Ben’s Blog

Today was a long day indeed.  After waking up late I rushed downstairs to grad a quick bite to eat and some coffee before heading into today’s first breakout session: “Work Green, Work Virtually” with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps.  I was a little disappointed that there was such a low turn out for this session but it allowed those of us in the room to have a good conversation on many topics ranging from politics, oil, green initiatives and finally virtual teams.  After hearing some of the barriers people encounter when trying to setup a flexible work environment I was thankful that our office is fairly laid back.  I am also more driven to find creative ways to meet virtually with clients and peers on other campuses at GVSU.

Next the entire group filed into the ballroom for the large sessions focused on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives in practice.  First up was Mark Woolen (VP CRM Product Strategy) from Oracle.  His 20 minute session morphed into a 45 minute sales pitch which threw off the entire morning’s schedule – judging by audience reaction most people tuned out at the 10 minute mark.  Thankfully, Pete Fields (Senior VP, eCommerce) from Wachovia Bank came up next and did everything right.  He focused his discussion on making a case for Enterprise 2.0 technology based on what he heard us asking in other sessions – wow, he tailored his presentation to the audience.  I could tell he passionately believed in the direction he was leading Wachovia and shared some insights that I hadn’t considered before.  A couple take aways would include:

1. He was able to finance Enterprise 2.0 initiatives by working with managers who gave him 5% of their annual travel budgets in return for collaborative tools.
2. A large portion of the work force will soon be leaving and taking a tremendous amount of knowledge with them.  It is in any organizations best interest to download this info into some tool for others to access before this happens.
3. Incoming generation Y employees have grown up with tremendous social networking and collaborative tools – they expect to have access to these in the workplace to do their work and are often stifled by the lack of the “social aspect” and often disengage or leave because of bureaucracy or environments that are too rigid.

Pete later appeared on a panel with other presenters and again gave some great tidbits of information.  I think next year he would be a great keynote speaker as he seems to really “get” this stuff and sums it up so well.

After lunch I attended a couple more breakout sessions – I was really looking forward to both of these, but the first session on mashups was a dud.  The panel that was assembled to discuss mashups seemed to be limited to sales/marketing experience and when asked for practical applications of mashups, or cool mashups they had seen, it was a struggle to find anything that didn’t involve a map.  The second breakout was titled “Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful,” and this was interesting.  The conversation ballooned to include blogging, micro-blogging and knowledge management.  Some take aways included:

1. Let go.  Trust employees to manage the content and don’t worry about their content. Find a balance between policy, risk tolerance, and culture.
2. Seed the wiki/blog/fill in the blank with content and evangelize the tool pre-launch.

Finally, a question was posed on how do organizations account for time spent blogging or contributing to a wiki.  Specifically, if employees bill for their hours or attribute all their time to a client or project, how do you account for time spent on these tools.  There wasn’t a real answer to this, but there was an underlying worry in the room that these initiatives may just be a time-suck for their employees.  I guess go to take away 1 above – just trust that employees are smart enough to find their own balance.

Was the day really this long?  Next came the social/beer/mingle with vendors time downstairs.  I saw most of what I wanted to see the day before but there were some new faces in the room and I spent a little more time in the Microsoft booth.  I dropped a card in the drawing for a Zune and I won!  Anyone need an 8gb Zune?

Finally, the last item on the schedule was a 6-8pm panel discussion between a couple vendors in the social networking space.  I’m not sure what the takeaways were, but the conversation was amusing and the panel worked so well together in answering the audiences questions.  I’m glad I stuck around for this – it was a lot of fun.

At this point it was 8:30pm and I had yet to step outside; once I did I found the heat had broke and it was beautiful outside.  I walked a little, picked up the T and found a little Italian restaurant where I ordered the special despite having no idea what the waitress said.  I picked up something about shrimp and what I thought was clams over linguine.  Turned out to be a plate full of whole mussels in the shell with a couple shrimp.  The special was great – I wish I knew what it was so I could order it again sometime.

And to think, there is still one more day to go!

I had a couple plans on how to entertain myself while in Boston alone:

• I had a few restaurants I wanted to revisit from my last trip
• I want to visit the new Contemporary Art Museum (because I saw it featured on This Old House)
• I wanted to find the building my parents lived in while my mother was in nursing school at Mass. General Hospital and my dad was in the US Navy.

I decided to set out on completing the third goal last night after the conference…but it was a little difficult seeings how my mom could only remember the street name and the fact that there was a market across the street. To make it worse, yesterday was the hottest day this week with a heat index of 103. Luckily Anderson Street is only a couple blocks long, and the market is still there.

After finding the building I spent some time walking around the neighborhood snapping pictures for my mom. It is a cool area, lots of young health care professionals walking to/from work in their scrubs and many little shops/businesses disbursed throughout the area. I’d live there if I lived in Boston.  I even bought a couple lotto tickets in the market thinking that lightning could strike twice and I would rewarded with copious amounts of treasure after finding the first item I was looking for – that didn’t work out so hot.

After checking that goal off the list I spent some time sitting by the Charles River talking to my friend Marty, enjoying the view, thinking about life and then heading back to the hotel. It was a good night.

Another highlight of the day was finding a whole new group to follow on Twitter.  There are about 30 people here who are regularly and extensively posting on Twitter.  It is so great – I can virtually attend every session whereas normally I would be limited to the one I could sit in.  I’ve also had a chance to meet a couple people that I’ve followed or who are following me which is a new experience (outside the office).

Got settled into the hotel yesterday and registered for the conference.  The Westin is a nice place – I could definately get used to the big HD LCD TV and the king size “heavenly bed” in my room.  The downside: wireless internet here is terrible which makes staying in touch with the office rather difficult.  My goal is to not return to an enormous pile of email!

The keynotes this morning were very enlightening – I had no idea how widespread web 2.0 initiatives are in the corporate community.  For instance, I learned that fedex has a facebook presence and a desktop app written with Adobe Air, and the CIA uses a host of tools coined intellipedia that includes everything from a wiki tool to presentation of online media.  Over lunch I sat next to a reporter for PC Magazine and she told me all about some of the cool things she’s uncovered while covering emerging web technologies.  Perhaps the most interesting was the fact that Comcast (the cable/digital phone company) actively monitors twitter and responds within minutes to any customer who tweets about their experience with Comcast.  To my amazement they even got back to me about my tweet about this and I messaged a couple times back and forth with their rep who knew a couple people in Grand Rapids.  Talk about the shrinking world.

After lunch I went to a couple break out sessions – the first was all about social bookmarking sites, how they’re used, how they can be improved and ways to integrate them into some of our own tools.  I left with a whole new vocabulary and a greater appreciation for tagging.  Next I attended a very collaborative panel discussion n blogging.  The panel ended up being the entire room, and sadly half the time was wasted going around a room of over 150 people and letting each person introduce themselves and their blog.  It got better from there - there were nuggets of useful information disbursed between all the self indulgent discussions.  I then realized that for the most part these people were bloggers and they were simply converting their blogs to “verbal” for the captive audience.

To keep it brief, those were the high and low lights of the day – I wrapped up with a little time spent socializing in the vendor demo pavilion.  I saw some cool tools, many of which seemed like little known sites with some very cool ideas.  I also chatted with a couple Microsoft gurus about their new initiative to compete on the itunes U space.  The zunes are nice and their product looked very sleak (and open source) but I think Apple has that market pretty well cornered at this point.

I’m thinking of walking around Boston again tonight but there is a heat index of 103 today and I just had a beer so I feel like taking a nap.  Maybe I’ll go watch some news, wait for the sun to set a bit and then venture out on the subway to see what I can find.  I invested in a one week pass to ride the subway and busses which has made getting around very easy.

Ciao!