of time trying to figure out why they give different answers," he says. He also cautions that sentiment analysis is vulnerable to spam and other gaming tactics and requires a large investment in hardware.

According to Good Technology's final report on new enterprise smart phone activations in 2010, Android is holding steady. Good sells a popular device management solution for non-BlackBerry devices. It reports rapid adoption of the iPhone and iPad in the enterprise. But Android is holding its own as well, with nearly 30% of overall new activations and 40% of new smartphone (ie, non-tablet) activations.

It's important to stress, however, that Good does not support BlackBerry devices so this is in no way an indication of how these devices are being adopted relative to RIM's products. Also, this data only tracks new activations.

Jaspersoft, vendors of the open core business intelligence application of the same name, today announced new reporting tools designed to handle big data. It's adding more than a dozen connectors for databases such as Cassandra, Hadoop and Netezza. The connectors will enable people to use Jaspersofts' native syntax to query big data sources. This is a big step forward for Jaspersoft users wanting to work with big data, and should make Jaspersoft an attractive option for organizations looking for an off-the-shelf big data BI tool. The connectors are available from Jaspersoft's open source site.