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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...

The 3rd edition of the SocialNow conference is coming up quickly. This time it will be held in The Netherlands. The previous two editions were held in Portugal. The unique concept of the conference hasn’t changed. The conference is focused on helping you select the right internal social tool. Many people and organizations are struggling with this. There are loads of internal social tools out there and often social tools are already being used internally (e.g. Yammer …). But how do all these tools stack up? As always most internal social tools say they can do everything. But can they really? Even when they have to present their tool against real-life business situations? That’s what SocialNow is about. Many tools will present, but no marketing talk is allowed. The tool has to speak for itself by relating what the tool can do to specific organizational challenges. Such as international collaboration, dispersed knowledge sharing and expertise finding. These presentations will b...

This is my final post about the SocialNow conference 2013 . In this post I’d like to share some highlights from four talks. Two were about gamification, one was about money and one about the future of work. Gamification The presentations about gamification by Andrzej Marczewski (of Cap Gemini) and Paulo de Carvalho (of Vodafone) were very interesting. I really enjoyed how these presentations were placed back-to-back. Andrzey gave a general but very good introduction to gamification . He talked about the what, why and how. I really enjoyed how he also talked about cheating and gamification. Paulo talked about his experiences with gamification inside Vodafone. He gave a detailled overview of how they applied gamification to certain business processes and how they deeply thought about the right metrics and incentives for the game to be useful. Costs Ana Neves gave a short presentation about the cost of social tools in the enterprise. Don't focus on the lic...

Now for some highlights from the vendor presentations in my second post about the SocialNow conference.  Foulders has not been launched yet, but presented their concept and tool at the conference. They want to start where the users are: their email inbox. And most people have multiple inboxes. So they provide a super dashboard over all your inboxes and help you organize the tasks that come out of your email. They use language technology to help the user quickly and efficiently organize emails in tasks and folders. Podio  was at the conference for the second year. I didn’t hear anything new with respect to the product. There will be a big update to the product in the very near future. Podio is still an impressive product that wants to help us overcome email and make spreadsheets better. Spreadsheets can easily be turned into open and smart Podio apps to improve collaboration and communication around them. Another new tool to SocialNow is Wordpress with the P2 e...

The 2nd edition of the SocialNow conference was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon. As you may remember SocialNow is a unique conference. The conference is organized by Ana Neves of KnowMan . The conference is about helping organizations compare and choose internal social tools. Several Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors have to present their tool relating to the situation of a fictitious company and its issues with collaborative project work and topic-based knowledge sharing. The program is complemented with keynotes from leading experts in the field. I really enjoyed this edition of SocialNow and thought it was even better than last year. I’ll share my notes and learnings from the conference in several posts. This is post nr 1. BTW: You can find a Storify by Paul Corney of day 1 and day 2 here. Challenges Emanuele Quintarelli  kicked off the conference with a talk about the challenges of the social enterprise. As with many experts in the fields his talk was not "happy cl...

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 companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice. As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for? The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman , addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendo...