IBM says a study it did of some 1700 Chief Executive Officers worldwide found that many indeed - or should be - grasping social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation.

If you're looking for a last-minute gift for Mother's Day, don't bother sending her a Facebook invite - chances are, she's probably already on it.

Microsoft is introducing a phone-a-friend feature into its Bing search engine, allowing searchers to ask their Facebook and Twitter contacts to supplement information gathered by the search engine itself.

If your employer or a potential employer asked you to hand over the keys to your house so they could search your possessions looking for something unspecified, I suspect you would be a little surprised and not a little outraged. Well, over the last few months there has been a significant number of reports of employers and colleges doing the digital equivalent of asking for your house keys by requesting Facebook passwords from employees, applicants and students.

Getting a positive return on investment from a social media campaign is about more than tracking the number of your Facebook fans and Twitter followers. It's about linking the social strategy to measurable business objectives, according to Gartner, which says most businesses aren't doing this.

VMware Thursday announced that its SocialCast sharing tool will now work with Lithium Technologies tools to capture and integrate external customer data.

In a move to expand functionality and allow for simpler adoption of its market-leading enterprise social collaboration offerings, Jive Software has released a series of new updates that go live Wednesday.

Last week I posted to Buzzblog a list of the 50 best "bragging rights" claimed by users of Google+.

Much has changed since we examined the ongoing war between Facebook and Twitter in the autumn of 2010. The stakes are higher, the competition has increased, and we see LinkedIn and Google roaring into the social networking arena like never before.

Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

Sure, companies have started using Web 2.0 tools, but one man says we've only seen a glimmer of the serious change that they're going to bring to the way we do business.

The meet-up in San Francisco last month had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party.

CPS Energy, the largest municipality-owned gas and electric company in America, needed to get a better grip on its budget and its budgeting process. Since CPS Energy was an enterprise SAP user, more SAP AG software was the obvious and lowest-risk way for CIO Christopher Barron to go.

While Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks have been wildly popular with consumers, efforts to measure the technology's success for businesses have returned mixed results. In fact, recent research from the Burton Group indicates that business leaders have struggled to define best use cases, measure their success and chart returns on investment.

But analysts warn that companies should be prepared for potential online user attacks.

To outshine your competitors and win the gig in today's economy, here's a secret to success: Don't abandon the steadfast career tips passed down from generations, but rather, refine them -- with a keen eye for the value in Web 2.0 tools like social networking.