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I really enjoy going to conference every now and then. I’m at the great SocialNow [link] conference now. I go to conferences to meet people and to learn more about a certain topic. This is key for a conference. I’m not going if the people and the program aren’t interesting. But in my experience the result of a conference is the greatest thing about conference visits – at least mine. I find conference visits always trigger news ideas. Not always because of the speakers at the conference. More often it’s just because of the different environment I’m in. I’ve always found this a weird effect of conferences. The weekends or a nice long walks also have this effect but to a lesser extent. Can you relate to this? Would love to hear what conferences do to you.

In little over a month the next edition of the SocialNow conference will be held. Organizer and good friend Ana Neves has been working hard on putting another great program together. And I'm honored to be the host of the conference again! So I hope to see you there. SocialNow is a special conference. I wrote about previous editions (and I still need to blog about the last one...). SocialNow is special for different reasons: For one it's a well-organized and thought-through conference. The conference organizer works in this field, knows what businesses are looking for and what conference visitors need to get value-for-money. The conference has a unique format. There is not one conference in which you get great keynote talk and discussions combined with real demo's of tools based on actual user stories in a business context. The conference is not only for people/companies looking for a new internal social tool. I find that the demo's also help you define a...

Now that plans are being made for the next edition of SocialNow, it’s a good time to post some of my notes from the previous edition. I’m really looking forward to the next conference and hope to meet you there! Special conference As you my know SocialNow is special conference. The structure is very different from other conference. The whole idea is to help you (the audience) listen to and select the right internal social platform for your needs. This is done by asking vendors to present to a fictitious company with real-life needs and convince them that your platform is fit for their needs. The company is supported by ‘consultants’ with expertise in IT, design and business. And of course the audience may ask questions as well. Here we go: Talks and tools The vendor presentations are mixed with several keynotes by Tim Walters , Louise McGregor , Luis Suarez and Euan Semple . I’m not going to summarize those talks. I do want to share my notes about the vendor presentatio...

SharePoint is used by many companies . Lots of them are struggling to use it strategically. How can SharePoint become essential for our organization? How can organizations drive SharePoint adoption? These are questions I hear a lot from customers. There are many SharePoint conferences out there. Do we really need another one? My colleagues and I at Entopic found many conferences address SharePoint from a technology and developer perspective. Which is great. There is clearly a market for this. However, we wondered if there are also conferences that address the business- and user-side of SharePoint. We found only a couple world-wide. For this reason we thought it would be good to organize a SharePoint conference with a business focus. And apparently more people were looking for something like this. There were 300+ attendees. Symon Garfield kicked off the conference with a keynote about how to implement SharePoint successfully. Symon discussed several reasons why implem...

I really enjoy going to conferences. Listening to other people’s or organization’s experiences helps me think. Good talks and breakout sessions inspire me and trigger me to try the approaches as well. Bad talks help me sort out what my convictions are and what my approach would be. Conferences are also great for meeting up with people I already know and meeting new, interesting people. In short, conferences help me learn. One of the great use cases for social media is conferences. I really enjoy social media before, during and after conferences. Before conferences social media is great to find out who’s coming and what other people are expecting of the conference. Letting people know you’ll be at the conference gives people who couldn’t attend a way to experience the conference anyways by following your tweets and blogposts. After conferences social media is great to evaluate: thank the conference organization, provide feedback about the conference and thank participants. Social m...

Many organizations have a hard time with selecting the right technology for their business. There is a huge need for expert support here. The company I work for helps select Content Management Systems for instance. Decision makers wonder what to choose. "Should I focus on a platform that is good at content management? Or should I focus on social first? What is the right approach?" Not many people are experts in this field. Not many people have to select new technology very often. Organizations do this every 3-5 years. So when they do, they get nervous and find it hard to oversee the field they’re looking at and the decision they’re making. They don’t want to invest in technology that will become irrelevant in just one or two years. They want to make a sustainable choice. Interestingly, there is now a conference that helps decision makers (and their helpers) do just that. There are basically two kinds of conferences: one focuses on business (users, adoption, business ca...

Another reflective post ... Hey, it's Friday! :-) This post is long overdue, but I promised I would reflect a bit on the Enterprise 2.0 Summit . I'll keep it short. I enjoyed the Summit and hope to be there next year as well. What did I enjoy most this year and hope to see more of next year? Here's my list: Some of the speakers shared the failures and dark side of enterprise 2.0. I think we need to more of these kind of examples. Not to focus on the negative side of internal social media, but to learn from failure and the unexpected. I agree with Ana Silva  we need more, deeper and detailled stories about e2.0 deployments. How did they really  do it? And then we can discuss the cases, share experiences, etc. This implies we need good stories and storytellers, and excellent workshop/discussion moderators.  I hope we'll hear more about mobile and location-based systems. Most of the cases were about social networking and microblogging platforms inside the org...

As you know I work for Entopic . Entopic has organized a conference about intranet for several years now. It has become the largest intranet conference in the World. We’re working hard on the 2012 conference. It will be held on March 13, 2012 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A large part of the program has been defined and we hope to finalize the program in the coming week. This year we wanted to focus on the soft(er) side of intranet. What are the skills intranet-related people need to successfully implement and maintain a intranet and especially a social intranet. We found three keynote speakers that know all about this side of intranet: Menno Lanting will talk about leadership and intranet James Robertson will give an overview of the changing intranet landscape Michael Sampson will present about facilitating collaboration with intranet We also have a great list of interesting breakouts this year. Ranging from Shell about knowledge management and intranet to the Loc...

A conference about social media, organized using social media and presented by experienced social media enthusiast, can that be done? Yes, it can. I was part of such a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was called 'The Social Media in Practice Event' (Dutch: Social media in de praktijk) . Ronald van den Hoff of Society 3.0 kicked off the event. He gave an interesting talk about the influence of the internet and social media on society, and its implications for businesses. I liked how he stressed businesses should be built around passion and learning from mistakes. They should be ever more open to what's happening around them or else they will be eclipsed. Interestingly he also said large companies will get smaller and smaller and independent contractors/free agents will be the 'companies' of the future. I also went to Roos van Vugt 's breakout about leading into social media. She works for Deloitte and explained how see introduced and is cultivating socia...

Really looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt! It's going to be great to listen to all kinds of talks, from experts and practitioners in the Enterprise 2.0 field. I'll also be giving a talk, as I mentioned some time ago . And it's great to know (old) friends will be there as well. Just received an email the other day from the organizers. I may give you a present! You can get a 10% reduction on the conference price by going to their website and entering the promotion code ' e20ref' . I hope this helps convince you to come!

Just to let you know: I will be giving a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt am Main in October. Please find the full schedule here. My talk will be about our microblogging experiences and my vision on how the information and communications processes supported by microblogging relate to more formal business processes . Hope to see you there!

I recently wrote about the prediction market I won . I told you I got a full-pass to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston (June 2010). In short, my company won't pay for travel expenses, so I can't go regrettably. So, who wants my full-pass to the conference. Leave a comment and I'll select one of you with the best motivation!