My background is with corporate web teams, and this is a topic that is just starting to get explored.

Channel and Partner Marketing often largest revenue stream
At a previous job I was the Web Marketing Manager for the Channel Extranet site at Hitachi Data Systems, called PartnerXchange, a website that dedicated to helping our partners resell our products. This was a high-tech B2B sale which accounted for 60% of the overall revenue of the company. One of the largest networking companies recently told me that the channel accounts for 80% of the overall revenue of the company.

[While Social Media has impacted corporate marketing departments such as PR, MarCom and Web Marketing, Channel and Partner Marketing programs are starting to wake up to the opportunities –and risks– that it entails]

Terms used:

Vendor: The primary company selling the products, such as Hitachi Data Systems

Partner: Often referred to as the “channel, this group resells products to the market, often with additional services, sometimes referred to as a value added reseller or “VAR”.

Social Media: An easy to use toolset that includes technolgoies that empower anyone to easily communicate, such as: blogs, forums, podcasts, social networks, and other easy to publish tools.

Customer: End recipient of product and services, in this case, they primarily deal with the Partner, and may or may not deal with the vendor.

Small uptake in Channel and Partner Marketing
At first, social media impacted the PR group within any particular vendor, then spread to corporate marketing, yet just now in 2008 I’m starting to see some uptake of Channel Marketing departments starting to take notice of social media for channel use.

Resellers often have limited marketing resources
A majority of resellers (although there’s some larger ones) have challenges with marketing, many are small or medium size businesses that have strong competency in service delivery, but lean on the larger vendors to setup marketing initiatives and programs to help them.

When it comes to social media, this can go one of two ways, some small companies, strapped for resources have already started to use these cost-effective tools to communicate to their clients. On the other hand, these resource limited companies won’t have the time to even think about ‘new media’ ways of marketing themselves.

The fact of the matter is that social media tools are cost-effective when used correctly, but could cost hundreds more when used incorrectly –often in the form of brand backlash.

Four Impacts of Social Media on Channel Marketing and Partner Marketing”

1) Internal Vendor Training and Support
Vendors can benefit from training their Channel sales groups, and support teams by creating internal blogs, podcasts, to teach internal staff how to better communicate and work with channel partners. Along these lines include fulfillment and support, where collaboration and community tools could help harvest, manage, and deliver key information to teams.

2) Vendor to Partner Communications
Perhaps the first seen effort is to use these tools as a way to better communicate to partners. Tools such as blogs and podcasts are great for talking to your partner base, but don’t forget about letting them cross-communicate to each other by using community tools. The better your partners are at reselling your products, they better off you are. It’s expected there will be some needs for permissions and rules of engagement as many partner are competitors.

3) Partner to Customer though Empowerment
The resource restricted partner is going to be happy to receive help from the vendor to market their products, and often they already have content that is re-syndicated on their website such as brochures, case studies, and white papers. Now, start thinking about how to create media (audio video) that could have a pre-roll with your partners name on it, and then embedded on their site. This would include RSS news feeds what could help populate their website with freshly updated content. Lastly, consider social media training sessions that teach them how to fish. As the vendor and partner groups start to cross-link all boats start to rise as the conversation gets passed from one company to another.

4) Vendor to Customer
Lastly, vendors should use the opportunity to discuss from their own social media activities the great things their partners are doing to satisfy clients. While it’s sometimes difficult to remain non-partisan, discussing issues, challenges, and solutions that partners are doing in an non-biased way from blogs, forums, communities, and podcasts could spark discussion that could lead to further sales.

Conclusion
In summary, there’s quite a few ways these tools can be used to improve the triangular relationship between vendors, partners, and customers. You’ll often need to find an internal resource dedicated to these new media efforts, and you may require outside help to train, establish a program and conduct workshops. I’m sure you’ll find the right mix.

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In the late 1990s the CMS invaders deployed their systems at large corporations, as managing web pages using HTML editors wasn’t scalable and non-technical folks needed to publish. In many cases after the invader left, the company’s business teams and technical web teams were stuck cleaning, fixing, enhancing, for years to come.

Unplugging web publishing systems (and community platforms) ain’t easy.

Publishing from Word Docs, ouch.
I was a web manager at a very large corporations, as such, I was the business sponsor for the website, and therefore the tools that were used to publish the website. Often, in most cases, I inherited a legacy CMS system, one that I did not choose, the underpinning structure of the site revolved around it, documents, navigation, ability to edit pages, and look and feel.

This was one of the worst implementations of CMS systems I’d ever seen, the idea was for non-technical people to edit the webpages, so the system would have the ability to check out a ‘word doc template’ filled with macros, publishers could edit the word doc, check it back into the system and a new webpage would appear. fail.

The templates were so complicated as users had to be trained on how to use the word docs, understand the styles, and all the nuances associated with the code. The linking structure linked to a primary key for a document, which also caused confusion. That’s just the publishing process, it gets worse.

The Pains of Content and Structure Coupled
The site was unfortunately designed so the structure would for the most part, remain constant. The structure of the site, and the content were coupled together, and that’s a major problem. As the site would grow and more pages were added to the taxonomy, the system became more and more inflexible. The developers had a very complicated way of managing the pages, the changes took a few days to work as the underlying code had to be changed. The simplest of web changes that you would expected to see from a web CMS system required ongoing developer support –not content changes at the business level.

I’m not going to mention the name of the CMS vendor who provided this less than stellar tool, as I believe the deployment of the system was to blame from the in house technical group –all of which happened before I got there. Whew, I feel better, that’s been pent up inside of me for a few years now.

Thinking forward: Community Systems of today, to be legacy systems tomorrow
As we deploy community solutions that have social media features, are we thinking about in a few years how these legacy systems will be inflexible, don’t talk to our other systems, cobbled together application ware that we loosely couple with our other customer facing web systems?

I also know of many business groups that are deploying community software, often by ‘notifying’ IT that they are doing it, sometimes without thinking about the long term implications of these systems not being able to migrate, talk, or share data with other websites. In many cases, the business sponsor will move on to another role, job, or company, leaving the archaic community platform in the hands of the next web strategist.

Two questions for you:

1) I’d love to hear from you about your CMS horror stories, feel free to leave a comment below, go ahead, vent away.

2) Are you deploying a community platform for your web strategy at your company? What are you doing to plan for the long term 5+ years impacts of this system in regards to the rest of the enterprise web strategy?

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In 2008, Business Adoption Of Web 2.0 Tools Is Expected To Grow Strongly

Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast
On Monday, colleague Oliver Young (I was involved with the report) published a forward looking report on the growth of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise entitled Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. As I mention with every report, you can purchase it directly from the site, or if not satisfied, obtain a refund, as we stand by the quality of our products.

Who should read this report?
Anyone investing in the space such as VCs, leadership at Social Media companies, or those involved in purchasing at corporations for social media tools.

Caveat: Sans services and “organic” sites
It’s important to note that calculations do not include properties such as ‘organic social networks’ like Facebook (which is valued at $15b), nor do they include services (a report I hope to do soon), so the numbers, in our opinion are just a slice of the overall technology sector. For example, in 2008 we project enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technology to account for just 0.2% of the $364bn global corporate spending on software and to barely even register as part of the $1.7 trillion we expect to see spent on technology overall is a useful piece of context. When you think about social media tools for the enterprise, most often, these commodity technologies are cheap, easy to deploy, and often free.

Web 2.0 Expo, a Physical Manifestation
I spent the last two days at the Web 2.0 expo (I was an advisor to the show), where 7000 people from this market assembled into one building. Who are these people? they are the ‘market’;, vendors, clients, analysts, press, media, and users. It was clear to me many mainstream businesses were attending, I’ll take a guess that many early adopters within the enterprise (I was that guy at Hitachi Data Systems) are dragging their boss, and colleagues who were once nay-sayers to the conference to learn. I saw many Fortune 1000 brands there trying to learn and understand how to use these tools for business.

Mainstreaming
To me, last year’s Web 2.0 expo was far different, it was a geek fest, where live streaming was prominent, and there was much more fascination over the tools –rather than the business impact. This year, many of the questions and folks I met were interested in using these tools to improve their business, they weren’t enamored with the latest widget. On the show floor, I spoke to two CEOs who read the report and commented that the numbers looked in par to their expectations.

Technology Infrastructure moves in
SUN (Who’s had the startup essentials program for a few years), HP, NetAPP, EMC were all present on the show room floor. What do they have to do with Web 2.0? In most cases, this is not their core business, but they realize this growing market will need infrastructure and technology to power these websites. I was pushing for this nearly 3 years ago at the data storage level, but I guess I was too early. Another change is the strong presence of an analyst firm, in this case it was Forrester, we were involved with four sessions, hosted a party, and launched a book. I guess this movement really is headed mainstream now.

What others are saying: in agreement and disagreement
Our friends at ZDNet may have misunderstood what we were actually sizing, at first it was assumed it was just “enterprise 2.0″ (internal) purchases, but in reality, this sizing encompasses externally facing (marketing), and is the largest piece of the pie.

The above and following image was posted on many blogs on Monday, where I encourage you to following the conversation and analysis. First, start with Read Write Web (Oilver and I are big fans of this blog), then Andy Beal takes Here’s the Reason Why Small Businesses Won’t Adopt “Enterprise 2.0″, and for a counterpoint, the respected Dennis Howlett The problem with Forrester’s $4.6 billion prediction, I always enjoy Dennis’ contrarion position, it’s needed in the industry. (update: Oliver Young left a comment on his post)

(This post was reviewed by colleague Analyst Oliver Young, who published the report)

Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

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Spending time with large corporations and getting to understand how they adopt social media is fascinating, recently, I’ve noticed a trend, not on public use, but on internal organization.

Unlikes Advertising (which is often controlled by a single group) Social Media is being adopted by many business groups across the enterprise, from marketing, product teams, sales, to support. While not uncommon, social media tends to be a grassroots movement that comes from the edges (where customers are) of the company, where individual users, vertical marketers, and client facing teams exist.

At least three models of social media orginization within a large corporation, which loosely resemble a tire, a tower, or a spoke model.

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Wheel
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

What styles of adoption are you noticing from large companies?

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Len Devanna is a Web Strategist at EMC I was able to get his precious time in SF recently, and he shared with me how to get organizations to adopt social media.

Learn how to change and move a large culture, how to demonstrate there is value (vs being a time waster) and convincing management.

Listen in at the very end, Len shares his one bit of advice (from being in the trenches) on what to always remember.

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To preface this post, be very clear that the participants are the owners of the community. I write this in context of who within an organization is spearheading and leading the community business program. This post is really aimed at those in the corporations who are leading the social media program from within and have to wrestle with confused management, doubtful colleagues, and the majority who want to keep status quo.

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I’ve served in web teams in both IT and on the Business side, so I find this topic interesting.

IT or Business
Yesterday I had a call with a client who was leading the social media/community charge at his IT related company. Nothing unusual for me, but in this case, he was in IT. Most of the time, when we hear of customer facing community programs or social media programs they are being lead by Marketing. In any case, I’ve got to applaud him for taking the challenge, as for customer facing community programs they usually require a business sponsor.

Business Sponsors help things go smoother
Why is a business sponsor needed for community program today? At least two reasons:

1) A business champion makes it easier: Evangelizing a community program and launching it within an enterprise requires interface with many business units. Marketing, Product Development, Product Support, Communications, PR, and other client groups are often impacted. Having a business champion (that will convince each of these groups) that will address the business objectives, mitigate risks, and define how it’s aligning with the corporate objectives are key.

2) They often control a bucket of money: Most of the time, business units have the budget issued to them from the budget committee, which will fuel the spend for development with either a vendor or with IT. This is not to suggest that IT departments don’t have budget, but when dealing with a customer program like community, the plan will need to gather requirements from the business who understands customers.

The ‘relationship ownership’ plague
Everyone wants to feel protected and safe, and in many corporations, the ‘ownership of relationships’ are present to keep things organized and also to assert some control. PR ‘owns’ the relationship with the influencers like press, media, and analysts, support ‘owns’ the relationship with customers, and sales ‘owns’ the relationship with prospects. So who ‘owns’ the relationship of a community that consists of all of the above constituents?

What really matters
In the end, it doesn’t matter who runs the social media program (IT or a Business unit) what really matters is that the program is customer centric and designed around delivering an experience that lets customers self-support each other, or communicate with the company and other members. Not to forget to mention that the most sophisticated IT departments have become business units, not ‘technology support’.

When these tools normalize, the walls drop
Looking to the future, the argument of ‘community ownership’ will be moot, just as email has normalized as a communication tool present everywhere in the enterprise, the same will be true of the social media tools. just take a look at the youngest graduating class to see how ubiquitous these tools already are.

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Lately, I’ve been hearing from more startups that they want to get into the enterprise space. These consumer focused web startups are the ones we know and love with the clever non-sensical names, rounded corners, and domains missing the “e”.

For many startups, having enterprise customers is a great proposition, as it gives the opportunity for repeat revenue from a stable source, partnership opportunities, and maybe even chances for acquisition.

[While many startups are interested to offer their services to Enterprise companies, they underestimate the complexity. There are many overlooked requirements from culture to support that startups just don’t get]

Sadly, while we love these tools on the free open web for our personal uses, many of them aren’t ready for a smooth transition into an enterprise web teams and by serious business folks and executives. A new set of rigorous feature requirements need to be met, including disposing of the ‘fun brand’ and getting ready to support demanding corporate clients.

10 Considerations for the Startup planning to offer to the Enterprise

1) Most importantly, find a business opportunity or pain that you plan on fixing.

2) Re skinning: In many cases, offer a white label tool so it can be rebranded by the consumer.

3) Offer an ASP version as business units will want to adopt without the IT department. (Update: ASP as in Application Service Provider, so a web-version hosted on your servers, so they customer doesn’t have to download any software, or have to rely on IT to do this. Typepad, SalesForce, and SurveyMonkey are examples of this)

4) Later, evaluated offering a software version that IT and Engineering can download and use on internal or secured severs behind the firewall,

5) Build a robust system that won’t fail from heavy enterprise use, sadly, Twitter would never make it.

6) Develop login and permission systems that work with a variety of identity systems, ensure data can be easily transferred to clients, use industry standards.

7) Provide a healthy dashboard and metrics for the clients administrative team

8 ) Hire sales and account teams that have backgrounds in corporate. For initial sales with a business unit, expect to sail through, but expect rigorous testing, negotiations, and detailed contracts when dealing with corporate purchasing departments.

9) On demand support: Dealing with enterprise clients requires a higher degree of support, expect to jump, leap, and spring into action at the request of your corporate clients.

10) Get serious: consider rebranding and refocusing the tool. Refine or create a separate marketing effort to aim for the enterprise space, consider creating a sub-brand.

While it’s sure attractive for startups to want to offer their products to corporations, many have not thought through the implications and requirements to be enterprise class. Quite frankly, many won’t have the aptitude, resources, or time to do this right.

[Many startups will offer to the enterprise, but most will fail. Successful startups offering to the enterprise need to have maturity, and it’s not something that can be masked]

If I’ve missed any considerations, please extend the list, by leaving a comment or sharing from your own blog

A special note about terms: While it would have been so easy for me to use the term Enterprise 2.0 I used every precaution to actually describe and explain the concepts rather than just using that term. I hope that you too become mindful before using that term, as well as Web 2.0. Show your mastery: focus on descriptions and outcomes rather than buzzwords.

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Enterprise Intranets are an often overlooked corporate asset. These powerful tools represent the knowledge, relationships, and processes of a company, yet for the most part they go under-resources, under-appreciated, and given third-class citizenship to the public site and customer or partner extranet. We know they are important as they are a direct reflection of your corporate culture.

If a company’s competitive strength is it’s employees and how they work together, the intranet is a valuable tool. Secondly, with many baby boomers in the United States retiring in the near future a great deal of corporate knowledge will be lost, how will you capture and distribute this tacit knowledge?

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The Challenges of the Enterprise Intranet:
There’s a few major reasons why the intranet is not fully utliized, it really comes down to corporate prioritizies and resources.

1) Leadership not employee focused. Web strategy is often owned by the Marketing department, or a dedicated web team, they have specific business goals to hit, and they are often aimed at marketing or customer focused –not employee focused.
2) Little love from IT: IT often owns the infrastructure, systems, and applications that the Intranet sits on top of, and they often are focused on ERP project and leave the intranet in a ‘maintaince and manage’ mode.
3) Value not recognized: The intranet management team (if you have one) is perceived as a corporate cost as it can’t directly generate revenue further perplexing the problem
4) Too many cooks in kitchen: Many constituents from Marketing, HR, IT, and every business unit make decisions at an enterprise level difficult, unwieldy, and often not worth the effort.
5) Decision makers oblivious: Management and decision makers don’t use the intranet, they rely on administrative staff for scheduling, sometimes emails, and any intranet tasks, the pains and opportunities are rarely seen.

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Evolution of the Enterprise Intranet
Intranets have a variety of stages as it evolves, I’ve listed out the natural growth pattern that I’ve seen.

1) Disparate: The early stages of an intranets birth often lies in the hand of a forward thinking rogue that sets up a server beneath their desk and initiates the first behind-the-firewall website. Later, many others follow his lead and create their own intranets on modified workmachines, and then finally they are put on servers and supported by IT. These often horrific looking and abandonded websites have a disparte user experience, look and feel, and content. There is little or no consistency resulting in a fragmented experience for users.

2) Common User Experience: As the company realizes the importance of sharing information on a web repository that’s available globally and 24/7 (unlike email) the push to unify the disparate intranet into a common user experience occurs. Outsourcing to a design firm or to marketing will yield a look and feel, navigation and information architecture form. Likely, hopefully the birth of a dedicated intranet team occurs, who manage the ongoing program. They provide direction, strategy, processes, and styles for content and the experience.

3) Unified Content Management System: Unfortunately, just because the front end of the website and the processes are starting to solifidy this doesn’t mean the right tools are in place. For the intranet team to manage all the content updates, create versions, and obtain reporting becomes unrealistic. As a result, the need for the right tools are needed. In the past, these webpages may have been static created and managed by tools like Homesite, Dreamweaver, or raw HTML, the need for what you see is what you get software is a requirement. The Intranet team needs and wants to empower business owners to manage their own content within the framework of the enterprise intranet. Typically IT is resourced to obtain the CMS tool, which will likely glue into existing architectures and systems, sometimes without the consent of the experience of the user base.

4) Personalization and Enterprise Search: With the access for business groups to publish at will with their CMS system, massive content is created and documents of every flavor are uploaded. The intranet begins to progress to a great deal of information, but leaving a very unwieldy experience for users, as a result the push for ‘portal’ type of personalized homepages may emerge, where content is delivered based on team, location, and rank. More difficult than easy, this undertaking is often not completed to the full enterprise. Enterprise Search, a tool that looks at all internal documents and data repositories emerges and starts to scan, index, and serve up information for users.

5) Collaboration: Popular in the last few years, businesses started to realize that employees needed to work together on knowledge projects and the right tools to span distance and time were not available. A large influx of collaboration tools invaded the enterprise, allowing teams to share and work on documents together and in near-real time. While helpful to many, the promise of ongoing collaboration isn’t for every user, as the complexity of features can be mind-boggling.

6) Socialization: Fast forward to today, the enterprise intranet are starting to see social features, (some call this Enterprise 2.0, but I prefer to focus on outcomes) where employees can go beyond collaboration on ideas and start to tell others about themselves, connect with others, and share information. The social capital of a company (the contacts and influence within a company) starts to become realized and the need to share contacts, knowledge across the enterprise (regardless of location or team) starts to emerge. There are many challenges that come with this, as the data starts to move to application service providers if IT doesn’t respond and data, security, and personal information leave the firewall. IT departments that are too slow to keep up end up doing clean up as business units can easily deploy their own intranet using tools like blogtronix, ning, and a variety of others.

7) The future: It’s sure difficult to peer into the next 5 years, expect rich smart phones to start to access the intranet for secured users as collaboration and communication occure on the road, at home, and during weekends –the workplace (along with the intranet) goes with us.

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Success Factors for Successful Enterprise Intranet

1) A centralized body that controls the User Experience. A group that can define the design, look and feel, user interface, navigation, taxonomy, and information architecture of a site. They are also empowered to enforce this regardless of polical structure.
2) Business and personal users have freedom to publish: Although the constraints for consistency are setup, the business teams are empowered to control their own content, to quickly publish, and to modify at will. A balance is needed between them.
3) Expiration of content: The worst thing that happens to an intranet is the layer and layers of retired content that is overlayed on it. The intranet team should auto-review content that hasn’t been modified after X quarters or years, identify the creator, ask if it’s valid and remove if not.
4) IT gets ahead of the need: IT needs to move away from thinking of the intranet as a system to maintain, but as a system to grow, develop and constantly build on top of. Failure to do so will result in business teams finding their own third-party software, installing or running on a remote server.
5) A social sandbox for employees: Currently, many employees are sharing their personal and business lives on third party social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and to some degree LinkedIn. In many situations the opportunity for self-expression or to share personal information (even in the context of the workplace) is not supported by the enterprise. Companies should provide a social networking like service for employees to connect, share, build and further relationships on the intrarnet. Clearly delineate this is separate from the other area of the website, but give freedom for unique ideas to spread, grow, and be built.

So where is your intranet? which Challenge? What stage of evolution? Which success factors are present
For each of the three sections above which relate to you or your clients? Share with me in the comments:

Related Resources:

12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008

Enterprise Irregulars

Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools

Facebook as a Corporate Portal Platform?

Project portfolio management and IT governance

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My intranet background: I don’t talk about it as much now, as I’m more focused on social media, but it’s still a passion. But in the past I’ve managed a global enterprise one for Hitachi Data Systems, aligned one at World Savings (now Wachovia) and did UI design and management at Exodus and Cable and Wireless America. Details on my profile.

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Before you join that next company, consider asking for a look at the corporate intranet first. Why? The intranet is a direct reflection of the ethos, soul, and culture of a company.

An intranet is important, it’s the collective knowledge of your employees, a collection of resources, and directories that should enable business to move forward faster (cost savings) and to grow and support customer focused teams (revenue generation). I’ve read research that indicates that 40% of the United States population will retire in the next few years, (Update: US Census reports that 26% of all Americans are baby boomers. 78M over US population of 298M, since youth and elderly are not working, 40% isn’t much of a stretch) and intranets are a key way to harvest the tacit knowledge from these information wealthy individuals.

[An Intranet is an accurate reflection of the inner workings and ‘Corporate DNA’ of a company]

My German uncle (I’ve a diverse family) runs the health department for a major county in California, his roots are with health inspection of restaurants. He told me one indicator of a cleanliness of a kitchen is to first check out the restroom, it’s often managed and cared for the same way. Intranets are often the same indicator for it’s internal culture. I know as I was an intranet manager, and have been involved with those programs in four previous roles.

You can tell a lot from the intranet, the way it’s designed, displayed, organized, the content all reflect how the corporation is run. Take a closer look at your intranet and compare it to the following attributes

What are the comparative attributes of a corporate intranet?

Structured Organization or Loosely organized
Is the architcture of your site tightly wound around the features of an existing CMS system, or loosely created by different collaborative groups? This is an indicator of how the company may be managed, either centralized or run by different factions.

Static or Dynamic
Is the content rarely updated, or is frequently changing with the speed of business? This could indicate how information is being shared (or not) within the enterprise.

Text based or Media Focused
Is the content primarily text and information geared, or are there uses of more ‘human’ mediums like images, maps, videos, audio? Is your company focused on delivering hard raw data, or sharing the human and ‘life’ stories among employees.

Disparate or Centralized
Is the user experience of your intranet different with every business group? or is it centralized within a single framework. This is a clear indicator of how your company is likely setup.

Product/Customer focused or Employee focused
Is your intranet focused on selling of products, or customers, or on the lifestyle of employees, and how they communicate. I’ve worked for a company where the sole purpose of the homepage was to push sales and marketing information to employees, nearly brainwashing. This indicates the true focus of a company. For example, Intuit is truly employee focused, and former employees tell me the intranet is setup this way.

Top down publishing or Bottom up publishing
perhaps the most telling attribute, if your intranet a publication of just a few key members with power, or are the voices and knowledge shared from across the enterprise? Does management lead with an iron fist, or are the suggestions from the employees on the ground floor (ones dealing with customers/products from day to day) taken into account?

Publishing from Business or Technology Group
Is the content published by a technology group, or is it in the hands of business? I’ve seen some intranets (a business tool) be controlled and owned by IT, which is clearly a mis-use of human tool to empower business units to communicate. This is a reflection of how business information is handled or respected, from a technology perspective or from a business perspective.

[By looking at the organization, content, and publishing of your intranet, will indicate how your company is managed, prioritized, and focused]

You can learn a lot from your enterprise intranet, it’s a telling mirror of the culture and ethos of your company. Now to hear from you: So how was/is your intranet organized? Does it reflect the corporate DNA of your company culture?

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I spoke at Visible Path’s (client) Corporate Social Network Design Council in San Francisco today. The panel, moderated by Anneke Seley Founder & CEO, PhoneWorks, included Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM, Ross Mayfield of Social Text, and Matt, the program manager of Motorola’s Internet and Collaboration Technology.

Highlights of the discussion:

-Initially, when the web was launched, it was estimated that business folks were separated by 7 degrees, now it can be measured at nearly 3 degrees
-Ross suggested that every brand will have a wiki associated with them. Take for example “lost” which has a handful of wikis, both from corporate and the fan base
-The big question of how do personal and professional networks become both a private asset to an individual as well as be shared by the enterprise.
-How many social graphs do we need? Is there conflict as they cross over? (I suggested there are four social graphs on average: public, work, friends, and family)
-Motorola is already experimenting with internal social networks and wikis, with success.
-”Sales 1.0 is about lots of reporting, and sell less, Sales 2.0 is about less reporting and more selling”
-The future is focusing on the people, and their relationships
-One HR manager had concerns as legal and compliance need records of how candidates are found, and sometimes this process happens in hard-to-track social networks.
-Ross has two strategic questions he applies to the enterprise: 1) How do you make programs more transparent and 2) How do you make them more participatory.
-Ross had the best line: “In school, sharing was called cheating, but in the workplace it’s called collaboration”

I shared the edgeworks concept and how the web, marketing, sales and recruiting is distributed on the networks.

It was held at San Francisco’s beautiful Olympic Club, I didn’t realize it until I was stopped by the guard by jeans weren’t allowed. Being a techie, I’m so used to wearing jeans to social media events (Ross was wearing jeans too, thank god I wasn’t alone). My visible path hosts were so nice to fetch me, I apologized of course. How is this a good lesson in understanding online communities and social networks? One should always research their community to understand their culture, behavior, and norms before joining. I’ve done other embarrassing things in public, and learned a lot from them.

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I created this Utterz (short mobile audio) from my mobile phone while driving up to the event. Social Graphs, identity, relationships and how we communicate is at top of mind. Here’s the post I was referring to.

If you click on the “click for more” on the utterz player, it will go to their site where you can see more conversations, such as Christian who left me an utterz response. We’re having a mobile, audio, asynchronous conversation online and via the cell. I can even listen to his messages while driving, and respond.

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The conversation took a sudden turn in the comments of my recent post: ” The Challenges of Social Media in the Enterprise, why Business and IT need to align” I was attempting to highlights the danger of IT being separated from the business. (Please read this post to get context)

I really enjoy the conversation points, and they deserved to be highlighted then here, because this is a real world issue we are all dealing with. To be fair, there are voices from the web strategists on the business side, folks from IT, IT consultants, IT vendors, and there is even at least one CEO I know of that chimed in.

Here’s the highlights from the comments in the previous post:

IT should manage infrastructure only
Ian Laurie:

“Don’t you think IT has needed to align with business for a long, long time? I’ve seen search marketing campaigns, web site launches, PR initiatives and more derailed by stubborn or overworked IT folks.”

The truth is that, in most cases, IT should be managing infrastructure, not web sites. The smart marketer or strategist puts their site somewhere where they can control it, or gets a dedicated IT resource, or screams until the do.”

IT may not want to evolve
Jennifer agrees with Ian (and she’s posted about it on her blog):

“I want to believe that joining together is an option and I always offer them the opportunity to be involved, but at the end of day they either don’t want to be involved, refuse to open their minds to new thinking, or just don’t get it. The IT departments I’ve worked with just aren’t ready to take on websites because they’re still trying to get infrastructure right, so in that sense I have to agree with Ian”

IT is Business Support
In the comments, Jake McKee poses some very strong questions about roles:

“As mentioned above, IT (as a general “thing”) is primarily responsible for infrastructure. They’re the group that keeps the phones on, the internal mail servers functioning, and the firewall secure. They’re not, by default, business support. The same group of people dealing with firewalls shouldn’t be be designing Web sites and activities. The marketing people aren’t calculating production line times in their downtime; the in-house lawyers aren’t taking customers service calls between writing briefs. Why do we expect something different from IT?”

IT not resourced for this change; third parties may be needed
Dennis McDonald, an experienced IT consultant relates from his perspective:

“In many large companies it is precisely because corporate IT departments spend so much of their time and money maintaining infrastructure technologies that they are shortchanged when it comes to being funded with enough staff to support agile and business-oriented responses to rapidly changing business needs….

…It’s a vicious circle that in some companies has led to so much IT outsourcing that providing support for new technologies can’t happen without the involvement of outside contractors.”

From the IT perspective: “we think bigger, do you?”
Nik Butler shares from the perspective of the IT pros:

“First of all IT Departments, Heck IT any Support guys dont like clients carrying out random acts of software delivery and implementation because its the very same IT guys who are reached for when it stops working or wont share or wont export or wont do a whole host of things which werent considered when the “New and Shiny” product is implemented.”

IT: No lust here, business doesn’t see full costs
Wade Rocket acknowledges the desires of IT:

“Your typical IT guy does not “lust” to work on the sweet new Web site you’ve been inspired to create. He just wants to be sure that nothing awful is going to happen that will require him to sweat over the damn thing for hours (or days).”

One solution: develop a corporate plan, but who owns it?
Josh Maher gets strategic and suggests a sensible plan, but the ownership still isn’t clear:

“Any organization actually looking to deploy social media technology needs to have the IT department support them. Not doing so would be a waste of time, money, and resources. If you can’t get the support than you are selling the wrong people.

Step 1. develop social media concept
Step 2. implement pilot on your own time
Step 3. sell your management on the idea
Step 4. leverage you management buy-in to develop corporate strategy
Step 5. use corporate strategy to get funding and prioritization for IT
Step 6. bring project to IT for company wide implementation”

Len also draws upon his experience in his day job and how he works with his IT department, a must read coming from a technologist at a very large IT company.

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Takeaways
In the end, what really matters? Is that business is moving forward.

Culture and relationships will vary in every company, on one hand if IT is too stubborn to provide or support social computing tools…the business will adopt them on their own, and there’s little IT alone can do about it. Banning the tools won’t work, especially if they involve customer communications.

On the other hand, if social media tools aren’t going away, IT has an opportunity to step forward and lead the tool selection and deployment for the business, these tools impact every business unit. My new CEO told me that IT should be renamed “Business Technology” and I think he’s right.

I hope I’ve represented the select quotes well, I spent at least 30 minutes reading and pulling this content together. For what it’s worth, I’ve worked in both IT and on the Business side of web projects.

So where does IT start and stop? Do they have a role here? What’s at stake for them not to step up to the adoption of social media by the business units?

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Last night I was one of the panelists discussing Social Media in the enterprise (some may refer to this as Enterprise 2.0. but the savvy know it’s so much more). Shel Israel always does a great job of leading panels in an unorthodox manner by encouraging panelists to give about a 6 minute doctrine before getting into question and answer. Here’s loosely the points I made last night:

[The notion of Enterprise 2.0 entices us of open communications, collaboration, in a connected world. Before we adopt these cheap and free tools have we must stop to consider the dangers when IT and Business departments don’t adapt at the same speed]

Web Strategy in the Enterprise
Many people consider me a marketer, yet I have a long background in intranets and the enterprise. I’ve served in both IT and software engineering departments. I’ve worked on four enterprise intranets and was the business manager for the global enterprise intranet at Hitachi Data Systems, mainly focused on the marketing and sales side. I was on the Board of Advisors for two enterprise 2.0 companies, ConnectBeam and Worksona (which has morphed to a new company) and have written a white paper with Dennis McDonald on the topic (we started it in 2005, before the term ’social media’ came about). For what it’s worth I prefer to be called a “web professional” not segmented to IT, Media, or Marketing, there’s many facets to the web.

The Shine of Enterprise 2.0
The promise of “Enterprise 2.O” to deliver open communications, collaboraiton, and social connections for a faster and more fluid business there are several concerns to consider. Even simply blogging tools like Six Apart’s Typepad is an example. We’re all excited about how disparate individuals and groups will be able to find each other, connect, and collaborate in new ways in the company, have we stopped to consider some of the pitfalls?

Then the dullness sets in Dangers of dispersion
Unfortunately for many IT departments, they focus on the programs they are budgeted to maintain. Sometimes they are not given the freedom or resources to innovate outside of the current enterprise architecture, “Must stay J2EE” or “This is a MS shop only”, or the worse one “Not built here? then we don’t want it”. This slowness gives business units with eyes wide open from business pains three options: 1) Ask IT for help, and hope their request for new communication and collaboration tools to be granted 2) Do nothing 3) Do something on their own.

Access to tools is simple, it’s called the “internet”
If business units adopt these tools without IT providing a technology and communications strategy the enterprise may suffer from a disjointed experience –regardless of individual successes. Out of necessity, the business unit turns to the web as they develop a program on their own. What exactly will they do? Access the variety of free tools, or cheap ones to meet their needs.

I’m guilty and you may be too
I’m somewhat guilty of this problem, I’ve deployed tools without contacting my IT department. Why? because I was afraid they would slow and eventually stop any innovative programs I would lead on the business side. It’s so simple to download, or use web based collaboration tools (in fact I have a list of nearly 80 white label social networks, and dozen of collaboraiton tools) that can be used at any given time.

Thinking through the impacts
Fast forward a few months, if not weeks. What happens when individual business units develop and deploy these tools? The immediate business problems are met, although the longer, and larger information landscape is forever changed. Enterprises may see ill effects such as:

Disparate user experiences to customers and employees

Information spread off the firewall, some potentially sensitive

Risk of enterprise 2.0 vendors being acquired by a competitor

Real time information being spread at the “edges” of the company, where there was one before corporate communications

Multiple login systems

Multiple identity systems spread from system to systems

Systems that may not talk to each other, now or in the future.

Business program managers that leave the company or position, orphaning any technology deployment deployed at the business level

Business groups paying for web programs in different locations, different budgets

Lack of a cohesive web strategy

The fix? IT moving at the speed of business
Business units, IT groups, and Enterprise 2.0 vendors need to work closely together to deploy programs across the enterprise. I, we, you, would love to see IT to rise to the occassion and get ahead of the demand curve. Get aware of what’s happening, build connections internally. Get educated, attend enterprise 2.0 conferences and events. Initiate a dialogue with business units fast and early. Your business analysts can stay close to the groups, gather information and help drive a real strategy. Experiment with new technology (give time and resources to those wide eyed employees in IT you see who may adopt these tools) and deploy quickly. Be flexible as business and technology changes over time. Sure, there are going to be changes at the speed of business, but that’s far better than doing nothing.

Chime in with your suggestions and experiences in the comments below, please.

In a few days I’ll be speaking at Visible Path’s event in San Francisco, Ross Mayfield and others will be on my panel. What’s Visible Path? They offer solutions to map out the “Social Graph” of an enterprise by sifting and organizing unstructured data in Outlook and other repositories. Why is this important? The most important knowledge in many orginizations (HR, Sales, Support, Management) can be relationships, and often in other organizations. Corporations are not islands, but are connected with interstate freeways extending at all edges of the border. You may also want to check out the free white paper Dennis McDonald and I wrote “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools”

Links from the Social Media Club event at Intel last night “Social Media in the Enterprise”

Stuart was there Update: and has blogged the session notes, and Chris (who said his URL enough times for me to remember to check it out SocialTNT), and he also summarized the event, fantastic capture.

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(Above: Over 200 folks showed up, dine, and talk enterprise 2.0)

Lunch 2.0 at Oracle was a great example of how a very large company is reaching out to the fast and rapidly changing market. Marius and Justin did a great job hosting and kicking off the event. Over 200 people showed up, were fed, and were exposed to a few Oracle demos. There were a lot of influential individuals there, Scoble, Dave McClure, Joseph Smarr, and even the Americas country director of Singapore (A country with deep roots in IT and technology).

Apparently there’s been a lot of internal groundswelling within the company to embrace the new web and what it means as the power has shifted, and my somewhat prodding post was just a minor bump (I take back what I said btw).

The Oracle folks mentioned to me they want to do similar events in the future, so what’s going to help them take it to the next level? Involve the community in the interaction and demos, one example is how an old enterprise data storage company let 10 web companies demo their own software.

Robert and I had a private tour of the intranet, which is using quite a few social technolgoies to connect employees. There were three other demos of enterprise software platforms that are starting to adopt social features, I always appreciate when the value of how people connect is highlighted over raw technology deployment. After all, software is about people!

Great job to the Enterprise Oracle team moving forward, I know from first hand experience how much work it is to move a big ol’ aircraft carrier.

Off to a few meetings then to speak at Intel tonight about Enterprise Social Media!

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Update: here’s the video with Justin, one of the hosts

Update: Lisa went to the event, and gives her honest opinion of the event, she’s been to many community event. Always count on the blogosphere to keep opinions and feedback real, this is new marketing, the new product development process and how communication will be going forward: open, honest, and fast. Feedback is just the first step, how companies and brands react (like Dell did, slowly) to the market and change is what counts, (now they are leading the conversation in their market). Jake recaps the event from the Oracle Apps blog.

Update: I used to get my photos up within an hour after an event, my new job is keeping me busy, sorry for the delay

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In the spirit of self analysis, Dennis McDonald often posts the top downloaded documents on his blog. If you don’t know Dr Dennis, he’s an experienced, and level-headed IT consultant that I’ve known and been communicating with since 2005 (I guess we were thinking ahead). In fact, we started a white paper in late 2005 called “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools”.

Although we wrote that white paper nearly two years ago, it continues to be downloaded and consumed (ranked number 6), as it’s finally becoming relevant to the enterprise workforce.

If you’re a new reader to my blog, you may be surprised to find out, that before I became so focused on social computing, I was actually an enterprise Intranet manager on the business side, and have worked on a total of 4 intranets, for some of my career, internal knowledge management was my passion.

Although I don’t have many docs on my blog, I logged into Google Analytics, and pulled this data.

Here’s the top 5 posts in the last 6 months:
The first was the blog index page, so I don’t need to include that.

Views are ‘page views’ and Attention is duration spent on post (very important), I’ve included other interaction elements too such as comments, add them up and you’ll get a sense of user engagement.

You’ll notice that for the most part, the traffic for these posts are not high, but it’s the interaction, the multiple comments, that make them stand out.

If I had more time, I would go into Delicious, Magnolia, Technorati, and Stumbleupon to find others tags, comments and metadata associated around the content.

For more information on social media measurement, check out this white paper I co-authored.

1) List of “White Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms
The market is clearly hungry for this information. Techcrunch used it for their posts and analysis, and VCs refer to it before funding into this market I’m told.
Views: 19,520 Attention: 00:03:26 Comments and Trackbacks: 201

2) Marissa Mayar, VP of Google on The Future of Search and Announcing Google Gadget Ventures “We pay you $100,000″
Got on Digg.com, causing a tremendous spike and residual traffic of about 5%.
Views 12,079 Attention: 00:03:14 Comments and Trackbacks: 23 (although if you go to the Digg page there’s quite a bit)

3) Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Facebook
This was passed around, and repurposed on MarketingProfs.com
Views: 7,690 Attention: 00:03:13 Comments and Trackbacks: 68

4) Web Strategy: How to evolve your irrelevant corporate website
This went global and the community started to translate it into multiple languages
Views: 4,743 Duration: 00:03:35 Comments and Trackbacks: 78

5) The Many Forms of Web Marketing for the 2007 Web Strategist
I noticed that some of the reffere traffic for this comes from Stumbleupon and Delicious
Views: 3,765 Attention: 00:02:50 Comments and Trackbacks: 58

I hope you list out your top 5 posts for the last 6 months, it’s a good exercise to learn what’s worked for you, leave a comment when you do, I want to see.

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Dennis has responded to my Social Computing for the Product Life Cycle post, which is a “How to”. In his viewpoint he asks a different question, he wants to know “Why” and gives some examples of some industries where customer and community feedback isn’t a good idea. I could list a ton of industries where it does work (even shifting the “x”s over to the Yes in the industries he’s listed out) but I’d rather elevate the discussion.

We can draw upon our innovation to improve our businesses through a variety of strategies, I’ll break them down as the Mirror, the Window, and the Door.

The Mirror
Relying on the Enterprise (IT in particular) to lead progress in this new world isn’t the solution. Dennis observes,

“I want to know how these processes get baked into existing systems. To date, I’ve seen almost no attempt at integrating social computing/media projects into the systems upon which industry depends. That should not be a surprise but it cannot be ignored.“.

This movement isn’t coming from IT, the CIO, or the powers-that-be. It’s coming from the people, the people who are using these easy-to-use tools to communicate and make their lives easier. I can’t think of any customers who are going to ask the permission of a CIO of a vendor before starting a blog or being involved in a brand forum on a third party. He suggests enterprise IT isn’t ready for the new world, and he’s right, the customers and savvy business units will just pass them up

Let’s stop looking in the mirror to see if this is being adopted, because the activity isn’t even happening in our own house.

The Window
Here’s where many of us are at now. For those who read this blog, or other blogs like it, we see the power shifting outside our windows. We’re looking out and see that customers are building websites in tribute to our brands, or are talking about how to make products better, or even how to fix them all together, we’re watching and learning.

Dennis is right, I don’t want the “crowd” designing the brake system of my car, but I would sure want the experts in that industry who are designing them into my car to participate. I also want to buy a car that has involved customers as many areas of the product life cycle, form analyzing support requests (on their site and ours) getting customer feedback in real time, and involving advocates. In fact, for many of the products we buy, we’re going to lean on customers to lend their opinion.

For most, some are just peeking out of the window, amazed and scared to see that customers are building on our front lawn, some shut the blinds, and others open the window, one thing is for sure, it’s not going away.

The Door
Here’s the future, and maybe my post wasn’t ready for the market, or maybe just Dennis. It’s unavoidable that every brand will be impacted by social computing, it’s up to the product teams to determine if voices are to be included. The risk? The competitor may recognize this, harvest and benefit.

For most, we’ve not even opened the door, welcomed the customers in our house, let them give input to our cooking, but the savvy companies will. To be fair, how far we’ll let them in our house depends, but let’s at least analyze the opportunities.

We’ll continue to see customers building their own community sites, not on the corporate website, to do nothing is missing the opportunity.

[In the end, we’ll all have to move together, not just on the speed of enterprise (IT), but at the speed of the market and customers–they’re not going to wait]

For what it’s worth, I’m no stranger to IT. I’ve worked in IT for 3 years, managed 2 enterprise intranets, and helped out with 2 others. I’ve also managed one enterprise extranet and have worked at 3 Enterprise IT companies (Web hosting, Telecom, and Enterprise Data Storage) who were selling to IT decision makers.

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Above: For those using a feedreader or email subscription, See video interview with Shankar Iyer, VP of Strategic Initiatives at WebEx

The trend for companies to use Gadgets and Widgets is not uncommon, Google and CapGemini are in partnership to reach the enterprise market as CapGemini has links to Microsoft’s Vista’s product.

I had morning coffee with Shankar Iyer, Vice President, Strategic Initiatives of WebEx, they use PodTech (where I’m employed for another week) for Audio and Video podcasting solutions. A few years ago, Webex purchased intranets.com an internal collaboration tool they’ve started to fold into their platform. A few years ago, they released a secure IM tool, which a scaled down version has been used by AOl’s AIM product.

Most recently, WebEx has been putting resources into it’s WebEx Connect platform, which Shankar described as a “Business mashup collaboration platform”. Think widgets on top of a communication platform for extranet and intranet. There’s two major elements of this platform, one is a server side platform and the second is a client based widget platform. Inside of the client platform is a web based and desktop based program, each will quickly integrate widgets from third parties.

A practical use case of their platform could be for internal sales teams to collaborate build documents, proposals and plans, they could then work with prospects, sharing data, bringing the process to the close, then pass on to delivery and fulfillment teams. The toolset could comprise of video, IM, synchronous tools like persistent chat, document sharing, and even the dreaded email. Existing CRMs could create widgets that could deploy, making the process seamless. I’m somehow reminded of the portal movement in the late 90s which I was deploying at Exodus.

I asked Shankar a few other questions, and found out that this is part of the overall corporate strategy of WebEx, and also their recently new parent company, Cisco. In the future they will align with Cisco’s “Unified Communications” strategy, and integrate other products. I asked about Five Across, Tribes, and other acquistions, but he didn’t give me any hard answers. The Widget framework should be able to support widgets from other platforms, like NetVibes, Google Desktop and Google Widgets, Facebook and Microsoft Gadgets. “Do you have Live Video?” Shankar responded that they have partners like Veodia who are building a widget.

Web Strategy Recommendations
For companies wanting to reach the enterprise web space, I highly recommend you take a closer look at the WebEx Connect platform, they may already have the install base, corporate footprint in SMB, and may offer yet another distribution platform for your web service.

On a personal note, anything we can do to make meetings less painful or time consuming, let’s do it.

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Above is Charlie, a fictional IT knowledge worker who’s using social computing in the enterprise, despite that he needs to fix his collar, he’s deploying some very productive programs that could change a company.

Great primer for those that need to learn how social software can aid the intranet, it was created by Scott Gavin, who really, really knows how to market himself, who appears to be connected to the corporate punk. I could have used guys like this when I was managing the enterprise intranet at HDS.

What do I like best about the presentation? not only does it just list out the tools, it shows HOW they can be used, and in an digi-integrated way.

Link via Shiv at Razorfish.

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(Above: The Social Computing Panel, left to right: Athena von Oech, Shiv Singh, Adam Nash, John McCrea, Anil Dash, Shel Israel)

Office 2.0: The Social Enterprise
I finished my second day of three at Office 2.0, and am really absorbing as much as I can.The first day was an unconference, an open style event where the attendees lead the topics and conversations. On the second day, I toured the demo pod area, where really nice Apple computer displays were used, it was a nice experience. I met with about 50% of all the vendors, but sadly, there were some companies that have created features, and are trying to create companies –it’s not enough, espicially when they are very similar. Every paying attendee received either an iPhone or a Play Station 3, what an amazing gift for attending, a well organized conference. I observed that there were few women who attended the event, is this a demographic slice of internal intranet teams?

[Office 2.0 is the intersection of employee productivity and the social web tools. Great conflict must be resolved as business units can communicate more effectively without IT, causing tension in security, support, and culture. The power continues to shift to the people, in this case, the employees]

Trend: Internal Evangelists fight for Employees
Remember back in 2005 when we first started to hear about how Marketing and PR was being afflicted with the blogging disease? There was always a great presentation how a lone evangelist had changed a program within a company. Now, in 2007, these stories are being told about the Intranet, I was very impressed and inspired to hear Adam Carson from Morgan Stanley share his story, Dan Farber was sitting in the front of the room, and has a great write up. Ismael has put on a great conference, many of the sessions were being streamed, and archived (Sadly, the Office 2.0 site is difficult to navigate, and I cannot find the page, try finding the agenda). After I asked my question to a colleague, I received a direct message from Charlene, who was watching remotely, what a connected world.

Notable Panel: Social Computing
While I despised the vendor pitching from one panel on mobile (Attention moderators, control your panelists, respect those who paid to attend) the best panel I’ve seen in a LONG time was the one moderated by Shel Israel, focused on Social Computing, the esteemed panel included: Anil Dash of Six Apart, John McCrea of Plaxo, Adam Nash of LinkedIn, Shiv Singh of Razorfish, Athena von Oech of Ning. I enjoyed the format, it wasn’t the usual Q&A, but each speaker (moderator included) were able to present their ideas and concepts up front, great format. As expected, Anil elevates the conversation to a strategic discussion, it’s always a pleasure to hear him. Many of these vendors are from social networking companies, and although Facebook wasn’t on the panel (those guys are hard to get) the conversation persisted around Facebook. As with most vendors, if they don’t have a ‘facebook strategy’ they pass it as a fad, or are nonchalant attitude. I clearly see the threat for some of these vendors, hence my focus on the topic. I like the shift the panel took, towards the impacts of social computing (social networks, blogs, media, live web) tools towards society, in which Buzz Bruggemen piped up from the audience that he only had business contacts, not personal contacts on Facebook. In response, I tickled the panel for their opinion on personal/business lives meshing, espicially with the millennial generation. The panel answered back, that those who had both merged were rare.

Attention IT Management: Step up or step off
I heard a lot of frustrations from business people that are tired of IT not stepping up to the plate to deliver social computing tools. Sadly, as IT units (often cost centers) are not measured by innovation, but rather by support, will be in a worse situation as business units adopt these tools. As a result, IT will eventually have to reconcile multiple logins, data off the firewall, new systems, and multiple databases in the new distributed world. I personally had frustrations of having to manage the Enterprise intranet at my previous company, when I asked for tools like blogs and forums, I was shoved clunky portal-like SharePoint. Why should IT step up? Some attendees told me they just need IT to provide a laptop and internet connectivity, everything else they can do within the browser –IT must step up, their livelihood depends on it. To help others, I teamed up with Dennis McDonald on this white paper, Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools, we started it in 2005.

Various pictures from the previous two days (see all my photos tagged Office20):