Enterprise 2.0 – Page 18

The Original Unconference: Mashup Camp

What is not to love about Mashup Camp? This is my first unconference event, and I am an easy convert. It defines the free-form, emergent foundation of enterprise 2.0 in that it is completely user (developer) driven. No formal speakers, no imposed structure. What’s interesting is that developers mix easily with vendors and sponsors because from what I’ve seen they’re all intellectually curious and are asking a lot of the same questions. I don’t see a lot of marketing and selling going on here.

The day starts by mapping out a series of sessions the camp wants to discuss with peers. Developers get to pick time slots first, then sponsors, then other vendors.

Next, each session is posted on a large, paper schedule that is transfered by David Berlind onto a wiki that everyone can access and annotate with session notes all day long.

Then, everyone self-assembles and visits sessions that interests them. There was a lunch a break (day one), and the favorite part of the day for me was “speed-geeking” which consisted of 5-minute demos of about maybe 2 dozen mashups located at tables in the grand hall at the computer museum. Each participant had five minutes to explain his or her mashup, show its main features, and answer questions.

All the mashups were impressive, but I know I and Jeff Nolan were particularly impressed with the Plaxo mashup demo. Straight from the press release, the 3.0 version:

“has a content sharing feeds system, which several networks are leveraging, especially after the combined success of Facebook apps with its newsfeeds feature. Individual feeds for Plaxo users will initially include those for Flickr photos, blogposts, Amazon wish lists and Plaxo contact info modifications.”

I videotaped the demo here for you to see for yourself. I apologize, but the “night vision” option was accidentally selected on the camera I shot it with. Grrr… Still viewable, though. This is Joseph Smarr, Architect for Plaxo, demoing Plaxo’s new 3.0 version.

Office 2.0 The Sequel: Adds Enterprise 2.0 Track

Well, planning has begun for the 2nd annual Office 2.0 Conference. Yay! I’m pleased to announce that Ismael Ghalimi has nominated me (for BSG Alliance), Jevon McDonald, and Catherine Shinners to be the lucky volunteer team who will put together the Enterprise 2.0 track for the conference.

If you can only make one conference for enterprise 2.0 next fall, make this one. The conference will again be held at the St. Regis in San Francisco. Ismael has booked a lot more space in the hotel this time, so there will plenty of room for networking and visiting panels and demos. The conference web site should go up tomorrow at this link as early as tomorrow. Keep checking for it. Oh, you might want to sign up early too. The conference was a huge success last year, and Ismael is intent on keeping it small, so it may sell out. There is also a Facebook event and group for Office 2.0.

The format for the conference will change somewhat this year. There will still be killer demos, jaw-dropping celebs, and investors from the 2.0 insider crowd, but the focus this year will be on customers and real adoption of Office 2.0 tools and technologies.

Regarding enterprise 2.0 specifically, we are interested in showcasing user case studies. If you have a particular user case study you’d like to share with us, please let us know as soon as possible. Frame your pitches in terms of business benefits, or possibly, social benefits that led or will lead to increased business benefits. We’re also interested in security, privacy, governance issues– typical IT issues and how they’re impacting enterprise 2.0 adoption. The stories don’t all have to be positive; if something didn’t work, and we can learn from it, we want to hear that too.

Send any questions or interest in participating on the enterprise 2.0 track to me, Jevon, or Catherine directly. My email address is susan at bsgalliance dot com.

Photo courtesy of Brian Solis.

#2. Write about your passion, passionately.

Today I participated in a wonderful introductory webinar for some of our CIO and IT director customers. My role was to talk broadly about what is happening in the blogosphere. Part of my task was to identify the do’s and don’ts of blogging. I put together a list of about a dozen, borrowing from other blogger’s suggestions, and adding a few of my own. I re-ordered them at the last minute and gave “passion” here a higher ranking. Passion is sticky in the blogosphere, so it has a lot of benefits to readers and bloggers alike.

To exemplify passion, I need to point to my good-friend-whom-I’ve-never-met-in-the-blogosphere, Luis Suarez who has just completed a seven part unpacking and analysis of the the McAfee-Davenport debate. The effort took Luis several days to publish; he released each “chapter” separately over the period of about a week while he was traveling from his home in Spain to NY for a conference. Luis’ passion is knowledge management, collaboration, social media, and enterprise 2.0 among other things related to these general areas.

Luis ends his seven-part article with this:

I couldn’t have agreed more with that statement as perhaps one of the most representative ones that describes not only Enterprise 2.0, but the entire movement behind Web 2.0 as well. With it, things have gotten a whole lot more exciting and interesting, because, for the first time in many years, knowledge workers have got the opportunity to have a voice, an opinion, and share it with everyone else collaborating with others, exchanging knowledge, improve their social capital skills and their subject matter expertise and, as a result of that process, innovate at a higher rather than in the recent past. And all of that dealing with their own passion for whatever the topic!

That is why, to me, Enterprise 2.0 is not only revolutionalising the Enterprise, but also our own ways of life, because, after all, social computing is a philosophy, a way of life you breathe and learn to nurture, that inspires constant change that you rather embrace … or not. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, it would be a matter of choice to adopt it or not. And that choice is yours. And yours alone. So it would be up to you (And not higher up in the management chain), whether you would want to change your organisation or not, whether you would want to change your life or not. And if I were you, I would not wait for others to tell you about it… Make it happen!

Make it happen now!

Now I know not all bloggers are passionate, but I think passion is a pre-requisite to good blogging. Luis is a great blogger and has a strong readership and following. I know all bloggers don’t express themselves with gusto and emotion, but beneath the surface of their writing is a driving passion and basic hunger to communicate and connect. When I look at the folks I’m proud to list on my blogroll, it’s the one unifying trace of blogger DNA that links me to all of them, and every other committed blogger in the hood. Like a wise English poet, well songwriter, once said, “Passion is no ordinary word.” (Graham Parker.)

The Art and Science of Social Media Analysis

I had a terrific chat yesterday with Nathan Gilliatt, fellow member of the Social Media Collective. I’m preparing for a webinar we’re hosting tomorrow with a large number of our CIO and senior IT clients on “Early Wisdom from the Next Generation Enterprise.” I was looking around for expertise on slicing and dicing metrics on the blogosphere and I recalled David Tebbutt pointing out Nathan’s research, so I reached out to him. Nathan published a report this year that profiled 31 of the leading vendors who do blog monitoring and measurement worldwide. Interestingly enough, aside from the expected PR and Marketing folks who are interested in this information, he has found willing buyers from the HR, legal, competitive intelligence, investment, and due diligence communities, as well. The bottom line on crunching through the numbers on making sense of the blogosphere is, it’s still early days and no one really knows what the real import of it all is and how influential the New Influencers really are. According to Gilliatt, the whole area of metrics is still immature and there are three basic areas that everyone does: influence, topic identification, and sentiment. The good news is, however, the vendors who are tracking the online phenomenon are increasingly adding more sophistication to their craft.

As I’m writing this post, I’m recognizing that some spider is combing this content and declaring I have “no influence” on this matter whatsoever based on the criteria they look for… that I’ve only referred to what others have written, for example. 🙂

Speaking of New Influencers, I have recently (finally) finished Paul Gillin’s excellent book. Paul was at IDG around the same time I was writing my first newsletter which was published by IDG. Paul’s book, first published ~~last year~~ earlier this year, is now going into its second printing. The book is thoroughly researched with generous heapings of personal anecdotes drawn from Paul’s long history in the technology publishing business. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I recommend you pick it up.

Incidentally, both Paul and Nathan did podcast interviews with Maggie Fox on the Social Media Collective regularly weekly podcast series. If you don’t have the time to read books or reports, try the podcasts.

I know throughout this basic prep research I’ve been doing, the most promising work I’ve seen is being done in monitoring the nested relationships of social networks and trying to analyze how relationship capital ignites tipping points for brands or opinion online. Weird science, but strangely fascinating.

Scott Gavin and friends have done it again… Give ’em some Link Love.

Scott Gavin’s blog.