The Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston ended today, and, magpie-like, I collected these tidbits to share. (They're related-yet-unrelated, so please imagine brief snippets of music playing between each one, in the manner of spots on This American Life.)
Driving to Tuesday's keynotes at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I heard an article on Marketplace about an electronic-cigarette manufacturer who has introduced a cigarette pack that vibrates when it detects another smoker of the same brand within 50 feet. (This story is worth listening to for the funny dramatization.) Say what you like about smoking, smokers, and/or cigarettes electronic or otherwise, the idea of bringing folks together with a kind of secret smoker sign is a social innovation. If they're going to carry a pack around, why not make that pack pay the rent?
The LaunchPad winner is Saba, producing learning technologies for today's information worker who is bored by conventional training offerings, doesn't have the time to learn, and who "forgets fast." See overviews of their "People Systems" here.
The Wall Street Journal blogged the conference, declaring "Enterprise 2.0 is Growing Up." To sum up: it seems that, as within the SharePoint community, the E2.0 conversational focus is shifting from tools & technology to business strategy and alignment. (I can remember business alignment being part of the conversation at the conference every year I attended, but hey...)
InformationWeek covered my session with Shawn Shell and Unni Loland in the article "How To Plug SharePoint's Social Holes." (Full disclosure: It's not a how-to guide.)
David Wihl at SoftArtisans alerted me to this beautiful infographic from Global Web Index, "Global Map of Social Networking 2011." What's interesting to me is the categorization of behavior types:
- messagers and mailers
- content sharers
- joiners and creators of groups
- All of the above, comprising "active social networkers"
This differs from the seven categories in Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder, which is what I've come to think of as the standard for describing how we participate in social media. Seven circles instead of three for each country would make a much more complicated infographic, but I think three might be too few. At this level the distinctions seem too blurry; If I'm messaging and mailing, am I not sharing content? Still, it's a data visualization worth checking out.
There's lots of fun stuff to see at the conference's official Flickr stream and by searching the #e2conf tag on Flickr. Best sights for me were the ways some of the vendors got people moving and active on the expo floor. Provide a game that requires a partner and you have a guaranteed way to get people to bond:
Please drop me a comment and let me know your favorite tidbit from the conference or the past week in social media news!
