The E2.0 community has spoken! Having survived the Twitter pitch, Jury selection and community vote, these four companies will demo live on stage at Enterprise 2.0 Boston on June 16, 2010.
Please help me in congratulating the Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 Launch Pad Final Four.
2. Doodle
4. MindQuilt
It’s Wednesday night, the big two days of the Enterprise 2.0 conference are coming to an end. I’ve blogged a ton and shot a lot of video at the conference. The overall sentiment I’m getting from all the attendees and from all the sessions I’ve attended is that enterprise 2.0 is not there yet, but it’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. Here’s a summary of the top learnings from the conference:
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. :)
Thanks to Alex Dunne for supplying all the photos for many of the posts. Make sure you check out his entire Flickr feed.
It’s the last session of Wednesday, I have absolutely no idea what this session is about, but with a title like “Social Network Shoot Out,” I’m hoping there’s going to be some arguing and maybe some pushing and shoving.
Participants in the shoot out include:
The session is a Q&A session.
How did you get involved in social networking?
What’s your least favorite tech buzzword?
Is social computing right for all organizations?
What industry is primed for enterprise 2.0?
How do your orchestrate change management?
What question do you hate hearing from prospects?
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.
Yesterday, Don Burke and Sean Dennehy from the CIA told the story of implementing the Intellipedia, the intelligence industry’s social network (watch the video). Today, Simon Revell, Manager of Enterprise 2.0 Technology Development, Information and Knowledge Management at Pfizer told his tale of implementing Web 2.0 tools at his company.
Revell’s said Pfizer’s first attempt at enterprise 2.0 was to set up a blog called DIGWWW to do the following:
In order to maintain the blog, a handful of issues came out of this:
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
Jun 11th, 2008 |
David Spark I spoke with Karen Appleton VP of Business Development of Box, the file storage utility. Appleton is also an advisor for the Forum of Women Entrepreneurs and Executives and she just had a session back in Palo Alto, CA that covered many of the similar issues we’ve been discussing for the past couple of days here at Enterprise 2.0. And those issues have been around social networking for business. The two big questions of why and how? She had some answers. Watch.
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
I spoke to Peter Biddle of Trampoline Systems, also formerly an encryption expert and creator of BitLocker. We were having a great discussion about cloud computing and why some people don’t encrypt their data. Unfortunately, I wasn’t recording anything, so I turned on the camera and asked him what’s it going to take for everyone to start using encryption ubiquitously. His simple answer, “It’s not easy.”
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
What does it take to pull off a successful wiki? Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian and Linda Skrocki, Sr. Enginering Program Manager for Blogs, Wikis, and Forums at Sun Microsystems showed examples of successful enterprise-level wikis plus offered advice on how to pull off a successful wiki in your enterprise.
First, some examples of successful wikis:
Skrocki’s three tips for successful blogs and wikis:
How to get people up and running on the wiki:
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.
As evidenced by the previous session “Social Networking and the Enterprise” (see post), many businesses can’t articulate the business reasons as to why they should be involved in social networking, yet they’re doing it or want to. There just seems to be a lot of pressure to be in social networking and it’s the “thing to do.”
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:
Not nearly as impactful as the first four, here are Wachovia’s last five rationales.
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 hierarchical nature of corporations is antithetical to the collaborative nature of bottom-up social networking. That was the theme of the session “Power to the People: Drive Business Innovation through Collaboration,” led by Mark Woollen, VP Social CRM at Oracle.
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.
Jun 11th, 2008 |
David Spark What’s the business value of social networking? What do you want to accomplish by deploying it? And how do you get people to use Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. This is just a few of the questions posed by moderator Chris Brogan, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, CrossTechMedia and the audience to the panel of Katie Delahaye Paine, Founder & CEO, KDPaine & Partners, LLC, Maggie Fox, Contributor, Social Media Group, and Rob Howard, CEO, Telligent.
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.
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