Enterprise 2.0 2009 is now in full swing here at Boston's Westin Waterfront convention center, and Social Media Today has a few representatives on site to listen in, attend a few sessions and parties, and hopefully get a feel for the current thinking on Enterprise 2.0 - its current status, its challenges, and its future. For those who were unable to attend, I'll try to share a few key themes from the sessions I was able to attend yesterday.

The morning's keynotes opened with a presentation from Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and Founding Partner, Blue State Digital, titled "The Secrets of Obama's New Media Juggernaut" (#e2conf7, for those of you who want to check out the tweets). The Obama campaign's use of social media tools both to further the campaign message and to drive fundraising has been a topic of fervent discussion over the past few months, and analysts have each made their own predictions regarding how this new tactic will impact political discourse in the U.S. and abroad.

This being Enterprise 2.0, however, Jascha was more interested in the potential lessons that we can learn from this success when it comes to applying these tools in the Enterprise. These included many of the themes that are expressed time and time again here on this site - authenticity, openness, testing and metrics, and personal engagement. The aspect of openness struck us as particularly relevant in this context, as it may represent one of the bigger challenges to enterprise adoption of Web 2.0. I'll explain:

Jascha shared a few stories of enthusiastic Obama supporters who, without encouragement, advocated the Obama brand by displaying the campaign logo in creative and artistic ways. Some painted logos and slogans on barns, for example, while one supporter turned his front bike tire into a glowing LED representation of the campaign logo. While marveling at the creativity of these expressions of support, I couldn't help but think of the rigid, detailed standards that most big companies have for allowing their logos to be used and reproduced, and note the massive discrepancy.

This is a small example, but this point of course goes way beyond logos. Viral engagement and unsolicited brand advocacy of this kind is now every marketer's dream - but it comes at the price of a certain amount of control. Companies cannot expect to reproduce this type of engagement while maintaining the rigid control over how precisely their brand is presented that they have in the past.

This seems relevant because it touches on a theme that was echoed throughout the rest of today's sessions - that "openness" is the key factor in enterprise's adoption of Web 2.0, and that cultural changes are necessary in order for this to happen. Later in the day, a participant in an afternoon session that we attended urged us (seriously) to "embrace the power that is twitter" in order to open up corporate culture to be more consistent with the way that Enterprise 2.0, as well as the younger generation of workers, works. We're not quite so sure that the twitter itself is the answer, but it does seem that, as another participant put it, there must be "a point where Enterprise and Enterprise 2.0 intersect."

What are your thoughts? If Enterprise 2.0 is the vision, what will it take to get there?