• Young people entering the workforce communicate with Web 2.0 tools. They want more than just email.
• Cloud computing is an easy way to launch a service and scale, but it’s far from being a true utility like electricity.
• To innovate, you need to harness the wisdom of your network. First start with your staff and then move to partners and your audience.
• When you create a collaborate Enterprise 2.0 space, TRUST your audience. Release the desire to control. Don’t control. Even the CIA recommends this.
• Change management. Adoption requires evangelism and constant reminders and associating Web 2.0 tools with everything you’re doing.
• Don’t just deploy social media for the sake of deploying social media. Develop a strategic business rationale.
• There are tons of companies that offer business social networking solutions. Some are trying to offer everything, and some are just trying to solve a single problem.
• Allow people to engage with your company outside of your .com business address. Let them engage with your brand where they already like to go, like Facebook, MySpace, etc.

And here’s a summary of all my coverage from the event. It’s a total of 23 posts of which seven include video. Enjoy. :)

• Introducing Social Networking into your Enterprise
• Social Network Shoot Out
• VIDEO: Karen Appleton on why social networking is critical for business
• VIDEO: Peter Biddle, encryption will be like air bags
• Mashups: Best practices and best examples
• Successful enterprise-level wiki implementations
• Developing business rationales for an enterprise 2.0 strategy
• Drive business growth from the bottom up community development
• Creating a socialization plan for deploying social media in the Enterprise
• VIDEO: If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can you
• Making sense of the endless options for enterprise social networking
• Stowe Boyds post everything economy
• What blogging brings to business
• Innovation will be driven by the adoption of cloud computing
• Age doesnt matter and other realizations for enterprise 2.0 culture
• FedEx makes its services accessible outside of FedEx.com
• From the bottom up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community
• VIDEO: Selipsky on the flexibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• VIDEO: Richard Soley of OMG is waiting for more cloud computing standards
• VIDEO: Schmoozing on the eve of Enterprise 2.0
• Move all your IT to the cloud: Cloud computing providers try to convince CXOs to take the plunge
• VIDEO: Enterprise 2.0 inspired CoreMedia to reignite communications and write a book

Thanks to Alex Dunne for supplying all the photos for many of the posts. Make sure you check out his entire Flickr feed.

Participants in the shoot out include:

• Moderator Matthew Lees, Analyst
• Rob Howard of Telligent Systems
• Sam Lawrence of Jive Software
• Aaron Strout of Mzinga
• Michael Wilson of Small World Labs

The session is a Q&A session.

How did you get involved in social networking?

• Strout: Bank of America came to us and said we’ve got a line item for $1 million for community. We don’t know what we’re going to do with it. At that point I knew that this community thing is going to be big.

What’s your least favorite tech buzzword?

• Lawrence: Enterprise 2.0
• Strout: 140 characters or less
• Howard: Web 2.0
• Wilson: Cloud computing

Is social computing right for all organizations?

• Lawrence: If you have an anti-social culture, it’s not right. But it’s right for everyone else.
• Wilson: I’m having a hard time finding out who it’s not right for.
• Audience member: It’s different between fear-based culture vs. a secretive culture. Fear can’t handle it, secretive can.

What industry is primed for enterprise 2.0?

• Wilson: Media space has been their biggest growth space.
• Strout: Technology clients are the most difficult to deal with because they think they can physically build and manage it. Yet, at the same time they were primed to actually use it.

How do your orchestrate change management?

• Howard: Start putting meeting notes in the blog instead of emailing them out. People will soon learn and adapt.
• Wilson: Technology is only part of the solution, implementation is what really matters. Part of their process with clients is to send require community management assessment and training.

What question do you hate hearing from prospects?

• Howard: Can I get this in 24 hours? What bad things are going to happen?
• Wilson: What if somebody says something bad about us? Can we get a source code agreement on this?
• Lawrence: Can you give us $3 million of software for free? How am I going to monetize this?

Lawrence says whenever he gets these dumb questions he sends them back to Sharepoint.

In the end, nobody got hurt during the Social Network Shoot Out.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Revell’s said Pfizer’s first attempt at enterprise 2.0 was to set up a blog called DIGWWW to do the following:

• Facilitate discussion about Web 2.0 tools
• See how it can be replicated in the enterprise environment
• Influence technology direction within the company
• Look to inspire new approaches to collaboration within the company
• Be completely open for anyone within the company

In order to maintain the blog, a handful of issues came out of this:

• There was a lot of nervousness. They feared dissent with the classic response of “Who gave you permission to do this?”
• But to prove success, they forced themselves to post and comment
• To create engagement, they needed to nudge their coworkers. They sent repeated reminders and urged others to post.
• Every chance they had, they’d to tie the blog into day-to-day operations. Constantly reminding their colleagues of the online community.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Such was the introductory explanation from David Berlind who moderated a panel on mashups and their value in the enterprise. The discussion trended between best practices and examples of really cool mashups. So here’s a summary of some of the items brought up.

Best practices:

• Let people stay within the environment their comfortable with. So let sales people stay in Salesforce.com.
• Make sure your data is accessible and remixable. Unlock it and wrap it in ATOM feeds.
• Not all mashups are mission critical. Some are good enough. You can put one together in a day. Sometimes you need to do that so you can see the value quickly.
• Make sure your IT and business goals are aligned. Don’t get into a situation where there’s conflict. If business doesn’t get satisfaction from IT, they’ll take matters in their own hands. Sometimes they may just use a simple tool like Yahoo! Pipes or Popfly from Microsoft and create a tool to expose corporate content without approval from IT.
• Make it portable and reusable. Make sure they can be shipped off to other services, that they can move around the organization.
• To actually secure the mashups, you need to create a mashup platform.
• Heavy industry users of mashups are anyone that’s heavily involved with spreadsheets. Such example industries include insurance, financial services, and retail.
• You have to make these tools addictive so people will keep putting their information in to keep the mashup valuable.
• Build fault tolerance. The components are out of your control. Need to monitor. You can create a rules based system. For example, if this goes down then switch to this data source.
• Not all mashups include a map. :)

Some cool examples of mashups mentioned:
(Sorry I don’t have links, the panel just mentioned that they had seen these mashups before.)

• Registration mashup for conference: Pull in content from a variety of sources that have personal content like YouTube.
• Emergency response: Send information in real time when there are tragedies. This information could be even more powerful if it were sent to mobile devices. Great for mission critical use cases.
• Situation awareness: Homeland security can do constant level of monitoring across many variables. They have a constant holistic cross-referenced view as to what’s going on.
• Assembling a customer visit: Salesforce.com mashup per customer that shows the weather for that date of visit, the golf courses, happenings on Eventful, and restaurants in the area.
• FaceForce: Puts the Facebook interface directly into Salesforce.
• Human resources matchup: When you interview someone, this matchup goes out and scans all social networks and sees tons of information about their personal life.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

First, some examples of successful wikis:

• Vodafone: Combine blogs and wikis. CEO blogs on the wiki. 65,000 employees.
• Leapfrog: Their finance department has a wiki. It’s designed to give new users a tour, plus it acts as a practical home page with useful things.
• SAP - SAP’s wiki (sdn.sap.com) has 800,000+ registered users using the wiki. Could conceivably be the largest corporate wiki.
• Deutsche Bahn - With over 270,000 employees (only 80,000 are online) they have 15,000 using the wiki. They reward contributions to knowledge management with the 42nd Marvin Awards, referring to the paranoid android Marvin from Douglas Adams’ “HItchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Marvin’s answer to every question is 42.

Skrocki’s three tips for successful blogs and wikis:

1. Relax and TRUST your contributors - Give up control. People will use their common sense.
2. Seed the site for success - That means create content. Engage power users in pilot, you’ll need pre-launch evangelism, communication, and stakeholder buy-in. Set up training tools such as instructional videos, 101 sessions for & by users, getting started content, and FAQs.
3. Guide and nurture a self-sufficient community - Enable users to self-train, -police, -support, -evangelize, -organize, and most importantly -grow.

How to get people up and running on the wiki:

• Induction - Encourage people to write a personal profile
• Useful content that they need every day - e.g. Staff contact list
• Project management - Incorporate that into a repeatable cycle in your business
• Useful widgets - Add a task list or other tools that make it easy to use.
• Charts - Create useful dashboards with real-time data
• Internal blog - Share news and internal discourse
• Social organization - Encourage non-work use. You want people to become comfortable with the tool so let them use it that way.
• Permissions - Be as open as you can possibly be.

Recommended site: wikipatterns.com for advice on setting up and designing a wiki.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Pete Fields, Senior VP eCommerce division at Wachovia, told his company’s story of the process they went through to determine the business rationales for deploying social networking across the enterprise. Wachovia ended up rolling out a comprehensive Sharepoint deployment that involved all kinds of communications, IM, group chat, chat retention, one to one video conferencing, video blogging, blogging, enriched profiles, presence awareness, and a lot more

They had a situation where they knew this communications was relevent, but they didn’t know why. So they spent time trying to figure out what’s the business case of doing this in the enterprise.

Wachovia’s business rationales for deploying social networking tools across the enterprise were:

• Work more effectively across time and distance - Took travel budget to finance this social networking effort.
• Better connect and engage employees - Traditionally had company sports leagues to connect with each other. They realized the virtual relationships on social networks are as real as the relationships you create on the softball team or the company picnic.
• Mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce - As people get older and retire or simply leave the company, there’s a loss of knowledge assets. Social networking tools like wikis can capture that wisdom.
• Engage the Gen Y worker - They come to their company with engagement off the scale. Social networking is the way they communicate in their personal lives. They’ve grown up in flat worlds, playing games with people around the world. When they start experiencing friction in the workplace that doesn’t allow them to communicate in their way, they drop off their engagement. Their world is a combination of fact and opinion, plus their participation. They need a voice. They need an outlet.

Not nearly as impactful as the first four, here are Wachovia’s last five rationales.

• Position Wachovia as innovative and forward thinking
• Lift general employee engagement
• Reduce travel expenses
• Provide employees world-class tools with which to compete for business
• Support other key corporate initiatives like going paperless.

They anticipated these last five benefits, but they just didn’t stick like the first four.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

The three factors of urgency, fragmentation, and engagement are driving enterprise 2.0, said Woollen. The market and communications are changing. Where it’s changing to is not known. What is known is that top down rigid processes of an organization will not allow you to respond appropriately in this given environment. People have the desire to be connected. Social networks have proven that.

The traditional hierarchical corporate system doesn’t lend itself to social networks’ any-to-any style of collaboration. You’ll want to harness your staff’s creative energy through fun and engaging use of social networking tools. It’s worth it to you, because it can be far more costly in terms of loss of productivity and competitive innovation if you don’t engage your employees.

Referring to a study whose name I never caught, Woollen posed the question, “Where do enterprise applications fall short?” Those companies surveyed responded (in order of importance): populating and maintaining data, getting user acceptance, generating meaningful analytics, customizing CRM applications, measuring CRM project ROI, and identifying sales-process problems.

Think like a really good marketer

When introduced with a new product to sell, a good marketer works his internal resources. He first connects with a company expert on the product. He learns from that person or persons, and then moves to partners who may have different kinds of wisdom to the product or audience, such as a design firm and a lead generation firm. This is the kind of efficient methodical behavior you want to replicate within a social network, but amplified, across as many people and groups as possible. Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is take the behavior of a good marketer and make it leverageable and scalable across the entire organization so the business can benefit.

If you’re looking to leverage social capital, let your audience know that you want to break free from the hierarchical “us vs. them” mentality. It requires bottom up creativity, flexibility in communities, and users must be recognized within the organization.

The difference between consumer based social networking and enterprise-based social networking is the enterprise cares about monetizing these relationships. How do you go from concept to cash? Networks are not flat, they’re very complicated, and social networking tools need to reflect this in their DNA and how they harness the power of communications.

When you get into a business driven environment, it isn’t just who you know, it’s about the depth of that relationship. Woollen didn’t talk about this, but if you’re looking for a solution that answers this question, check out Hoover’s Connect. I interviewed the President of Hoover’s Connect and this is exactly the model of his social networking tool. It’s a business social networking tool like LinkedIn. But what’s different about Hoover’s Connect is they show the depth of each of your relationships by monitoring your email communications via Outlook and webmail.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

First issue with social networking in the enterprise is the difficulty for businesses to articulate what is it they want. When posed with the question, “What is the business problem you’re trying to solve?” they respond with answers like “Someone told me we should do this” or “We want to get our feet wet.”

Social media requires you to be agile. Enterprises are trying to be agile, but they can’t. Unlike the individual or small business, Fortune 100 companies can’t turn on a dime.

Once organizations can show the value of what they’re trying to accomplish, IT gets involved very quickly. And the business side gets very interested once they see the mounds of internal and external data that’s generated.

Often organizations think they need training wheel steps to getting on, and so they limit their launch to only internal. If you do start only internally, you won’t see any of the pain points that will result from outside criticism.

Blogging is a status symbol unlike email. When you publish externally its this public face you want to share. But even though you’re public, you’ll still want a space for an internal dialogue, where you can ask dumb questions and make mistakes. It’s important to have that internal safe harbor. When you’re a public company blogger, you don’t want to bust the perception that they’re an expert externally.

Launching an enterprise social network requires investment in a socialization plan. The “we will build it and they will come” attitude doesn’t work. State Farm learned that hard fact when they launched an internal blog and nobody came. They stepped back, and put in another effort to form a socialization plan to get people interested and involved. The step they took was to place tent cards at every State Farm office around the world. And that alone is what got morale and engagement to increase.

When you’re developing a socialization plan, look to develop a solution that taps into the self interest of the user. You have to figure out what you’re going to do for them. You want to create a situation where once they use it, they’ll quickly see the value.

Socialization is ongoing. It’s not just a first step that requires a grand announcement. You have to keep people engaged, and as users become more savvy, they’ll need additional functionality to stay interested.

One socialization example is to put up information that can only be found on a wiki. And then play a game with employees, like “Who wants to be a corporate millionaire?” If they want to play the game well, they’ll have to research the wiki for answers. It’s just a way to retain your users.

Socialization is a change management effort. You have to create a budget item. Think about forgoing funding for technology investment for a socialization program.

For millenials and Gen Y, social networking is not a fad. This is the way people will expect to work when they come to your organization. When they graduate and get into positions where they can make decisions within the organization, these are the tools they’re going to use. One panelist argued that this won’t be a revolution. Millenials won’t turn a company upside down. But like the transformation from voice mail to email for leaving messages, millenials and Gen Y will view email as being too slow and opt for social networking tools.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.