Things I learned today at Enterprise 2.0 (Wednesday)

1. “Me First” {Blogger Stowe Boyd is credited with the “Me First” statement; however, I prefer the “eating my own dogfood” though that has a weird marketing buzz/lameness to it I find I repeat too often} If I and other leaders of this organization want to see adoption and change in the organization with respect to collaboration, transparency, and social computing behind the firewall, I need to lead by example – Instead of sending emails with decks (ok, I sent 2), I have been providing updates via my blog post and informing folks curious about the conference to check the blog for updates.
2. Ecosystems around collaboration and social computing are winning over the one-off blog here/there. (NOW, to be fair, this is something I already knew, but it was nice to have it validated...)A major theme I'm seeing this year in comparison to when I went in 2006 was that companies who are just implementing a 'blog' or 'wiki' and saying that they are a collaborative workplace are missing out - really examining your complete ecosystem is key here and extends way beyond the Millennials (which I know you know!) This means that the portal, for example, is built with collaboration in mind; unified communications is brought into the picture, etc.
3. Don’t make the end-user go somewhere else to network. Have the networking component baked into the whole mixture – the end-user should be able to connect and look up people and expertise ANYWHERE she is doing work on the portal – if she is reading a news article, ifshe is looking for RSS feeds to subscribe to, if she is finding alumns from a particular university…Don’t make networking happen away from the work – otherwise, you’ll end up with empty, outdate profiles and not much reason for folks to keep it up-to-date.
4. We are now really at E2.0 – we’re moving beyond the “what is the value of a blog? Why should I care that my employees build and sustain informal virtual networks in an organization; rather, we’re going to – yes, I see the value; how can I make it work (and measure it!) in my organization?
5. Adoption – these tools (all of them) require the power of the network to make them work – 5% participation – something your organization is willing to invest millions in?
6. A blog isn’t a panacea for an organization that neither trusts its employees nor really empowers them to provide differing or critical views.
7. Pete Fields’ talk from Wachovia – one of the things I admire and respect about Pete’s story is that he took 18 months to build the business case. Because he was able to also bring in organizational psychologists and other experts, too, he really built a solid case relevant to his company's needs. While this might not seem new to you, the messages from his talk really resonated with the people in the room, the folks on the backchannel, as well as bloggers and Twitterers.

Questions I have in my noodle

1. Are the Millennials really going to flee your company ( and 401K plans) if you don't have social networking? Seriously? Who are you creating your collaborative spaces for? Them? All the generations? The organization?

2. What is the typology of enterprise users of social tools behind the firewall? Can we apply some of the pew and forrester work around this?

3. Who was I talking to about the book "Corporations: The pathological pursuit of profit" and my knowledge piecemeal concept?

See you tomorrow!