The GroupSwim Diving Board

Well, the conference is over and it was quite an experience. Tom McCleary and I met tons of people and had lots of fun. See Tom working his magic.

The mix of people who attended was impressive. There were vendors, CIOs and other executives, analysts, and bloggers. What became obvious was the focus was on larger Enterprises. The attendees and vendors were mostly interested in large Enterprises like Lockheed, Sony, etc.; the SMB market was not well represented.

Instead of a rambling set of observations like Day 1, I’m focusing on 2 sections for this post.

1. Interesting tidbits from customers

The conference featured a Q&A with several large customers (FedEx, Sony, the CIA, Wachovia, Pfizer) and what they learned implementing Enterprise 2.0. Here are the sound bites that caught my attention:

• Openness is required. The minute you stifle employees and what they can say in blogs or whatever, you will fail
• The challenge for getting going is the opposite of what you think. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t build it and employees will come. You need to enlist people and encourage them to get things rolling. It will eventually take on a life of its own, but it takes nurturing first. You need champions (We see this in our customer base as well)
• Brand your tools to help drive adoption. I think it was Pfizer that branded their social network the Pool. While it is a shame they had to steal the name of our customer community, we’ll give them a pass
• Just do it. Don’t over think it or you will never get started
• Go big and audacious. Of course, another customer then said start small and use stepping stones so you decide based on the particular culture and personality of your business
• The hardest thing for most companies is to give up control; this is scary. However, you need to trust your people at some point or it isn’t going to work
• Do not add extra stuff to people’s plates. In order to make this technology catch on, you need to change or eliminate something they hate
• Don’t use artificial incentives. Schwag (boy it keeps coming up) and badges work well, but don’t rely on money to incent participation (I’m not sure I totally agree with this one for managers. I think you should link a portion of performance bonuses for managers to encourage them and their employees to participate. I blogged about if you can force collaboration here)
• Look for email volleyball. This is a great indication of an area that can benefit from Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques

2. LaunchPad update

To make a long story short, we didn’t win. A company called Veodia took the prize. They streamed live video from a camcorder directly onto the screen. I give them credit; they took a chance on internet connectivity, the demo gremlins who always seem to surface during these things, and hung it all out there. As one of my former clients used to say, the had serious “wow” going. Our approach was to describe what we did, show a scenario, and describe the benefits. 

I learned a couple of things from this experience.

1. Sex it up. While our powerpoint was clear and accurate, it obviously didn’t have the wow. It may have been my delivery but you can decide
2. Video is a great way to create the “wow”. We are learning this on our website and even in the app, but the same goes for presentations
3. You can use Twitter to cheat. I’m not saying it actually happened, but it appears that people in the audience were using Twitter to broadcast voting instructions. I use a service called Summize to look for mentions of GroupSwim, and I picked up some interested Tweets during the LaunchPad session. As an aside, I have to give Twitter a tiny bit of credit here as the may be the first time I’ve actually seen people use Twitter to accomplish something useful