We are in the midst of a big shake out in how organizations use social technologies. As we develop a common understanding of the opportunities and risks, better decisions are being made about when and how to use the technology available. We are no longer having exciting breakthroughs every day, so the changes in the market have become more subtle, but no less profound. There are three big challenges I see as we move forward:

1. First, many organizations have enthusiastically embraced and rolled out social technology, but didn’t really think to include staffing and content resources with the initial roll out. They have let 1,000 flowers bloom – or die – on their own. While this approach can be very effective in that it allows rapid experimentation and organizations can really discover what works best for them, it also comes with some pretty high risks. If the stage is not well set for productive use of the technology by community managers, people may not use the tools in ways that have clear and uncontroversial value – and there may be no one to track it even if they do. Successful experiments won’t be shared to other groups. Dead groups that project a failed community won’t be cleaned up. Executives who come in to take a peek my see chaos – or nothing – which is not helpful to garnering their support and extending the value of community to the entire organization. 

2. Another big challenge faces community management teams in organizations that are further along in their community lifecycle. These teams, in many cases, are being squeezed and asked to address near impossible tasks like reconciling the culture of the organization across geographies and functions in order to engage in a consistent way. Part of the reason is that executive sponsors don’t really understand what they are implicitly asking of these teams and don’t adequately understand some of the growing risks in the online social world.

3. Finally, as social business initiatives grow so does the gap in experience. There are a fair number of people who have been managing communities in the online world for more than a decade, but often in contexts that don’t fit the growing need. Culturally and from a business perspective, online gaming and banking are very different worlds. Companies looking for community management are going to have to be flexible about who they hire for community management roles and plan to invest in training and other professional development resources for these individuals.  There are lots of people who are poised to fill community manager roles well, but very often don’t have the experience to prove it is something they can do.

The good news? Understanding the need for community management is on the rise. Training and other professional development services are available – including those we offer at The Community Roundtable. Finally, budgets for social business initiatives are growing. All of this will help address these challenges. Join us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference as experts in the field share their experience on the community management journey.

See you there!

Rachel

As organizations work to transition collaboration and social pilots to enterprise-wide initiatives, architectural questions increasingly rise to the fore:

• How can we integrate with other systems?
• How do we incorporate enterprise directory structures?
• How can we ensure performance and reliability at scale?
• How can we convert features to applications?
• How can we put social applications within the flow of everyday activities?
• How much does SharePoint — present and future — really address these issues?
• How solid are all the many other vendors?
• And so on…

The architecture track at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this June was designed to answer these questions. I hope you can join us there.

I’ll kick off the track with a pre-conference workshop, “Insider’s Guide to Evaluating Architectures and Selecting Vendors.” As a customer, you have more choices than ever, in terms of architectures, delivery and license models, functional breadth, and integration alternatives; this session will help you sort it all out.

For the conference itself, Kashyap Kompella leads off with “Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet?” This session critically assesses a emerging architectures that posit social and collaboration services as a layer (rather than a place) to apply over diverse workstreams within the enterprise.

As many enteprise collaboration leaders will testify, “SharePoint happens.” But do you have to accept that platform as-is? Join three leading SharePoint gurus — Jill Hannemann, Richard Harbidge, and Sadie Van Buren — for “SharePoint: Optimizing 2010 / Looking Forward to 2013.” We’ll turn next to the customer perspective with “Social Collaboration at Scale: Customer Panel.”

Finally, industry luminary Mike Gotta will analyze key building blocks in “Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects.”

If you have any questions or comments, just ping me here.

See you in June!

Tony Byrne

Social technologies are changing the ways we market and sell, that’s obvious.  But the change is not simply superficial or new ways to do the same old work.  Social — along with analytics and mobile technologies — is enabling companies to be far more knowledgeable about who they target, what messages they deliver, and even what products and messages they develop.  In short, social companies have the ability to do business better than their non-social rivals. 

But what does that mean?

Check out our track at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 19^th.  It will showcase some advanced thinking about social adoption, revenue development and how companies are adopting social approaches.

Our goal for the track has been to identify and bring to our audience real thought leadership from some of the industry’s leading practitioners in a variety of disciplines.

• Gerry Murray, Research Manager, and Joe Ferrantino , Research Analyst, both from IDC will share some of their findings from very recent social research.
• Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, will discuss how modern socially based marketing technologies affect revenue generation.
• Steve Adams, CEO VirtuOz will talk about how virtual agents will take on some tasks to improve eCommerce and eServices.
• Jarek Sygitowicz, CEO, Smartupz will discuss how to make the most of social graph analysis.

We are also planning a special panel discussion to round out the Sales and Marketing track.

So make the Sales and Marketing track a focus of your time at Enterprise 2.0.  You are coming aren’t you?

The management model in most organizations is out of step with our times. The model of the past is a hierarchical structure, with a bureaucracy that runs on conformity, control, standardization, and specialization. It was designed for large organizations to be efficient at scale, not to address the ways humans work best.

Come to this session armed with your questions. You’ll be able to submit questions directly to our panelists for a live Q&A session during the hour.

Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Time: 10:00 AM (PST) / 1:00 PM (EST) Duration: 60 minutes

Presenters:

Gary Hamel
Gary Hamel has identified the practices and ideas that are reinventing leading corporations in this new model, inspired and enabled by social technology. The Wall Street Journal has ranked Professor Hamel (London Business School) as the world’s most influential business thinker. Fortune has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy.” He is co-founder of the Management Innovation eXchange and a best-selling author

Paige Finkelman
As General Manager of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and the BrainYard.com, Paige is responsible for business strategy, brand direction, and content programs. Her experience includes roles in business development, product management, event production and sales. Paige holds a Law degree from the University of Manchester in England.

Milind Pansare
Milind Pansare is senior director for Social and Collaboration software at Saba. He has over 25 years of experience in Silicon Valley, and has led product marketing, product management, partner programs and large engineering teams at silicon valley startups and larger silicon valley companies like Sun Microsystems and HP. He has also served as an advisor to startups at a prominent silicon valley startup incubator. He holds a degree in Computer Science.

Today’s social media technologies offer an alternative. It is now possible for organizations to be:

• Large but not bureaucratic
• Focused but not myopic
• Specialized but not balkanized
• Efficient but not inflexible
• Disciplined but not disempowering
• Fit for the future and for human beings

From a practical standpoint, organizations use the Internet’s DNA—its values of transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, and self-determination—to fundamentally transform management. Join the conversation as Gary Hamel shares insights in this free, interactive webcast on April 18.

You’ll walk away with the principles and tools of the Web that will make your company more adaptive, innovative, inspiring—and fit to embrace the opportunities of a fast-approaching future. After the event, you will receive a webcast report and regular updates on the best new ideas in management innovation from the Management Innovation eXchange.

We’ve got an intriguing Human Capital Management track lined up for the June Boston E2.0 Conference in a business area which is starting to see enormous change after years as a bureaucratic people processing departmental silo.

Like many other industry verticals the Human Resources world is being exposed to the connecting forces of enterprise 2.0 thinking and technologies: internal social networking enabling collaboration between everyone in a company, their suppliers and associates and even customers in some consumer industries. Agile Software as a Service updates iterations, the mobile revolution and of course a rapidly changing, increasingly digital sophisticated workforce.Historically HR Technology has been very impersonal, with a focus on the processing of people in and out of companies, with annual performance reviews which are divorced from key moments in employees work lives, their triumphs and frustrations. 

A whole new generation of people centric technologies have now arrived, with some having a direct impact on the limitations of existing Human Capital Management suites. On-demand financial management and human capital management software vendor Workday have had an enormous direct impact on the HR world, and ownership and interactions with systems of record are an important key to enabling broader collaboration across enterprises. 

Our working worlds are now changing rapidly and the old guard of people processing technologies are starting to react, with acquisitions of 2.0 challengers and attempts at socially networked  interoperability across companies. Oracle have bought Taleo, SAP Successfactors and Salesforce Rypple in the last few months, and the changing face of Human Capital Management is really starting to pick up stream as greater flexibility and cross pollination with other parts of the enterprise jigsaw is expected by end users.

I’ve had Rypple (now part of Saleforce) speak at the last two Enterprise 2.0 conferences, with their client Facebook providing fascinating insights into the ways they work together at the fall Santa Clara event. 

As I said in the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference White paper ‘HR Management Challenges & Opportunities‘ Recruiting, compensation & payroll, benefits, incentives and training/learning are the lifeblood of managing the people in a modern company but those foundational elements are table stakes in the new social enterprise vision.

Ideas which have been discussed at past conferences are now being demanded today by some enterprise customers and our sessions are sure to be forward looking from a practitioner’s perspective.

Session details include: 

- How Target Corporation are driving large scale E2.0 adoption driven in part by theiryear-long “Be Connected” adoption strategy 

- Innovation versus Integration, a panel discussion between agile innovators and seasoned global enterprise players on how they see your future

- A discussion of how Lowes are using collaborative technologies to move beyond traditional forms of employee messaging to new strategies designed to build employee meaning and engagement 

- An exploration of how Enterprise 2.0 and Social Networking’s Influence on Human Resource needs has influenced the development of  a new generation of better software and mobile support 

It’s sure to be another fascinating event and I’m looking forward to seeing both familiar and new faces and to listening and participating in the conversation. 

Oliver Marks

Much of the chatter out there around Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business revolves around the growth and application of social tools, and, why not? After all, these technologies have often been the catalysts for the charge forward.

Right now much of the discussion sounds like:

“We need to get our employees using these tools so ‘we know what we know’ as an enterprise.”  Or, something along the lines of “We’ve got to get more people to follow us and like us.”

Those conversations may be starting points but they’re certainly not the ending points if our organizations truly want advantage. If we are to move towards collaborative, connected enterprises that drive value, the questions we need to start asking ourselves are much more about –  “What are the implications of Social Business to the way we work, the way we lead, and the way we organize as a business?”  And, “How does this shift our operating model and the ways we drive value as a company?”

To be clear, social, to this point, has been applied tactically heads and shoulders above strategically – and it continues, in nearly every organization, to be an overlay to their current operations  – this is a recipe for a superficial dish, at best.

We have seen the trees for some time but the forest is just starting to become clear.  New roles are emerging.  New ways of leading and managing must accompany that.  And, the need for reimagining the ways we engage and empower our customers and workforces (made up of a complex web of employees, contractors, agencies, partners, and freelancers) are bearing down on us.

I’m pleased to be leading a new track at Enterprise 2.0 starting this June on the topic of ‘Organizational and Operational Readiness’ that will continue to dive deep into these very topics.  Of course, there is no silver bullet and no one has “the answer” but I don’t believe you’ll find a better place than this conference to connect with some of the early front-runners who are making their forays into asking these questions and taking action in their enterprises.

In our track, you’ll hear from and engage with leaders from Bank of America, Telus, The Hartford, SUPERVALU, and more in addition to learning from our work with numerous other F250 companies.  It aims to be a very engaging track where presenters and participants alike will share what’s worked, what hasn’t and how we can overcome barriers and leverage bright spots to drive our organizations forward.   In the spirit of social and collaboration, we even have one session where the entire presentation will be entirely crowd-sourced on demand from the audience.

Take a peek at the agenda and know that this will continue to evolve for this June and ongoing.  We hope to see you there and have you be a part of this vital conversation >>  http://www.e2conf.com/boston/conference/organization-and-operational-readiness.php

Warm regards,

Sara Roberts, Author, Speaker, and CEO of Roberts Golden (www.robertsgolden.com & @robertsgolden)

With a new year comes new beginnings, and as 2012 gets underway, I want to give an update on how Enterprise 2.0 is shaking things up this year.

Evolved Positioning

I’m excited about the direction this brand is headed. Enterprise 2.0 has been a key driver in pushing social forward, creating a forum for buyers and sellers to connect and explore the power of social and collaboration in business. Once considered a “rogue” market, social is now mainstream.  As 2012 gets underway, social will not only dramatically change the way we do business, but can also inform the business due to an abundance of new data – data that can be mined to improve internal business processes  and create operational efficiencies in customer and partner networks.

Mobile will play an even more important role in the enterprise this year, and reflecting on this trend, we announced Mobile Connect which will run alongside Enterprise 2.0 in Boston this year.  Like social, mobile will fundamentally change the way we do business. Mobile and social are enabling new inputs, fueling vast amounts of data, and creating an opportunity for businesses to run more effectively than ever before. The tools that provide a deep, meaningful analysis of big data will be as integral to the success of these initiatives as the technologies themselves.

We are experiencing a renaissance in enterprise social software. Disruptive forces including social, mobile and better analytics are all influencing enterprise apps, reshaping them from a user’s perspective. Enterprise 2.0 events and online portfolio will continue to be at the forefront of the renaissance playing out. E2’s diligent reminder and question for 2012 attendees is:

The technology is here – is your enterprise ready?

E2 will be the place for enterprises to step back and rethink what the influences of mobile and social mean for their business, and to find out what’s next in enterprise apps. Enterprise 2.0 will continue to bring together key IT and business leaders tasked with making decisions about the future of their organization’s enterprise applications – expect E2 to continue to serve up relevant content and provide real context for attendees.

New 2012 Advisory Board

To help E2 evolve its new positioning, we’re bringing in the big guns to help us get there. Along with some of the usual suspects from previous years, we’ve added a few new folks to the Advisory Board. Say hello to our 2012 members:

	Nathan Bricklin SVP and Head of Social Strategy Wells Fargo Wholesale Banking
	Lee Bryant MD Europe Dachis Group
	Tony Byrne President The Real Story Group
	David Carr Editor The BrainYard
	Ross Fubini Advisor Kapor Capital
	Adam Graff Senior Manager, Collaboration Services Genentech
	Josh Greenbaum Principal Enterprise Applications Consulting
	Rachel Happe Principal and Co-Founder The Community Roundtable
	Irwin Lazar Vice President, Communications Research Nemertes Research
	Maribel Lopez Principal Analyst and VP, Constellation Research; Founder, Lopez Research LLC
	Oliver Marks Partner, Sovos Group and blogger ZDNet Collaboration 2.0
	Ross Mayfield Chairman and Co-founder of Socialtext; VP Biz Dev, SlideShare
	Andrew McAfee Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business MIT Sloan School of Management
	Sameer Patel Partner, Sovos Group
	Sara M. Roberts Book Author and President & CEO Roberts Golden Consulting
	Andy Wang Principal Systems Architect Genentech
	Steve Wylie General Manager UBM TechWeb

New 2012 Vendor Board

E2 can learn a lot from our partners. Although we are an independent conference, ultimately every vendor in this space is encountering the same challenges and opportunities, and to create an opportunity for the conference to learn from our sponsors, for the first time in the event’s history, Enterprise 2.0 has created a Vendor Advisory Board. These folks will serve as a litmus test for ideas and weigh in on positioning. Please meet the 2012 Vendor Board:

	Lawrence Coburn CEO and Co-founder DoubleDutch
	Mike Gotta Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Enterprise Social Software Cisco
	Nikhil Govindaraj VP, Products Moxie Software
	Aaron Levie Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer Box
	Andy MacMillan VP of WebCenter Product Management Oracle
	Nathan Rawlins VP of Product Marketing Jive Software
	Walton Smith Senior Associate Booz Allen Hamilton
	Jared Spataro Sr. Director SharePoint Product Management
	Ramin Vosough Vice President, Products Neudesic
	Michael Wu Principal Scientist, Analytics Lithium Technologies, Inc.
	Tim Young VP, Social Enterprise VMware

Mobile Connect

As I mentioned earlier, mobility will play a major roll in this year’s conference. Emulating the success E2 has achieved in bringing LOB and technical leaders together to ensure they’re working in lockstep, UBM TechWeb is launching Mobile Connect, the defining conference for mobility in the enterprise. The event will take place alongside Enterprise 2.0 Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, June 18 – 21, 2012.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference has been a major force in leading the enterprise social software market, and with the announcement of Mobile Connect, UBM TechWeb continues to play a leadership role, helping people harness the opportunity mobile technology presents to change the way they do business, serve customers and go to market. Mobile is here and companies need a forum to debate and define how this disruptive technology will accelerate their business. Mobile Connect will bring together enterprise mobility thought leaders to discuss the innovations in mobile, and how forward-thinking companies are getting the technology to work for them, providing unprecedented business value. The conference will explore topics including:

• Mobile App Development
• CoIT
• Analytics
• Voice Input
• Video
• Mobile Management
• Mobile Platforms
• Enterprise app stores
• Tablets
• Location based services
• Mobilizing business processes
• Mobile Networking (WAN and WiFi)
• Bring Your Own Device
• Security and Governance.

Craig Mathias and Maribel Lopez are the Mobile Connect Conference Co-Chairs and will be driving the content for the events. E2 attendees with a full conference pass will be able to attend Mobile Connect sessions and meet with Mobile Connect sponsors on the show floor.

Digital Happenings in 2012

E2’s digital arm continues to grow. We host two virtual events per annum, and our webcasts series runs throughout the year. A couple of E2 events to note on your calendar:

• Feb 16, 2012: E2 Virtual Event; Topic: Social Analytics: The Bridge to Business Value
• September 26, 2012: E2 Virtual Event; Topic: The Power of Convergent Disruption: What’s Next in Enterprise Apps

And of course expect more great coverage from David Carr and all of our contributors over on The BrainYard.com. We’ve got a lot to look forward to and I’m excited about what lies ahead in 2012.

Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara kicked off today with pre-conference workshops, where attendees filled up rooms to get their social business education on. As I walked through the convention center, I saw a lot of old friends, colleagues, as well as first time attendees who were in awe of all the great content Paige Finkelman put together for the event.  As usual, the twitter feed was active with great pieces of information that attendees were getting from the workshops.  (Reminder the official hashtag is #e2conf)

I was able to attend a few sessions this morning and in the spirit of sharing, I want to pass along some things I learned at Day 1 of Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara:

1. Internal (Enterprise) communities are a good way to expose needs and matching needs of members.
2. You have to share what is good and what is not so good to get a true sense of what is working and what isn’t.
3. Community is about getting members to a certain level of “social comfort” #e2conf (@rhappe)
4. Community is where work happens.
5. When welcoming new members, there is always a “what’s next”
6. Advocates play a huge role in enterprise communities
   1. Share community  work
   2. Increase & reach – word of mouth
   3. Prune & Create
   4. Source of Trusted Feedback

I can tell you that my brain is very happy after absorbing all of the information today. I’m looking forward to continuing my Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara education tomorrow. You can too – register now for a *25% Discount on Enterprise 2.0 Conference passes or a free expo pass by using the following Priority code: CPHJES11 and attend all of the free sessions.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more inside Enterprise 2.0 updates.

Let’s do this!

Cheers,

Jason

‘Human Resources’ is an early 1960′s term but now seems pretty archaic in our ‘always on’ era of broadband and mobile networked connectivity. The needs of the people and collective cultures within enterprises continue to evolve rapidly, with increasing emphasis placed on interactions through the firewall with prospects, customers and partners being seen of value in some industries, although by no means all.

Human Resources responsibilities – recruiting needed talent, managing it, complying with disparate global payroll requirements and dealing with staffing changes and succession plans involves executing many complex processes, checks and balances. Like IT departments, HR professionals have to keep vital enterprise systems functioning, often with legacy technologies, before they can get to more strategic and tactical focuses in order to provide greater efficiency in the future to meet new business goals and needs.

Leveraging the power of collaborative networking technologies to meet specific business goals, Human Resources professionals are well placed to improve productivity by being the center of a culture designed for more efficient knowledge and real time intelligence flow. Finding time to get out from under the weight of existing responsibilities to take the logical role of running a more collaborative culture is a huge challenge – we’ll be focusing on how to achieve this.

Our people, culture and internal communications track has shaped up nicely. We’re kicking off the day with ‘The Evolution of Talent Management ‘ – a conversation with Mark Bennet of Oracle and Andrew McCarthy of Ultimate software, two seasoned professionals who know the evolution of enterprise needs for HR Technology extremely well. We’ll cover historical context and previous generations before diving into what ‘Talent Management’ means today and for the future in our rapidly changing workforces which are increasingly global – but also increasingly fragmented and distributed.

We then switch gears in our next track for a fascinating look at how Facebook manage their 3000 person internal culture, half of whom are ‘millenials’. Molly Graham will discuss how their rapidly evolving culture is geared up for bold, fast moving growth and evolution. We will hear about Facebook’s core employee values and guiding company principles as well as  insights into work processes and motivations. Technology provider Rypple will provide some additional insights on working with Facebook – this is sure to provide some fascinating insights into the leading social network’s guiding tenets.

“Enterprises Speak on Culture and Performance’ will have an interesting blend of participants: Managing director at the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) Management Lab Michele Zanini  will provide broader insights, while Jobvite VP of Customer Success, David Lahey will speak to what enterprises are seeking to improve their talent pool. Secure file transfer vendor Accellion will bring the realities of IT security to the conversation to keep us grounded.

We round out the track with ‘New Strategic and Tactical Trends in Social Learning’ an important and often overlooked topic in our era of assumptions about supposedly effortless adoption choices by individuals of ways of working. New approaches to getting employees and partners up to speed on business needs are being heavily influenced by social networking against a foundation of traditional learning resources. How much are approaches really shifting and what is working for enterprises in a tight economy with ever more sophisticated knowledge flow needs? Former co-founder and CTO of THINQ enterprise learning management tools Amar Dhaliwal is now Senior Vice President of Product Operations at Saba, who now own THINQ. Michael Rose is CEO of Knoodle Powering Social Learning & Presentations and rounding out the conversation will be Nick Stein of of Rypple, the innovative social performance management firm.

The once a year performance review is widely seen as hopelessly out of touch with real time enterprise activities and annual usage of associated software is increasingly being questioned. Real time feedback is a given at companies like Facebook: but to what extent are training guard rails needed to shape behaviors, rather than reacting to events either annually or in real time? Getting the balance between both approaches is important, particularly in rapidly changing business environments.

We try to get continuity between sessions, and since they all occur on the 15th we hope you’ll join us for what should be a very stimulating series of conversations!

Working in the enterprise has changed dramatically over the past 5 years.  The cubicle walls are being torn down as organizations are now leaning towards more open space environments. See picture.

The enterprise is not only tearing down the physical walls, but the communication walls as well. In the past messages always came from the top and then filtered down to the rest of the organization.  

Employees were “told” about how the latest strategic company initiative would make the company grow and their job easier from executives that often times failed to ask for feedback or ideas from their team. This is a clear example of one way communication – a very enterprise 1.0 way of getting work done.  

As we’ve seen with the emergence of social media in our daily lives – people now have a way (voice) to question, follow up on facts and more importantly learn from like minded individuals who may be thinking the same thing they are.  The enterprise has realized the value of social and how to take  advantage of these new tools to make the enterprise a more collaborative work environment. Social enterprise tools allow an open and transparent dialogue between employees globally, which will in turn make the work experience richer and more fulfilling for everyone involved.

Enterprise 2.0 provides an opportunity for employees to learn more about the company in a more immersive way and become more engaged with other employees –helping to incent communication and collaboration across the company resulting in improved ROI.

At Enterprise 2.0, the leading social business event, you will learn about the latest social business technologies, network with peers and unlock the value of your organization. Receive extensive education on the collaboration life-cycle — from setting a social strategy to technology interopability to adoption, with case studies to guide you along the way.

See the latest tools and technologies in the Expo Pavilion and learn from thought leaders in Enterprise 2.0′s comprehensive conference. Topics include:

 
Take a deep dive into key topics in pre-conference workshops on Monday, November 14 including:

• Insider’s Guide to Evaluating Architectures and Selecting Vendors
• Building a Unified Communications and Collaboration Roadmap
• Community Managers’ Toolkit
• Organization Next
• SharePoint 2010 as a Social and Collaboration Platform: Key Opportunities and Roadblocks
• How Do You Measure That?

Register now for a *25% Discount on Enterprise 2.0 Conference passes or a free expo pass by using the following Priority code: CPHJES11

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more inside Enterprise 2.0 updates.

Let’s do this!

Cheers,

Jason

*25% off discount applies to Full and 3-Day Conference Passes. Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers