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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...

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business. Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value. Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift . Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization. Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning). We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like: lower operational costs networked productivity business agility effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder) customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening) Where is business practice going...

Some time ago I said: Vacation First . I wanted to share my review of professor Andrew McAfee's book Enterprise 2.0 before I went on vacation. That didn't work out. I wish I could have written this review sooner, because the sooner you read this book the better. I'll tell you why. Andrew McAfee coined the term 'enterprise 2.0' (in 2006) and has been one of the leading thinkers in the space of applying web 2.0 concepts and tools (or 'collaborative media' as McAfee likes to call them) to the workplace. This book summarizes his thinking over the years. Of course he's been blogging and speaking about this topic. So I was wondering if this book would bring me new insights. Well it did. And to me this is why I love books. You know thinking about the topic you're reading about in a book won't stop as soon as the book has been published. But a book does give you a summary of past thinking and concepts for future thinking. And all that in a limited...

The Dachis Group recently shared a really nice overview of "The 2010 Social Business Landscape" , written by Dion Hinchcliffe . One of the tools I missed in his overview is 'social tagging' or 'social bookmarking'. Based the research being done by my student , Arzu Yucekaya , on social bookmarking, I've thinking about and discussing with her why social bookmarking adoption seems to be harder than, for instance, the adoption of enterprise microblogging. At least, in the company I work for... I'd like to share a citation from a (preliminary) version of her literature research. This citation relates to the adoption of knowledge sharing tools in organizations in general. She writes: In the context of knowledge sharing systems, public good nature of knowledge introduces two major challenges that organization face (Prasarnphanich & Wagner, 2008): 1. The start-up problems (achieving critical mass) 2. Discontinuity problem (sustainability...

Just finished watching the movie/documentary 'Us Now' . Really enjoyed it and would like to encourage you to take time to watch it too (1 hour). I thought 'Us Now' would 'only' be about government 2.0, which is interesting enough, but it's actually about the relevance of the web 2.0 movement for 'everything'. What does it mean for life in general, for organizations, and also for government? While watching I tweeted the remarks I found most interesting and wanted to remember. Hope you enjoy it too! --- If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers: Us Now about Government 2.0 and Much more http://twurl.nl/5wxla5 Tags van Technorati: social media , web 2.0 , government , business , innovation

I just wanted to repost my comment on RWW's post on Slideshare 2.0 . Sarah Perez gave a nice overview of the new web Powerpoint apps. However, what I've been looking for for some time is: Slideshow 2.0 for the enterprise. Do you know of commercial and/or open-source alternatives of a slideshare-ish platform for the enterprise?

Richard Dennison just shared a case study that was done for BT on how they use social media . If you follow Richard's blog you won't read anything new, but this case study does sum it all up nicely. What I was wondering though is: Do they help their users/customers decide where to share and store information? With all these tools, it can become hard for them to choose the right tool! I’m working on an internal document to do just this. And I’ll share it with you soon.

BusinessWeek ran a nice article titled "Social Media Exposes the Corporate Psychopath" . It has some interesting guidelines that companies "need to master in this new world" called 'social media'. I'll pass you the last two paragraphs: It's important for your company to build a presence in social media. These new communities are irrevocably changing the landscape for marketers and how we communicate. Increasingly we are being charged with delivering ideas that engage and influence the people in these living, breathing, and highly responsive human communities. For advertisers, this presents both a unique challenge and opportunity: We need to integrate our message and presence effectively, profitably, and appropriately into social media communities. The presence you build within social media will be analyzed, scrutinized, and perhaps criticized. However, entering this territory—which is controlled by the digital swarms of consumers and their communi...

Great! I'll be participating in an interesting workshop on "Enterprise Social Software" on the 17th of September. It's being organized by the Telematica Instituut in Amsterdam. Go ahead and take a look at the program and the topics we'll be discussing . I'm really looking forward to it!

My wonderful newspaper, the NRC , had a nice article yesterday by Marie-Jose Klave r (who also has a nice blog ) about Web 2.0 in the workplace. It was titled: "Web 2.0 voor al uw communicatie" [in English: Web 2.0 for all your communication]. It has some nice examples of Dutch governmental and non-governmental organizations using web 2.0 principles and tools. (I don't have a link to the article yet, because the article wasn't published online yet. As soon as I do, I'll let you know!)

Interesting post titled "Freedom and Social Media within the Enterprise" by Mary Abraham! It mentions McAfee's idea to tag tweets as work- or non-work-related. This idea can easily be applied to other social media as well. I've written on my wish to have one blog platform enabling me to post inside and outside the organization. So you can tag a post saying if it should be visible only to your company or to the world. This should also work for social network tools, wiki's, etc. It should be that easy!

Wow, interesting post by Jon Husband at the FASTForward Blog . He extensively quotes a NTTimes article about the US State Department using wiki's and blogs. One part triggered me: IN the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out. Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but "now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article" — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting. This is a really interesting way to use wiki's. CRM using wiki tooling! And it also triggered me. Companies can also use this to build up information about customers. Furthermore, information about places and con...

A student at the company I work for is trying to answer the following question: Which factors influence the motivation of users to participate in (online) user generated content applications within formal organizations and how, if possible, can these factors be influenced? I was wondering if you have any ideas on where to start. Are their blogs, books and/or articles that address this topic? Or can we just reuse the work that has been done on this topic with respect to collaboration and communities?

In the past many companies tried Yellow Pages to help employees find other relevant employees to be more productive and effective. Of course, on the Internet, we now have social network tools that help us connect to relevant people from all over the world. Some companies are starting to apply this inside the organization. BT is one of them . They just released their social networking tooling. Very interesting! They "easily" built in on BEA AquaLogic. I've heard of other large companies working with PeopleAggregator , but I haven't heard what their experiences are. What I was wondering is this: employees can mention their skills; do other employees also get to rate their skills? And what is the incentive to keep your profile up-to-date (- which was a big problem with Yellow Pages)?

This is just one of those examples why I love blogging and the blogosphere. I've been following Luis Suarez's blog for some time now. And then he points to the Headshift blog on which Oliver Amprimo writes wonderful stuff. Luis pointed to one post in particular I really liked: "The Museum and the Zoo" . What an amazing post! You should read it all. But here are some highlights of the parts/statements are liked most and totally agree with. Hopefully this will trigger you to read the entire post. The consequence [of current business education and specialization] is that people master the " what ", sometimes the " how " but hardly the " why ". They don't capture the reason why these processes are put in place, how they relate to corporate strategy and how the organisation relates to its environment. The result is straightforward: in organisations, people focus on their own limited sphere of responsibility. (...) Another consequence is...

A nice little citation from Sarah Perez' blog post on ReadWriteWeb : Here's another word to add to your lexicon: " Socialprise ." It's meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise." It's a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it's currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. Post to Del.icio.us / Furl It