Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Earlier this month I did a presentation with my Sovos colleague, Oliver Marks, at the Enterprise 2.0 virtual conference. The focus of our keynote was to  frame the discussion around social and collaborative concepts in the context of business value and performance. We coverd critical issues that are on the minds of executives at large enterprises that are grappling with the tanglble value of social computing in the context of the enterprise.

The slide deck is pasted below.

Yet again, thanks to Eric Norlin, a bunch of us get the opportunity to escape to Denver next month to talk about what’s next in social software. At the Defrag conference next month on November 11th and 12th.

I’m going to spare you a diatribe about why its a great event and distill it down to five reasons, (or fragments) that make me go back and why  this an awesome event for the enterprise folks out there:

• Its about debating solutions to big big business and economic value challenges that will consume us all over the next 12-24 months. That applies to the buy-side as well as the sell side.
• Its about the ramifications of eventual large scale adoption of a lot of what a serious IT executive will deem to be well, “cutesy” ideas today (e.g. Real Time Enterprise).
• A cut to the chase discussion on which consumer trends we see and use today might one day be enterprise worthy. Remember when people laughed at the concept of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’? Yep, that probably came up at Defrag two events ago.
• Little talk-to-the-crowd panels. Everyone is deemed to be intelligent and has an equal voice. You’ll spend more time talking to the person sitting next to you than you will listening to someone on stage. Guaranteed.
• Its frightfully practical stuff. No fluff. All actionable thinking that makes you look at work differently when you leave. And makes you want to come right back the next year.

I’m going to be facilitating a discussion on ‘Communication Metaphors’ with Tim Young, Alexander Moore, Michael Cerda, and Matt Brezina.

Hope to see you there!

Quick post to tell you that I’m very happy to be appointed to TechWebs Enterprise 2.0 conference advisory board.

Last week conference Chair Steve Wylie and I got together in San Francisco to chat about what social business ecosystems will look like as we move past this early stage of defining and justifying open collaborative environments between employees, partners, customers and suppliers. As important, what it’s going to take to truly accelerate business performance via social computing constructs and technologies.

It quickly became clear that the time to start talking about this, is now. Joining the advisory board allows me to participate with some very smart folks on addressing these issues.

Thanks again to Steve for the invite. And thanks to everyone in the E 2.0 community for their good wishes and support.

About the Conference:

Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process.

Beyond discussion of the “why”, there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the “how” that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board is comprised of leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change and collective intelligence.

I’m going to be on a panel at the New Metrics for New Media Workshop at Stanford University on August 6th, in Palo Alto. The event is organized by Martha Russell, Associate Director of Media X at Stanford, and Marc Smith, Sociologist and Chief Scientist at Telligent Systems.

Some details about the event here:

The conundrum of the participatory media culture is that participation is expected, but continuous, dedicated attention cannot be assumed.  Legacy audience media metrics, such as CPM (cost per thousand) and CPI (cost per impression), have broadcast media as their reference. These metrics were developed because channel developers, advertisers and their clients needed to quantify the cost/benefit of media purchases. At the time they were developed, these legacy metrics assumed that each channel delivered media to its audiences (individuals, family, etc.) in a singular fashion.  The legacy media metrics assumed that each media exposure occurred in isolation, that viewers were attentive, and that viewers’ attention was dedicated to a single medium.

Consumer generated content has further complicated the differentiation of purchased media (space in the media that is purchased by advertisers) and earned media (space in the media that is acquired without payment through journalistic and public relations efforts).  To more accurately measure the quality and quantity of viewers’ engagement, the distinction must also be made between assumed attention, in which audience metrics count the number of people who could potentially pay attention to a message, and earned engagement, in people actively choose to pay attention.

Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop will cover foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provide hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.

I’m involved in this session:

Day One:
Media usage, measurement and analysis: legacy concepts, forces of change, emerging metrics for social media and virtual worlds, and the creative tension of academic and business influences.

Given my Enterprise 2.0 focus, and in particular, our work with Sales and Marketing groups at large organizations, I plan to focus on how businesses can accelerate performance via new forms of insight, brought about by social media analytics. Something that’s integral to overall Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

Full details on the event and a short video by Martha and Marc available here:

http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/metrics.html

If you would like to see specific data points covered, chime in in the comments or drop me an email.

Hope you see you there.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston ended earlier this week. This post covers my overall impressions about the conference material. Apologies in advance for a longish post.

Overall Thoughts

Given my insane meeting schedule and my objectives for the conference, I used 3 criteria to pick sessions. Here’s what I was looking for:

a) Practitioners before cheerleaders, skeptics and early adopters. Were there enough practitioners in attendance?

b) Did the event generate adequate tangible advice to show practitioners what works and what doesn’t, how to sell this internally, and finally, how to drive adoption?

c) Did the environment encourage their participation?

Two Thumbs Up to the first 2 questions. As to C, so, so. There were a good number of practitioners from companies such as BoA, Raytheon, Alcatel-Lucent, Allstate, Humana, M&M Mars & Eli Lilly. And a good number of tactical sessions. So in my book, all up, I think the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work.

On the other hand, the conference was a bit too Vendor centric – not in terms of attendance necessarily but in terms of who had a louder voice. There were in fact a lot of practitioners in the audience. I just wish their stories could have been heard.

A quick disclaimer: This re-cap reflects my favorites from sessions I attended; not across all available sessions. I missed some superb stuff but I’m sure others will speak to those.

The Good Stuff

Looking at it from a practitioners standpoint, what impressed me most was heavy weighting towards content on tactical insights that practitioners can use when they get to work, tomorrow. Sessions covered some long range thinking but plenty of actionable tricks and how tos that can let implementers and program managers sleep well at night.

Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. The session was peppered with clever, even quirky tips such as a button called “shady” for questionable content that needed moderation, to creating stickers as invite codes that a user can distribute at their discretion. Genentech for instance, calls their social network GenePool and they tell their users “don’t pee in the pool”, as a way to encourage clean, relevant interaction. Again, not brain surgery but tactical marketing ideas that generate buzz. Ben Kepes of Cloud Ave was nice enough to live blog the session, here.

Another favorite session was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption, that showcased specific details on how to manage separation anxiety when transitioning from 1.0 to social computing environments.  For instance, Lee described methods to illustrate the similarities between an RSS Reader and Email on a Blackberry. How to highlight the customizable nature of a social network over a static phone book. Or how to gently transition from a stogy old one way Intranet to a by-directional collaboration platform. All in all, tricks that a practitioner can act on soon after returning from the conference. For a more detailed analysis, Sandy Kemsley has a great write up, here.

I’m a little biased here because I read or listen to pretty much anything Marc Smith and Kate Niederhoffer say or write and because I believe that Analytics/Intelligence is going to be a huge differentiator in this space. So it was a treat to attend Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc, Kate and Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. I’m convinced that articulating the sociological and psychological (respectively) considerations as a catalyst for Enterprise 2.0 transformation can play a big role towards both executive buy in and successful execution. Moreover, my sense is that correlating the use of social computing as a way to respond to (not change) basic human nature can make it all seem achievable and less daunting. Contrast that with sermons on the glories of wiki based collaboration or the promise of orgasmic levels of workforce liberation via the use of a Twitter-like public status update. I wish this session was not at the tail end of the conference. We need more of this, up front.

Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta was possibly one of the best research efforts I’ve seen on the topic of Enterprise Social Networking. Mike does a superb job of objectively “telling it like it is” whether its vendor capabilities/holes or inherent execution considerations such as the focus on deployment when it should be on adoption, or the threat to middle management and the curse of social caste systems. Lots of lessons not only for adoption but also excellent material to set expectations with LOB executives on risks that need to be mitigated, upfront. Bill Ives has an excellent post on this session, here.

Again, there were others that also had good insights. And I think the baseline research done for Open Enterprise is a treasure chest.

On to the sub optimal stuff.

Conference Format – Get Micro: Some of the most repeatable ideas and common problem sets I heard surfaced in conversations over dinner and in the reception area. Many from senior program managers, architects, and even executives who were ridiculously smart but not necessarily the kind that want to walk up to a microphone in a 300 seat auditorium.  Early lifecycle categories such as E2.0 need more casual break out sessions to foster discussions where repeatable problems, ideas and insights emerge. These off hand discussions I had included insight such as the limitations and possibilities of leveraging social computing tools on the BlackBerry. Which vendor apps really afford a customer centric mobile interaction model vs. those that are simply riding the polish and hype that comes with the iPhone developer platform. What’s particularly working for sales reps in their orgs? And on and on. My sense is that a lot of good insight was left of the table and we need a format that brings these topics to the surface.

Objectivity: This certainly wasn’t germane to most sessions but in some cases, there needed to be a clear distinction between research findings and objectivity on behalf of the speaker. When it’s research, it needs to be presented as findings, not tilted towards the preferences or enthusiasm of the speaker. And when an expert, who happens to be a vendor, is invited to a topical panel, little less product highlighting and more industry based knowledge sharing needs to be enforced. If I feel like I need to hire you (as a consultant) or buy your product (as a vendor) to really get the benefit of your opinion, then something’s lost.

Closing

So, as a practitioner, I think the conference brought a lot of actionable learning to the table and that’s a big win.

Personally, I can’t put a price on what I got out of these 4 days. I got to meet and thank a ton of folks who comment here on Pretzel Logic. I met folks whose stuff I read and learn from, every day. We exchanged a lot of ideas, opined on what’s hot and what doesn’t have legs in the space. We closed down bars.

This is the first of a series of posts on the conference. Next up are take aways on the space, distribution models and what customers should be asking of service providers.

Finally, a big thanks to Susan Scrupski – I might not have made the trip out but I did, and for that I’m grateful to her.

Other posts on the Conference:

My pal Gil Yehuda wrote a post yesterday about meeting logistics at Enterprise 2.0. I encourage you to read it and see if you can gain from his suggestions.

Gil’s post got me to write about how I expect the conference to play out for me.

• I’m part of the press corps so first and foremost, I plan to look for stuff that interests me so I can write about it. Pretzel Logic (this blog) is about Enterprise 2.0 execution and the social software landscape. To that end, I’m going to be looking for customer case studies that moved the needle in terms of business acceleration. As important, solution providers that really make it happen. No spray and pray, “the enterprise just needs to get social” stuff. I hope to debate, contest and cheer meaningful success stories.
• As my close E2.0 pals know, my plan was to be as fluid as possible for the next few months, on the career/work front. And I’m up to my eyeballs in consulting work at the moment, per plan.  A big component of my work goes beyond the “what” and into the “how” and “why”. So knowing vendor capabilities is important to successfully tie the right solution to business problems at hand. Lots of new announcements too.
• Beyond this, I’ve got partner meetings that I’ve scheduled since I’m out east.

Nothing on the list above is what I consider tedious work. The social calendar looks tremendous. And I’ve left plenty of time for serendipitous encounters. So I’m stoked.

Looking forward to going back to my old hometown.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is coming to Boston in just a few weeks.

Over the past few weeks, it’s been good to see a whole host of topics emerge, ranging from customer facing social media and marketing, to nuts and bolts, behind the firewall plumbing. What’s striking about this years schedule is that a plethora of practitioners from larger companies are in attendance, sharing real world stories about deployed social computing initiatives.

My primary focus (and by extension, the topic of this blog) is on answering the “why” and “how” questions that business managers care about when associating an Enterprise 2.0 design with accelerating a given business activity.. With that in mind, here are 4 sessions that focus on making it happen.

Web 2.0 and Selling: Whether it’s on 3rd party networks such as Twitter or Friendfeed, or a customer community, we need to go beyond Brand Awareness and Engagement and start generating leads. I addressed this in detail recently in a Q&A.  This session at the conference promises to address social selling – “a process to build trust, generate interest and eventually close the deal.” Speakers include George Dearing (Telligent), Mark Woolen (Oracle), Romi Mahajan (Ascentium), Timothy Jones (Buzzient) and Umberto Miletti (Inside View).

Enterprise 2.0 – What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s next: This session brings together a panel of vendors and customers that have deployed social computing technologies in the organization. Speakers include R. Todd. Stephens (AT&T), Nate Nash (Bearing Point), Christian Finn (Microsoft SharePoint), Matthew Fraser (INSEAD).

Transition Strategies for E 2.0 Adoption: Switching costs are one of the most neglected topics when changing work processes and underlying technology. The ROI and break even analysis focuses on the numbers without accounting for risk associated from shifting people and platforms, that jeopardize any well thought plan. Lee Bryant of Headshift leads this discussion by offering strategies to transition to newer work models.

Reality 2.0: Enterprise Social Networks (A Field Research Study): Burton Group Analyst Mike Gotta talks adoption, risk mitigation and identifying the business case. All based on a study of 60 people from 21 large enterprises. This should be particularly interesting to the majority of readers of this blog who come from larger enterprises.

There’s plenty more but these formal sessions jumped out at first blush.

Finally, there’s the Open Enterprise 2009 research findings by Stowe Boyd and Oliver Marks. Described as “The project examines the adoption, application and impact of Web 2.0 techniques, tools, and architectures in the enterprise and is based on an open research model involving crowd sourcing of several major areas of focus.”

Will the conference answer important business considerations such as activity focused benefits, execution planning requirements, risks, tolerance, etc? Well, the right folks on the practitioner side are attending but frankly, I don’t know. But you can join me in bringing it up to get a discussion going, so we get to the bottom of this.

On a personal note, I’ve only been back to Boston once since I left in 1999 and so I’m thrilled to be going back to my hood.  I’m also planning on participating in a class at Babson (my alma mater), thanks to professor, Bala Iyer.

Here’s a 30% discount code for the conference.

See you in Beantown!

I’m looking forward to attending the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco at the Intercontinental Hotel on March 4th and 5th.

Ironically, my last post was on the topic of opportunities and pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0 in the context of Sales. Given my work with Sales and Marketing organizations, I’m very familiar with the litmus test these buyers use (or should use) when selecting social software. I’m hoping that over the next few days, we’ll learn how well some of the solution providers have taken into account what makes a sales rep tick. Looking at the list of presenters and sponsors, I’m fully expecting to see some really useful innovation. If you’re attending, come say hi. Or register here.

Agenda topics include:

• How to Accelerate Sales in a 2.0 World
• Sales Lead Management 2.0
• Customer Engagement Strategies
• Analytics and Compensation Management
• Accelerating Productivity – New Sales 2.0 Tools
• The Foundation of a Sales 2.0 Business

Speakers include a list of whose who in the Sales community including Anneke Seley, author of Sales2.0,  Tom Barrieau from IDC, Jeremy Cooper from Salesforce.com, Scott Santucci and Brett Wallace from Forrester. I have to admit though, I’m as excited in the “LobbyCon” part of the event. Trying to understand how Sales and Marketing solution providers such as InsideView, LucidEra, Marketo and others are going to reinvent/improve the business of selling should be very interesting.

I’ll be there as part of the blogger/media folks and the plan is to soak it all in and write up a few posts at the end. I also plan on tweeting the event (@sameerpatel). The hashtag on Twitter is # sales20 for those of you that want to follow along.

Eric Norlin is hosting Glue, a conference that gets under the hood and examines technologies and standards that will shape how enterprises communicate, engage, collaborate and sell in the coming years. As Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence illustrates in this post, the application layer in the enterprise technology stack hasn’t seen significant innovation for a long time. Enterprise 2.0 concepts present the first meaty opportunity to blow open silos in the enterprise and drive bottom line benefits. I strongly suspect that Glue will bring the right people in the room that can articulate the value of these new technologies as well as the path to introducing them into the enterprise.

I was lucky to make it to Defrag (Eric’s other conference) last year and I can say from personal experience that Eric is commited to creating an intimate environment that enables active participation and learning. As I said to Eric on Twitter about my Defrag experience:  “I made amazing relationships at defrag and ignited existing ones. I’m indebted to you for that ”

Here’s the agenda. And Blog post.