Jeff Cutler – columns, essays and opinions

Sure, it’s only Wednesday, but today I’m going to take a minute and give you my thoughts on what’s been good, bad and random at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week. *The conference goes on for another day, so my reflections are certainly not complete.

In fact, I’m currently listening to some guy from Microsoft give a keynote about sharing information across businesses. Allow me to ignore the session and think about the great stuff around the show.

Best things I’ve seen are the give-aways on the show floor. While the exhibit floor is a bit small, almost every vendor is giving away an iPad. The funny thing is that in an environment so dominated by IBM, Microsoft and other PC-centric companies, the big draw is an Apple product.

I’ve also been impressed that companies are starting to embrace the theory that they should listen to their employees and provide them with the tools they need to collaborate within the walls of the organization. Exhibiting at E2.0 are no fewer than five companies that offer tools that allow employees to either share opinions about company policies or to share, brainstorm, collaborate and be more productive at work.

The HUGE surprise for me was that Brookstone Corp of Merrimack, NH has signed on to use a system like the ones listed above. Why’s this a surprise? I’ve worked with Brookstone and they have ALWAYS been my example of a legacy-thinking firm. The one firm of the hundreds I’ve worked with that would NEVER EVER wake up to the power of open communication.

Image courtesy of http://samsonblinded.org/blog/head-in-the-sand.htm

But I guess everyone can learn and I’m thrilled that the company is embracing technology that I think will make them more effective and productive. Kudos guys!

The bad things about the conference aren’t too numerous. I guess the biggest thing is the layout of the venue. I don’t like to walk. So why would you set a conference up where the sessions and the exhibit hall are at complete opposite ends of the hotel? My fix would be to allow folks to walk outside to get to the exhibit hall instead of going upstairs, across the entire hotel and downstairs just to get from one to the other.

Oddly, the door to the street from the session area is RIGHT NEXT TO the doors at the back of the expo area. Walk a mile or walk 100 feet? You tell me which would make my feet happier.

And the only other thing I found lacking was a true variety of topics and vendors. Sure, there are a lot more sessions to go, but from what I’ve seen so far, a lot of people are parroting each other. Cloud this, silo that, collaborate here, share there, and lots of talk about silos and internal communities. What I think is really missing (ironically the topic during the current keynote) is content curation and creation.

If you’re going to have a message, you should definitely know how to share it. Especially with internal audiences across the enterprise.

What’s the takeaway? The conference is, like so many events in the tech space, invaluable as a networking event. The sessions are for the most part informative and inspiring (good speaker selection from what I’ve seen so far). And the exhibit floor could stand to be more diverse, bigger and be better located.

Image from http://www.deletetheweb.com/unstuck/archives/2009_01.html

Are you missing something by not being here? Definitely. But follow me on Twitter and bookmark this blog for more info on the show. Hope to see you at the next tech event.

What’s the best conference you’ve attended this or last year? And why?

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According to one of my favorite sites, What The Hashtag (linked below), the folks who work in cloud computing and Enterprise 2.0 are rabid users of social media. While they might not use the nuanced approach of Ron Sylvester or Greg Verdino – and they might spend more time just shouting out their news than sharing and communicating – they are still pretty rabid.

Take a look at the numbers of Tweets tagged #e2conf – Enterprise 2.0 in Boston – and you’ll be amazed.

Are you Tweeting the conference? Have you ever Tweeted a conference? What’s your opinion of this type of sharing?

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I’m now in a session at Enterprise 2.0 learning how to measure social media activity within communities and entire populations. Here are a few of the resources these guys have shared with us so far…

Google Sets

Searchword Research

Next up in the session – 40 minutes about what you should think about when working with communities and social media. Analytics that apply to the social media and Website landscape.

The session is called Enterprise Communilytics. Here is the description…

Last year, at Enterprise 2.0, we took a look at the tools used to monitor social media platforms. The market has matured greatly since – and many new tools and techniques exist to help you understand more about your brand presence online.

This year, we’re going to cover how measurement practices and tools are applied to every day social media campaigns. You will leave with a practical understanding of measurement concepts as they’re applied to digital strategies. We’ll spend time looking at real campaigns that we’ve launched, and how we measured them to determine their successes and failures. We will cover some material from our book, Complete Web Monitoring, but most of the content in this session comes from recent campaigns that we’ve launched and new concepts that we didn’t have a chance to write in the first edition.

Instructors:
Alistair Croll, Founder, Bitcurrent
Sean Power, Consultant and Analyst, Co-Founder, Watching Websites

It’s good stuff with a lot of practical information. Glad I made the trip to Boston today. Conference goes for another three days. More info here.

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I cover technology events. I write about the gadgets and the tech that people use daily. I’m even a correspondent for outlets that require a technology reporter in the field when they can’t afford to send a staffer across the country or even across the ocean. So right now I’m in a session at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and I’m realizing how dumb I really am.

The reason I say I MIGHT be dumb about Enterprise technology is because the session I’m attending is pretty empty. See the photo. This session – An Introduction to Cloud Computing – has a mere nine people in it not counting me.

I’m here because this is one of the three sessions going on right now that I thought I had a pretty good handle on. I didn’t want to start my day over my head and stymied. I also wanted to hit the ground running with a topic I know something about. But it seems that only a couple people are in that same boat with me.

What’s that mean? I’m taking it to mean one of two things…

• The conference just started and nobody is here yet

• An intro to Cloud Computing isn’t needed – especially at a conference that talks about enterprise technology at a much deeper level

It could also be that the other sessions going on right now are too targeted and specific to be of use to the conference attendees. Which brings me to a larger point – and maybe a rant. Why wouldn’t you, when running a conference, figure out the needs of your attendees a lot more carefully before renting out a venue and putting on sessions that leave hundreds of seats empty?

This is purely a philosophical question because in reality a conference organizer is racing the clock when they put on an event. Unless the event is SXSW or CES, you can’t be too certain how many people will attend and you must make educated guesses at what topics to cover.

But that’s a digression. Looking at a list of sessions over the rest of the week, there is some cool stuff happening here.

Would you be interested in attending? What stands out to you?

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Have you ever had to edit a Word doc with a group of committee members? If so, you know that by the time you get the original document back, it’s every color under the rainbow and all shred of continuity has been extinguished.

That’s usually the power of collaborative tools. And that’s why there are so many jokes about large committees not being able to accomplish anything.

In fact, there’s a town north of Boston where the school committee chair allows everyone from the crossing guard to the custodian to give their thoughts on policy before making a decision. In that hamlet, the meetings regularly go for 90 minutes longer than scheduled and it’s taken them years to agree on topics as menial as school naming procedure.

But I digress. Technology now makes it possible – and has made it possible for years – for large groups to work together without being at the same table or even in the same hemisphere, and actually accomplish real work.

These tools, on display at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference at the Westin Waterfront Hotel this week, are proving to be the lifeblood of doing more work with fewer staffers.

For example, RollStream has a product that allows companies to build networks like Facebook for their clients. Essentially, the software creates a closed social network where teams can work together online, safely and easily.

Also at the show is a company called ThoughtFarmer. They’ve created a tool that’s used internally at companies for collaboration and information exchange. One interesting way people are using this software is to put up company alerts, HR info, and other internal forms and data – all inside the walls of the firm and presumably safe from prying external eyes.

Walking around the exhibit floor, I saw a dozen companies with similar products and that made me realize it might be the wave of the future. But why?

I think it’s got the promise of financial savings and ease of use. People are increasingly comfortable sharing their updates on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, so why not leverage that familiarity to create tools that work the same way at the office?

Are we hearing the bell toll for shipping, hard media forms like CDs and DVDs, and for business travel?

Well, products will still have to be shipped and people will still want to look at larger documents in hard-copy (architectural drawings, etc.). But as these tools get more popular, we are going to see fewer people jetting around the world to sit in a room with a useless committee. We’ll see less spending on shipping if people can just click and see a product or contribute their thoughts. And we’ll continue to see companies tightening their belts on resources.

One can only wonder what’s going to happen to conferences like this one when everyone finally buys into distance learning and collaboration. Why would you ever need to go anywhere to be AT a conference if you could be there just by sitting down at your desk?

What’s your take on new media tools for business? Are you marketing, collaborating and interacting only on line these days?

Keep reading!

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