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:

• 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.

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:

• 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.

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:

• 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.

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.

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:

• 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 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.

I went down to the demo floor at Enterprise 2.0 to talk with some of the Enterprise 2.0 providers. Many of the companies offer very similar services in internal company knowledge management and social networking. My head started spinning as I looked at them all. My question for most of them was, “What makes you different from the booth right next to you?” Some were highly differentiated and others not so much. I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, so if you’re reading this post, and were on the floor, please add your explanation as to why your knowledge management/social networking tool is different/more useful than the competition. Also, if I didn’t describe your differentiation correctly, please make additions in the comment field. I may keep adding to this post over the next day.

First, a summary of what many players in the enterprise social networking space are trying to do. Unless otherwise noted, they’re all SaaS (Software as a Service), they’re all offering a variety of Web 2.0 tools (e.g. discussion groups, podcasts, video sharing, image sharing, blogs), they’re flexible, and they connect your employees helping them find each other and each other’s knowledge. I don’t know the answer as to which is best, but here’s some differentiating factors I unearthed from the players I spoke to on the demo show floor at Enterprise 2.0.

Socialcast - This application incorporates many of the newest tools being used by consumers and gamers. Specifically, it has Digg-like voting and reputation ratings depending on participation and others’ interest in your participation. Two very successful customers for them are retail outlets, Guitar Center and Hot Topic, that have had a difficult time managing its 10,000+ employees at hundreds of disparate retail outlets. Management now has a tool to watch staff and see ideas within the company as they trend over time. Tool is 100% internal. No way right now to publish any of the content to the public Web.

Awareness - Offers a mix of internal/external enterprise social networking. They power social networks for Boston.com and McDonald’s.com.

Igloo Software - Some of their customers call them “Sharepoint lite.” That’s probably because you can truly launch a company social network through its wizard in about two minutes. Also because the company’s software is fully built on Microsoft’s technology. RIM is a huge investor, and Igloo plans on having a BlackBerry client by the end of this year.

Mzinga - Company swallowed SharedInsights and they claim to have the most employees (150+) of all their competitors. They host 14,000 communities in 13 different languages and they have employees around the world that moderate them 24/7.

Trampoline Systems - Not SaaS. Software sits on your server behind a firewall. The software tries to answer the question you often hear in the office, “Who do we work with that knows about such and such?” But it does that without you having to manage a social network. Instead, it tracks what you’re talking about, such as reading your emails, articles you write, etc. With that information, in creates tags (autotags) to identify your area of expertise. You can also manually create tags and identify your own expertise.

Connectbeam - Not Saas. Software sits on your server behind a firewall. It merges public search with company search. Do a Google search and you’ll see Google results, but also on the left (blocking the Google Ads, I’m sure Google loves that) is Connectbeam’s search of knowledge within your company. That parallel search shows a company-generated list of tags, users, and bookmarks related to your Google search. The point is to work within your existing search behavior, Google, but also alerting you to the fact that there is knowledge within your organization.

Small World Labs - White labeled social networking that differentiates themselves by doing lots of configuring with their clients. Much of their product cost is in the configuration, design, and management of the internal or external social network.

Adenin Technologies - Offer both a firewalled and SaaS model. It’s designed to be a company intranet with its most impressive features as true document management and structureless Google-like search across company documents that you can import by spidering employee hard drives. One cool benefit is when you search for documents, you can see which employee wrote the most documents based on your search.

Headmix - Tries to put an end to occupational spam. Those are the emails that are the result of you getting caught on threads for which twenty people are copied. Headmix calls itself a combination between Yahoo! Answers and Twitter for the enterprise. The company’s CEO actually used to work at Yahoo! Answers. Headmix is a SaaS tool for you to pose and answer questions. But you’re only following the questions and answers of people and groups you’re interested in. To stay in the know, and be alerted to all questions and answers within your Headmix inbox, Headmix has an Outlook plugin that operates like Twhirl, the Twitter application, that pops up messages on your desktop, but lets you still operate in the Outlook environment.

NewsGator’s Social Sites - Just released a new firewalled service, Social Sites which is social networking for Sharepoint. It’s huge advantage is it doesn’t look like Sharepoint (management loves that), it maintains the security settings of Sharepoint (IT loves that), and you can see your relationships to people with like minded interests. Currently though it gathers that information WITHOUT looking into employee created documents.

InQuira - Firewalled knowledge management tool for call centers. Its big differentiator is Apple is a client.

GROUPSwim - Looks most like Connectbeam in terms of how it tags people and lets you save bookmarks, but it’s also a complete collaboration platform as well. It though doesn’t integrate with standard general search like Connectbeam.

Spaceo.us - Uses a standardized framework to allow you to drag in information from multiple sources that you’re already using. Like pulling in a series of RSS feeds, but it’s widget based to create a front end for all your information, say from Seybold and Salesforce.com. What makes it different is that you can than connect these “spaces” to users so they can receive information from that space, and get alerts when anything changes.

Sun Microsystems’ Project SocialSite - Using OpenSocial, add social networking to existing Web applications and apply to your social graph. It appears all that social networking lives in programmable widgets. The way it looks, it’s not an end in itself but rather take advantage of the widgets to quickly incorporate in whatever site you currently have.

Veodia - Agile video platform to use in your every day business communications and collaboration. They’ve got an endless list of competitors. Most notable are TokBox, OoVoo, and Sightspeed.

Box - File sharing and management tool. A virtual file locker where you can access files from wherever you have a Web connection. Box has tons of competitors in this space, one of the newest being Drop.io. But beyond just file sharing, Box has an OpenBox platform for integration with other Web applications. Files can easily be sent, posted, or viewed via other applications like Picnik, eFax, WordPress, Twitter, NetVibes, iGoogle, and 19 other partners.

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

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA showed off the structure of Intellipedia which is foremost a wiki for the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and Burke and Dennehy are two of its leading advocates.

Intellipedia is a closed knowledge management system with three levels of access ranging from top secret, to secret, to sensitive but unclassified. But beyond just a wiki, Intellipedia has also become the brand name for a suite of other common Web 2.0 tools such as bookmarking and video. No need for me to go on and on explaining it. Dennehy and Burke posted all the information (and more) explaining it on the Enterprise 2.0 community site.

It wasn’t easy for them. Some saw their desire to create an intelligence information and social network as traitorous. Luckily, they were able to show that a government intelligence community with a wiki was possible for the intelligence community and its partners to answer the burning question of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

Make sure you watch my video interview with Burke and Dennehy.

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