Last week I was honored to be part of the wf360 summit at the New York Stock Exchange. The event started with a reception on the NYSE trading floor followed by an award dinner with 200 or so public company executives. The “360 Leadership” award this year was given to Anne Lauvergeon, the CEO of Areva, who was also profiled on 60 minutes.

One of the interesting experiments for this year’s summit, which I was happy to help facilitate for Susan Bird, the organizer of the event, was to invite well known business bloggers to attend and blog the event. You can see some pictures from the event taken by Howard Greenstein here, and also peruse posts about the rich conversations that took place by Don Dodge, Howard Greenstein, CK, Tom Steinthal (also here and here), Tom Guarriello (with video), Dorian Benkoil, Russ Nelson, and Rob Leavitt. There were additional bloggers at the dinner and I will update this post with links to their posts when they write about their experiences.

Besides meeting some great bloggers for the first time in person, I also met some fabulous people from various industries who were interested in talking about how to “operationalize” all this new social media stuff into their sales & marketing, their educational programs, and their human resources processes.

[Tags: wf360 summit wf360 nysecorante NYSE marketing 2.0]

A group of bloggers from the Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog are blogging the Global Messaging conference as well as the MEM 2007 conference over at the Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog.

This morning I got to attend a series of sessions on mobile communities and user generated content – a topic near and dear to my heart, especially as I am preparing to take on the chairmanship of the 2nd annual Community 2.0 Conference which will be held next year. It was quite disappointing to hear that the two main business models that panelist could come up with during that discussion were subscription and advertising based models. Is there really no value in harvesting the content generated from multi-million user based communities and package it up in such a way that it can be sold back to vendors? Not only would that provide higher value to vendors than standard click-through advertising, it might actually benefit the users as well.

Another surprising factoid is that at this conference press representatives do not get fed… If you are from the press corps, you pay for your own food. What a great model to save money from those freeloaders

If you get a chance, please join us for the Enterprise 2.0 webinar which I will be hosting this afternoon at 2pm. This afternoon we will have a conversation with a number of experts – including Euan Semple, Susan Scrupski, Bill Ives, Jevon McDonald, John Musser, Joe McKendrick and Lee White from GSK.

Tomorrow will be the second part at 11am ET with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jerry Bowles, Jenny Ambrozek, and JP Rangaswami.

You can find registration information at the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE site.

Those discussions will be recorded and available for replay after the conference calls are over. We will post the information on the Enterprise 2.0 Rave site as well as the FASTforward blog. Also make sure to join the Enterprise 2.0 Ravers social networking site at http://e2ravers.ning.com.

Here is another cool project I am working on – organizing an Enterprise 2.0 RAVE in NYC on May21-22 with the great team at Longworth Venture Partners .

If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools in your enterprise or actively strugling with pilot projects to try to do that, you should not miss this event. And if you do plan on going, use the link below to get a $250 discount for the RAVE. Seating will be limited and we already have two registrants!

The paint is still wet, so if something does not work correctly let us know.

See you there.

[Tags: future of work enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 wiki tag blog]

This weekend was a very busy one as we prepared to soft launch another group blog – this one on the Future of Health care and as a companion blog to the European World Healthcare Congress which is currently taking place in Barcelona.

Suggestions & comments are welcome!

[Tags: health care healthcare]

This afternoon at 4pm EST/1pm PST we will have a public conference call to discuss IP issues that arise when a company starts to integrate outside audiences within their business processes.

The call will be led by “blawger” and long time Corante Contributor Denise Howell and Michael Madison, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who blogs here.

Dial-in information is as follows:

From SKYPE – dial +990008275785861

From a regular phone:
Calling from the US call # 1-605-475-8590
(long distance costs apply).

In Europe, call:
Belgium 070 35 9989
France 0826 100 277
Germany 01805 00 7649
Ireland 0818 270 034
Italy 0848 390 175
Switzerland 0848 560 195
UK 0870 738 0763
The conference is free but national rate charges will apply to these calls.

We hope to see you then!

As I mentioned on this blog earlier, I agreed to be the chair for the upcoming Community 2.0 Conference. If you plan on attending the conference, which is shaping up rather nicely, remember to use the Corante Discount code – which provides you with a $600 discount off the list price. You can register through the conference’s web site and get the discount by using the code FWMIH00.

We hope to see you there!

FASTforward ’07 – a project we were paid to support, and where we spent most of last week – was a great success. The FASTforward Blog, which we origianlly launched as a companion blog to the conference, but which quickly evolved into a central repository for thinking around Enterprise 2.0, has some great interviews with some of the speakers who presented at the conference.

Interviews by David Weinberger, in no particular order:

• Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of “The Long Tail”
• John Battelle, author, blogger, editor, media entrepreneur
• Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit
• Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research
• John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast
• Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group
• Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture
• Susan Feldman, IDC
• Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group
• Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems
• Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group
• Zia Zaman, Fast
• Lydia Loizides, former exec of techn and emerging media at Interpublic Media
• Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School
• Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam
• Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
• Hadley Reynolds, Fast
• Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media
• James Robertson of Step Two Designs
• Michael Schrage, MIT
• Euan Semple, consultant, formerly of BBC
• Sandeep Swadia, Fast
• David Watson, Digital Media at Disney/ABC

Interviews by Kathleen Gilroy:

• “The meaning of search“
• a montage of statements by conference participants on the meaning and future of search
• Tim O’Reilly:
• Web 2.0 is defined by building systems that get better as much people use them. This means asymmetric competition in the information business. But there are opportunities to work in the global information commons. O’Reilly hosted a panel where he interviewed the search person from Reed and the head of business development for Fast. They discussed producing more contextual search and looking at federated search where the data coming from multiple customers was combined and made available.
• Andrew McAfee:
• Enterprise 2.0 is about new forms of collaboration and unlike previous enterprise computing efforts, e20 enables the expression and capture of judgement.
• E20 will not happen just by building new technologies and expecting people to use them. It is hard to get e20 to become part of the DNA of a company and it will require sustained management and leadership through coaching, rewards and incentives, leadership, and building a culture that is attuned to the benefits of working in this new way.
• E20 is very different from groupware (Notes, Sharepoint) in that it is very unstructured. Groupware often failed because it demanded too many rules and the terms of interaction were defined from the start.
• Ray Lane on the “interpersonal enterprise”

Related posts:
Andrew McAfee – FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, part 1
Rod Boothby – Message From FASTForward: Search Changes Everything

It is unquestionable that if done right, deploying communities in support of specific business processes can lead to game-changing benefits. To cite just a few examples:

• Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing – from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.
• In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.
• And through their “Connect and Develop” strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it’s developed.

But it is also true that a majority of business community initiatives fail, and will continue to do so. Some companies focus too much on the technology architecture to support communities rather the social architecture – forgetting that some of the most successful communities are facilitated through email lists and discussion threads. Others are not investing enough in getting their communities up and running. And then, of course, you have those companies who try to exert too much control, not realizing that communities are like any complex system – you have too few rules and connections and the system disolves in chaos, too many and the system freezes up.

It is with these issues in mind that we are launching a new group blog on the Future of Communities. We have a terrific line up of contributors and hope that you will join the conversation.

[Tags: communities community management marketing plan community marketing]

If you have anything to do with Word of Mouth Marketing, you should attend the WOMMA Summit next week!

As they say about the conference:

Have you heard of word of mouth? If you haven’t yet, you will. It’s the new way to market, and more and more companies are getting on board every day. Just ask the Inc. 500 (82% of their CEOs use word of mouth) and their customers (2/3 of consumer purchases are influenced by word of mouth).

Word of mouth is already happening TO you. Do you know how to make it work FOR you? Learn at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, Dec. 12-13 in Washington, D.C. It’s the only conference that will give you a hands-on, advanced understanding of how to build truly deep, two-way relationships with your customers.

The Summit features:
- Lessons from 70+ experts
- Big questions, important issues, and straight answers
- Practical “how-to” instructions
- Everyone you need to know

Register today at www.womma.org/summit2.

They have a great line-up of speakers as well as many interesting people in attendance – making for great networking with!