I don't usually review conferences but after attending e2.0 this week I have a few comments that I think are worth sharing. I've been to e2.0 a few times but I had actually decided that I didn't have time in my crazy schedule to make it to Boston this year, but then I ended up with a few other things to do there this week as well, so I managed to spend some time at the conference. I walked away feeling somewhat less than satisfied and with the need to dig into that a little.
From my perspective, and maybe because I spend so much time focusing on the broader concepts around social business, e2.0 now feels narrow. It's at best addresses only half of the business, looking at the internal employee processes in isolation. Collaboration is extremely important and moving a business to a model that is people-centric internally is critical but so is engaging your customer, knitting a closer network with your suppliers and moving partners from a point-to-point model to an ecosystem. I think the prevailing base of understanding around social in the enterprise is advancing and evolving rapidly, so rapidly in fact that there's a danger of getting lost. Collaboration is an overused term and has many different meanings and maybe e2.0 is on its way there too. In general we as technologist often get so focused on technology that we don't see what really has to change to make things work. For my taste I didn't hear near enough about the culture change that is the real core of a move to a social business.
On to the conference itself. I love opportunities to catch up with friends, colleagues and clients and e2.0 did not disappoint on that front. Three of the analysts from my group, Mary Wardley, Erin Traudt and Sanjeev Pal were able to get out to the conference for awhile and we had some time to catch up on some projects, always better in person. Mitch Lieberman, who has just launched his own consulting business, was in attendance and we had a great conversation on all things social business and social CRM. Also on the new business front, Jacob Morgan and I caught up on his new venture ChessMedia Group. I won't list all of the other colleagues and friends that I saw, but it's a solid list, from a conference networking perspective e2.0 is one of the best.
On Monday Jive Software hosted a launch event that was a continuation of a multi-city road show explaining their vision for social business focused solutions. I will do a separate post on their announcements.
Vendor exhibitors represented a wide range from new start ups to old line technology vendors. In fact, there were a surprising number of the more traditional vendors present this year, a sign that at least e2.0 is getting traction, although I'd say all things social are the real draw. It's good validation that companies like IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and Novell are so visible as sponsors and participants at e2.0. The increased visibility is good but frankly its a double edged sword. I'll talk more about that later.
In a vendor rich environment (just a fact in a market that now has over 200 vendors) I managed to get updates from several companies I follow closely and also meet a few new and very interesting vendors. On the update front I caught up with Cisco, Spigit, MangoSpring (great new iPad app for their Engage platform), NewsGator, PartnerPedia, Yammer, InnoCentive and Mzinga. Two new offerings caught my attention, QxygenCloud, a company created by the founders of LeapFile, and Social 27. I'll save the OxygenCloud discussion for another post, I promised I'd hold off until their product announcement in a week or so. Social 27 is a feature rich new virtual conference platform that has a lot of embedded social connectivity features that I think will help them differentiate from a growing number of competitors. They have made good traction, in fact a week long Microsoft Dynamics virtual event was underway all last week on the platform.
The socialytics market is really heating up and I see new entrants in that market regularly, e2.0 was no exception. In a conversation with CrowdCast CEO Mat Fogerty and Chief Scientist Leslie Fine I got a good preview of where they are taking their strategy. Socialytic vendors tend to focus on the use of social data, often things like sentiment, mentions, etc. but I think the greatest value in socialytics is found at the intersection of the social data with existing enterprise data. The CrowdCast crew definitely gets that and are moving to enhance the intersection of information.
The e2.0 sessions themselves were something of a mixed bag this year. There certainly were some strong participants, with people like Dennis Howlett, Mitch Lieberman, Rachel Happe, Dion Hinchcliffe, Susan Scrupski, Andrew McAfee, and many others. The conference used a submit - then community evaluation process for session topics but there was no evidence that the topics that were voted up got any additional consideration, at least that was my perception. I was thinking about thought leadership and the number of thought leader participants this year versus last year and this year seems light. As an example look this list recent list of social thought leaders from Paul Greenberg and compare it to the conference speakers list this year and last...short of the people I already mentioned its quite a big difference year over year (not that this is the only valid list, it's just an example).
The biggest shortfall in my book was the keynote sessions. It's a difficult task to manage large sponsors' desire to promote their products with the need to provide thought provoking keynotes that address the key issues currently being discussed among e2.0 and social business experts. In my opinion the conference this year, especially considering the rapidly growing number of large sponsors, did not manage that balance. Way to many keynotes were demo-fests and did not provide broader e2.0 thought leadership and discussion. Note to conference organizers and sponsors, the Expo is for demos, the keynotes are for thought leadership.
So that's my take for this year, great networking, mostly good sessions and keynotes that for the most part seriously missed the mark. What do you think?
Tags: social business, e2.0, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, conference, software
