Event Summary: The Future of the Social Web

Categories: Analyst, Events, Forrester, Social MediaPosted on January 1st, 2009

Nothing like ringing in the new year with a look at where the industry is headed. My job as an industry analyst is to assess where the industry is going, and how vendors and brands should respond to changes. My upcoming research on the topic of the future of the social web will do just that, and perhaps the most effective way for me to learn from the best and brightest in the industry is to bring them all to one room.

A few months ago, I held an event to bring the industry top leaders together to discuss the future of social networks for my upcoming research report on the topic. I brought forth community platforms, widget companies, social networks, brand monitoring, web analytics, CRM, CMS search companies, and of course, brands that will implement these technologies. Thanks to SAP who hosted this event (thanks Giovanni for the intro) we had a day long working session to uncover what we see are the predictions of the social web, the challenges to overcome, and how they will be beat. Thanks to Kenny Lauer and the GPJ team for assisting me through the event. Special thanks to SAP for hosting this community event.

Folks flew in from around the country to attend this no-cost event, and we brainstormed and collaborated during the day to come up with the three things (and more) that will matter. Most would agree, none of the findings were earth shattering, but were confirmation for the different parties to attend. I’ll be hosting similar events throughout 2009 to bring the industry together, so we can learn from each other, and I can improve my research.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialnetwork socialmedia)

Update: For some reason the pictures aren’t showing in the embedded slideshare, although they are viewable in this version.

The embedded slideshare has more details about the event, if you’ve questions, leave a comment, I’ll answer the best to my ability.

Key Findings
Group findings at the very high level revealed the following, to see the specific three predictions, check out the slideshare. Note, these were not my predictions, but what I gleaned from the attendees.

The social web industry was able to collaborate towards a single goal.

Predictions generated weren’t “earth-shattering” yet group consensus confirmed industry direction.

Most challenges indicated culture and change management processes within corporations –not a technology issue.

The social web is still in early stages –standards have not been fully been developed nor adopted.

Measurement continues to be a key issue to determine progress and value –as well as a lack of standards.

Key relationships were developed pan-industry.

Here’s the roster of attendees
I invited others, but some were not able to attend, I tried to avoid pundits, and focus on those that really do the work not just talk about it. In some cases, I sent an invite to the company, and they selected who would attend, some of these folks were hand selected by me.

Brands
Scott Lawley, SAP
Len Devanna, EMC
Brian Ellefritz, Cisco
Faith Legendre, Webex
Bob Duffy, Intel
Joel Nathanson, Wells Fargo
Joshua-Michéle Ross, O’Reilly
Karl Long, Nokia
Paul Gilliham, Juniper Networks
Tom Diederich, Cadence
Justin Kestelyn, Oracle

Brand Monitoring, Analytics
Brad Brodigan, Biz 360
Aaron Gray, Web Trends

CRM, Enterprise Applications
Sandy Carter, IBM
Param Kahlon, SAP
Oracle
Eugene Lee, SocialText

Widgets/Applications
Rooly Eliezerov, Gigya
Will Price, Widgetbox
Jeff Nolan, Newsgator

Social Networks
Chris Schalk, Google
David Recordon, Six Apart, OpenID
Surya Yalamanchili, LinkedIn

Community Platforms, CMS
John McCormick, Documentum EMC
Adam Weinroth, Pluck
Bryan House, Acquia
Cameron Deatsch , Jive
David Carter, Awareness
Lyle Fong, Lithium
Michael Chin, Kickapps
Mike Walsh, Leverage Software
Rob Howard, Telligent
Rusty Williams, Mzinga
Peter Friedman, LiveWorld

Expect more on this topic as I dive into this research for 2009, I plan to host this roundtable each year, will try to circulate different attendees as possible.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 1:22 am and is filed under Analyst, Events, Forrester, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

A lot of the slides contain empty frames (e.g. 6, 16, 17, 18…) - is there some technical problem?

Posted by Ofer Egozi on January 1st, 2009 at 5:56 am

Interesting, the pictures aren’t rendering, let me have a look

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 1st, 2009 at 9:51 am

Very nice but like I have said on my branding and marketing site, I think social media will evolve and it will be driven by users. I also really believe that a lot of people are going to drop out of social media as they realize that their time is not worth the effort.

Posted by Rich Meyer on January 1st, 2009 at 1:41 pm

Rich

Social media (the term) will disappear into the background, communicating with others is going to become pervasive.

See these stats, social media is only radically increasing by consumers –not decreasing.

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/10/23/2007-to-2008-social-technographic-data/

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 1st, 2009 at 2:23 pm

if you want to do a similar meeting in Europe in 2009, I will be delighted to host/sponsor the affair in Utrecht, The Netherlands….

Posted by ronald van den hoff on January 2nd, 2009 at 10:13 am

We’d love to participate Jeremiah, particularly around the drastic landscape changes in the B-B uses of social media.

Posted by Martin Edic (Techrigy) on January 2nd, 2009 at 12:54 pm

Ronald, Martin

Thank you, I’ll keep this in mind.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 2nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm

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Posted by renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll - Links of the day on January 3rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm

Im a BIG FAN. Nice job taking your thoughts to the “streets”. Be sure and include the new cloud(aaS) approach to portals and social networking… We’re kicking it over here in the ROI and TCO department.

Posted by morley on January 6th, 2009 at 2:59 pm

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[...] Event Summary: The Future of the Social Web - Jeremiah Owyang (Web Strategy with Jeremiah) The top leaders got together to discuss the future of social networks, and Jeremiah gleaned insight to share with all of us. Some of the things we learned were that culture holds some companies back, not technology. Also, measurement will continue to be a key issue. Starting on slide 22, there’s some great value to be had for those curious as to where the social web is headed. [...]

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