As part of the Open Enterprise 2009 study, Oliver Marks and I will be reviewing case studies submitted to us, looking for the most interesting and innovative stories about companies — large or small — adopting Web 2.0 technologies. We will include the eight most interesting ones — after some further research — in our report, and we will award the most compelling case study the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award. That winning company will also have the opportunity to present at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this summer.

If you’d like to participate, please fill out the form, below, on or before 22 May 2009.

New survey on Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. 

http://bit.ly/E2confSurvey

Contribute your answers and see what stats the industry comes up with. 

Complete and enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

Jason Rothbart is one of the founders of Groupswim, a SAS enterprise collaboration solution that debuted at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 as a finalist in the conference Launch Pad. I caught up with him recently, and explored his perspective on Web 2.0 tools adoption in the world of business.

• Jason’s title is VP of Customer Success, which I think says something important about the orientation of the company.

• Jason affirms a bimodal sales model: some clients are buying really quickly, because their “heads are on fire”, where in other cases acquisition is very, very slow because you need to get the CFO to sign off on any purchase.
• His insights on how tools virally spread through a company or top-down in enterprise-wide deals confirm what we have seen in other conversation.
• Jason points out that the there is a stake difference between clearcut returns — like increased sales — but other benefits are more nebulous: “But anyone who tells you that they can tell you exactly what the ROI is is either lying or doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

The interaction with Jason is a lot closer to the deal side of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but that aspect of what is going on is just as revealing as the more academic and theoretical issues that seem to become foremost with practitioners.

Hiya all! A quick blog post to let everyone know that we’re putting more fuel into our Twitter account – @e2conf

Please follow us if you’d like to get 140-characters of info about the enterprise 2.0 industry. And we want to hear from you. Please DM us with any inquiries or @ us any links to information, articles, blog posts, or other tidbits of interest you want us to share with the enterprise 2.0 community. We’ll retweet whatever we catch (as long as it’s relevant).

You can also find us on Facebook – our wall is a great place for you to post information about your company, self, interests, jobs (needed or wanted).

The same goes for MyE2 – the conference social network we launched last week. (But you’ve got to be registered for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference to have access.)

You can also always leave a comment here on this blog – we’re keeping tabs on it all.

Have a great week folks!

~ Janetti aka @janerri

Your Enterprise 2.0 Conference Community Manager

The truly unique characteristics of Twitter are its simplicity and lack of specific purpose or application. Twitter is merely a digital conversation; albeit one that’s constrained to short statements of 140 characters or less. Like any conversation, you choose to talk to one other person at a time or broadcast out to many. You can make your conversations private or public. You can choose to blather, or to comment on everything from walking your dog to world affairs. You can follow and share your thoughts with thousands of people or you can offer your attention to a select few.  As with any live conversation, contribute something particularly witty, funny or unique and your comment could be repeated to millions of users by Twitter’s digital word of mouth, also known as a re-tweet. At its core, Twitter is just a platform for simple conversation and that’s what makes it unique.

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Telligent is a 5 year old 105 person social network software company: in this conversation with CEO Rob Howard we discuss the challenges and opportunities for the industry.

Rob is seeing far deeper knowledge from customers and prospects about the Enterprise 2.0 space, as people understand the technology and benefits.

The Telligent value propositions of supporting innovation and collaboration communities around both structured and unstructured content, both internally and outside the firewall is aligned with their analytics software, which helps prove ROI.

Rob thinks we’re at an interesting point on the growth ‘S’ curve of the entire space and is aware of the need to innovate ahead of the larger vendors who are rolling up complete suites. He predicts a lot of change during the next year with a weeding out of the space at all size vendors.

Rob is surprised by just how invested some companies now are with collaborative technologies these days, which are increasingly intertwined around their existing systems.

Telligent software is helping tie different together back end technologies at client installs – erp, sales management, supply change – to increase efficiency of information exchange: they are seeing clients find this more useful than email.

Rob is seeing a lot more to down adoption as senior management understand engagement of employees and customers, and Telligent are seeing some very innovative use of their technology by customers such as Dell.

I’ll be talking to Telligent customers in the next couple of weeks.

Yammer was announced with great fanfare at the Techcrunch50 conference last fall, and David Sacks, the CEO, has had the opportunity to work closely with a large and growing list of enterprise clients since. He and I recently caught up, and the time was well spent:

A few of the insights I gained:

• Yammer was called “Twitter for enterprises, or Twitter with a business model”, he recounted, but it is evolving into a larger service with more collaborative support.

• As far as Twitter goes, David doesn’t see them as a direct competitor, since it is so geared to open discourse. Selling private areas for business discussion doesn’t fit with that model, he feels, so Twitter might not go there ever. Yammer, on the other hand, is geared to privacy as the default, which makes more sense in the business context.
• Yammer also dropped the 140 character limit that defines Twitter, and which makes sense for a consumer and SMS-integrated product.
• David points out that the buyers of technology in the enterprise market are not necessary the end users. Yammer has developed a wide range of administration tools — privacy, usage policies, user management — that appeal to the IT buyers or management. But end users really want to use web 2.0 style tools even while at work.
• Yammer supports ‘bootleg’ adoption, since anyone with an ‘company.com’ email address can start using the product, so it doesn’t require corporate sign-off, but the admin tools do.
• David has found a greater willingness by users and management to try new SAS models, which favors start-ups and leads to innovation.
• Businesses have clearly come to the realization they shouldn’t necessarily own or manage their own software, David thinks. But the hybrid, viral model that comes with a product like Yammer means that companies don’t have to make any decision about buying until it has become widely used and popular.
• Yammer seems to have an immediate impact on the way work gets done. In his experience, in traditional large companies people really don’t know what people are working on. “If you think about how tools like Facebook and Twitter allow people to remain connected with large groups of friends, and think about how that could work in business, I think its going to make companies more efficient [...] and they will have much more engaged employees because the employees will feel much more connected to their colleagues and what is happening in the company.”

While David is an unabashed evangelist for Yammer’s specific offering, I found his thoughts practical and not at all bubbling with marketing hyperbole.

Tools like Yammer represent a real turning point for business, I think, where more open social discourse (even given the privacy constraints of business) and ambient awareness become foreground activities, displacing fully closed discourse tools like email, and the batch mode mindset of org charts and monthly management reports.

Are you registered for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference coming up this June in Boston? If so, join the Enterprise 2.0 community site and network, network, network.

With your registration to this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference you also have access to MyE2, the conference community site and social network where attendees can meet and connect.

The MyE2 site was designed specifically for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference so comes with custom features that will improve your experience before, during and after the event:

Your Profile
Once you log in be sure to upload an avatar picture and fill out your profile fields. This will help other attendees search for you and find out who you are. Show your personal tags and history or simply share your LinkedIn, Facebook and blog URLs. To get your photos and Tweets added to your profile page, please update your Twitter ID and photo sharing RSS in the settings tab. View your public profile via the “My Page” tab, the direct link is http://my.e2conf.com/account/settings/profile/

Official Conference Tag (#e2conf)
Tag your Tweets or Flickr photos with e2conf and they’ll be pulled into our public event streams for everyone to see. Tagged tweets will also get pulled into the MyE2 homepage in real-time for community activity updates.

Member Search & Messaging

To message someone, you must first add them as a friend. Locate their profile in “Member Search”, and click on “Add to friends” on their profile page. Once they accept your invitation you can send them private messages.

To compose a new message, start in the ‘Account’ tab. Once there you can also set your email alerts for when people send you messages. If you choose to get email alerts, please be sure to whitelist webmaster@e2conf.com to avoid spam filtering.

Forums
Use the forums feature to start discussions around your topics of interest. The Enterprise 2.0 team has already set up a few initial forums to help you get started, including details about hotel and travel discounts. Check it out at my.e2conf.com/forum and add your topic to the mix.

The Backchannel
The Backchannel is a way for you to talk to other attendees while in a conference session. It allows attendees to surface their thoughts, communicate reactions, add context or expand upon something the speaker said, and so on.

For participating in and tracking conversations feel free to use the Meebo chat room or Twitter, both updated in real time on the backchannel page. By using the official #e2conf Twitter tag, along with the session-specific tags provided on-site, attendees can stay in the know about what’s happening throughout the conference.

Schedule Builder
Get the most out of all the sessions and activities taking place at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference by pre-planning your event schedule. Search through the program and click the orange plus sign for details and then ‘Add this session to your schedule.’ Having a personalized schedule before you get on-site will help you stay focused on the content that’s most appealing to you, while giving you more time to network and meet fellow attendees in person.

ACTIVATING YOUR ACCOUNT
If you did not activate your MyE2 account alongside registration, you will find a link on the MyE2 homepage (my.e2conf.com) . Please use your Enterprise 2.0 Conference registration login details for MyE2. If you forgot your password, please go to http://my.e2conf.com/forgotpass for assistance or see our activation page for more details.

~ ~ ~
If you have questions or feedback about the MyE2 site, please let our webmaster know via adunne@techweb.com. It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be working on it through the show. MyE2 was built for your use so we welcome you to tell us how to make it better.

* Note: hyperlinks included in this post require you to have a MyE2 or Enterprise 2.0 Conference registration login.

I had hoped to interview Dion Hinchcliffe, of Hinchcliffe & Co, back at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, but he turned the tables and interviewed me instead. But I tracked him down this week, and spent some time talking through some issues in enterprise 2.0.

Some highlights:

1. Dion is a treasure trove of case studies, starting with a great story about wiki use spreading in AOL years ago, at the very outset of Web 2.0 adoption in large companies.

2. Regarding adoption of Web 2.0, he quotes Euan Semple, “the easiest way to do this is to do nothing,” meaning that the millenials will pull these technologies into the enterprise. He also points out that since web 2.0 tools are more conversational you have to wait for people to warm up before joining, as opposed to point-and-shoot tools like email.
3. I asked if the specific culture of companies influences adoption. He responded that we should see things that we didn’t expect to see, since these tools lead to emergent benefits. We will see a broad range of responses, since “organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways.”
4. Dion agrees that there is a bimodal division in adoption because of the Econolypse: either companies “circle the wagons” and do nothing new, or else they embrace the crisis as an opportunity to explore lower-cost, web 2.0 alternatives. He cites the Transunion case study published by Socialtext, as an example.
5. Most requested: new ways of collaborating with partners outside the firewall. He thinks that these needs for extra-enterprise collaboration are still unmet, but working “better, faster, better” within the walls of the business is still the fundamental driver for adoption.

A great discussion, and very good advice for tool vendors thinking about positioning their products in this space, as well.

The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is a great opportunity for companies developing new products to compete for the chance to present them in front of the largest audience in the Enterprise 2.0 community.

Individuals and companies now have the chance to post their video pitches of the most interesting, desired, wild, crazy, and/or cool tools and technologies for consideration. Then, starting on May 8th, the community will vote for the pitches they think show the most promise.

Take note of the participation schedule below and add your vote to the mix.

Twitter Round

Using your Twitter account, publish a pitch of your product or idea in 140 characters or less, but you must include the tag #E2L09. Links to reference material are allowed and encouraged:

May 1: Begin accepting submissions
May 8: Submissions closed and voting begins
May 14: Voting closes and Sweet Sixteen Finalists announced

Sweet Sixteen (Video Round)

Pitch your product or idea in a one-minute video you will upload to the Launch Pad site

May 18: Begin accepting submissions
May 22: Video submissions closed and voting begins
May 28: Voting closes and Elite Eight Finalists announced

Elite Eight (Video Round)

Pitch your product or idea in a two-minute video you will upload to the Launch Pad site

June 1: Begin accepting submissions
June 5: Video submissions closed and voting begins
June 11: Voting closes and Final Four announced

Final Four (Live Presentations)

At Enterprise 2.0, the final four companies will pitch their product or idea in a five-minute video. Use of slides, video and demos are allowed and encouraged.

June 24: The 4 finalists will present their ideas at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on June 24th in Boston, where the audience will decide which one makes the final cut. The winning Launch Pad participant receives a free turnkey Pod (valued at over $7,500) in the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Sponsor Pavilion.

To see which company emerges victorious you should attend the Conference or Demo Pavilion, so register today. Watch the official Launch Pad page for instructions on how you can post your video.

Video Upload Instructions

1. Create a free account on this page.
2. Make a video of your application (preferably with voiceover describing it), or a video of yourself describing the application.
3. Upload the video to the Enterprise 2.0 site

Voting Instructions

1. You don’t need to log in to vote, but just one vote per person.
2. Click on videos to watch them.
3. Select the best applications by giving it a higher number of stars in the ratings block below the video.
4. The applications with the highest average vote will move onto the next round. The 4 finalists will be asked to appear on stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

Please register with code CNACEB08 for 20% off a conference or workshop pass, or to receive your free Pavilion Pass. If you have questions about the Launchpad process or schedule, please contact Stowe Boyd, the E2 Launch Pad Head Honcho.