First published on CloudAve.

In two weeks time I’ll be winging my way across the world for the inaugural San Francisco holding of the Enterprise 2.0 conference. As is the norm before large events like this, the emails have started pouring in already asking for times for briefings on products and services to be released during the conference.

In a bid to save frustration on all sides, and as a suggestion to my fellow media attendees, I thought I’d publish here my simple guide to securing time with me (bear in mind there’s hundreds of companies going to be at the event, I’m in SF for just one week and I like to sleep from time to time);

1. Please make it relevant. I’m a Cloud computing and SaaS guy with an interest in business process software and the culture shift needed to ease adoption of “Enterprise 2.0”. Sorry but there’s a bunch of things that simply aren’t in my sphere of interest. Please do some research and read my stuff to get a feel for what will interest and be relevant to me
2. I live in New Zealand, that’s a long way from SF and is in an entirely different timezone – if you want to engage me in a pre event briefing (something I’m not at all against), please take the time to work out when might be a suitable time for me. While I’m a very early riser who partly works in Pacific time, 3am is not a good time to be showing me the latest micro-blogging service for enterprise
3. Find out ways to engage me when you’ll get good attention. I’m a fitness fan and jog most mornings, especially when attending high-stress events like Enterprise 2.0. If someone comes to me and suggests a chat over a leisurely 5 mile run they’re likely to capture my undivided attention – it’s a good opportunity!
4. Work out what pushes my buttons – we all get jaded from lots and lots of calls and a million and one “me too” offerings. Find some way to reach out to me (and Cocktails are definitely NOT my thing) and your chances go up exponentially. I’ve written fairly extensively about a couple of companies lately precisely because their PR people connected with me in all the right ways – this is in no way a “pay for play” situation, merely a way to ensure you’re heard above the hubbub

So there you have it – a simple four step guide to ensuring your investment in media relations pays off. I’d be interested to hear what my fellow media attendees thoughts are….

The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:

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Initially posted on CloudAve - home of specialist cloud computing and SaaS commentary

From the program - Social media is all the rage in the consumer world and with some of the world’s leading consumer brands. Now businesses of all types and sizes are exploring the use of social media both for internal purposes and as a communications conduit to the outside world. But do the same principals and lessons learned from the consumer world apply to businesses? It’s time to get serious about social media adoption in business and ask the tough questions. What are we trying to achieve? Can social media possibly scale for enterprise consumption? How has social media proven effective and how are we measuring its effectiveness?

Peter Kim, Senior Partner, Dachis Corporation
Ben Foster, Strategy and Content Manager, Allstate Life Insurance
Greg Matthews, Director, Consumer Innovations, Humana
Morgan Johnston, Manager Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways

Social media sometimes is a tool to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – a cure chasing tool. Allstate has department called and for social.. and feels a need to use the tools to partner with organisations to asses where problems lie. Social media is a great tool within Jet Blue for;

• Real time “taking the pulse” of the feeling of the community
• Engaging with the community
• The ability to inform (730k Twitter followers helps!)
• Humanising the company

Humana is trying to reinvent themselves as a health – company more than just a healthcare company – social media and marketing helps them to innovate and find the bleeding edge ideas that will help transform the company. They created a site to gather some ideas – most of which will never see the light of day but some that might.

How do we incentivise and enable collaboration within an organisation? How to make it part of the fabric of the company? Enterprise 2.0 helps with this, embedding the tools that enable the cultural shift within an organisation – give the tools to the staff and stand back ie not try and control the use of them.

Two emerging areas where enterprise 2.0 stuff matters: customer service and innovation/new product development. Tension between top down and bottom up – also a company like Humana needs to be very aware of privacy with regards customer records so approaches it more by creating separate externally facing tools that don’t connect directly with internal data.

In development their is always tension between IT and the social media evangelists – need to get people in the same room to talk about their relative perspectives. It’s hard for IT given that as soon as something goes wrong they get nailed – and in a modern, social media driven world rapid development doesn’t sit particularly well with the traditional IT perspective (scope, develop, test, release) – need to deal with the concerns from both sides.

Things are merging – IT conferences talk about social, PR conferences talk about social. Social media is becoming the hub around whic

Drip some ink on a piece of fabric and watch what happens. Depending on the type of fabric, the blot spreads at different speeds along the warp and woof. The pattern that appears reveals as much about the fabric as it does about the ink. What does this have to do with social media? Here is a picture of a chain email diffusing through the social fabric, created by Cornell researcher Jon Kleinberg (picture taken from a Cornell University news article).

As I write, a Presidential news conference is going on, a broadcast event that I, like many of you, would have treated as ‘unmissable’ 10 years ago. Yet, today, I am happy to keep twhirl in my peripheral vision, trusting that if anything truly important is said, tweets or emails will come my way.  I have let a vast, trusted crowdsourced filter descend over my eyes. My changed behavior is just one symptom of the waning of broadcasting and the waxing of diffusecasting (I hereby claim credit for the term) as the central process in mass communications. Virality and word-of-mouth are just surface characteristics. Here is a deeper X-Ray view. Mass persuaders, read this if you value your future in your profession. Continue Reading »