Wow - Enterprise 2.0 is not done yet but I am. Despite the potential for more great content this morning, I had to step away from the swirl.
I also must confess that in the blur of catching up with old friends and colleagues and meeting both new 'old' Twitter friends and new people, I didn't attend very many of the sessions... which is a shame because I missed some good ones. I did make it to a few panels that I thought were particularly interesting, however, and well worth the time. So for me, the value of Enterprise 2.0 was very skewed toward the people vs. the content. Below are my highlights:
Themes
- The debate over "Is this a revolution" vs. "Is this an evolution" rages on. It doesn't really interest me other than to say that 'revolution' is a scary word if it is happening to you so... I don't think it necessarily furthers the cause when talking to people about change.
- I was on a panel last year about Twitter in the enterprise - this year the subject seemed to infiltrate many of the panels and yet still a lot of discussion about its benefits and what its value is. I heard two interesting use cases - one was that a company I spoke with introduced Yammer under the radar and had seen significant adoption (thousands of people) and the other from one of the vendors (maybe SocialCast?) who feeds in data streams from enterprise apps so employees get alerts and notifications in their individual streams, side by side with conversational chatter.
- One of the more interesting things that I heard came out of a discussion with someone at IBM about the need for large enterprises to fund 'marketing labs' the same way tech companies fund pure research labs on the technology side. The next day on a panel with Allstate, Jet Blue, & Humana it turned out that in the case of Humana and Allstate at least, their teams are separate and have more flexibility than the core marketing teams - along with their own IT support. I think this a great trend for large enterprises to figure out the new communications environment.
- Another thing that I heard - from both Humana & Comcast - was an awareness of their need to become, in essence, product managers for software solutions. Instead of taking the technology at face value and using it in the way it was presented to them, they are both thinking about how they want to manage... and figuring out how to get their solutions to adapt to those needs. Both consider themselves to be in the application development business as a way to support their core business processes.
- Semantics are tricky. I spoke to a woman at a large services business struggling to define what a group/community/network was. There are user generated groups, well defined groups that align with lines of business, affinity groups, functional groups - all with potentially tens of thousands of employees. How do you distinguish? I don't have a great answer but I know she is not the only one struggling with this topic.
Quotes
Nate Nash "ROI is kinda like envisioning your funeral: Who'd show up? What happens when you don't have it?" via @rawn
@stoweboyd "In a risky economy, people are willing to take more risks because they seem less risky...relatively speaking"
@Armano "If your company is 1.0 and it's using 2.0 tools externally, it's going to be transparent about how 1.0 it really is"
@MikeLefebvre: This morning I'm beginning to gather one male and one female of every species of animal on the planet. Just in case [this was not in particular reference to Enterprise 2.0 but it nicely summed up the weather situation in Boston!]
@benphoster from Allstate talking about trying to avoid "A cure looking for a disease"
"Email domesticates thinkers" [sorry, missed the attribution here - but I believe it was the CEO of BrainPark]
@comcastcares "We need to get back to Helpful1.0, not Sales2.0" & "You have to earn the right to sell to customers"
People
I can't begin to document all the fascinating discussions that I had but this event was great for catching up, reaching out, and connecting.
I got to reconnect with: @mwalsh @goodridge @schneidermike @rawn@marketingprofs @sirmichael @geechee_girl @amcafee @peterkim@laurelatoreilly @elsua @chrisbrogan @srog @dhaslam @johncass@jeffcutler @MaThurrell @justinmwhitaker @bostonmarketer @robertcollins @joselinmane @gradontripp @sarahbourne@CarolineDangson @mlevitt @AmberCadabra
I got to meet (so fun!): @comcastcares @dhinchcliffe @stales@stoweboyd @theRab @cflanagan @KMHobbie @benphoster@itsinsider @marciamarcia @DanYork @Armano @dougcornelius@michaelido @cbensen @gialyons @lehawes @Greg2dot0@Ed_Sullivan @danlarsen @amber_rae  @cmajor @GeorgeDearing@wacom @robincarey @maggiefox @jyarmis @Matthew_T_Grant@jamiepappas @mwthomasSCRM @robhoward @MikeG514
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch but these people are what made the event fantastic - whether talking shop, discussing The Community Roundtable, or fooling around - see some fun Twitpics: Fun with micro-celebrities @comcastcares & @jimstorer; Three stages of hair growth; snorting shrimp (they were that good!) - and some pics from our Crab Tweetup.
New Terms
Breakfast Bingo - when you're in a hotel lobby looking for someone that you have never met but have arranged to have breakfast with... you could play Lunch Bingo and Dinner Bingo but the alliteration is not as good. Reminds me of the children's book "Are You My Mother?"
Twitter Litter - any superfluous use of Twitter, specifically pertaining to extraneous RTing or bots.
Oy - so much in just three days. What a blast... but glad I'll have a few months to recover until the next big event!