Factiva to host a Social Media Round Table- why don't you tell us what companies should be monitoring and why

Over the last few months i have been having a lot of conversations with folks in the Bay area- from A-list to D-List bloggers, customers, corporate communications/PR folks and public relations companies among other social media enthusiasts about Social Media and what it means to companies that are trying to understand, monitor, measure and leverage it.

Last week i attended the Social Media Club's "From Social Media to Corporate Media: An Interactive Workshop for Communications Professionals" and spent a very engaging afternoon with a bunch of really smart people who have either given this a lot of thought already or have recently realized that it can not be ignored. I have a half written draft post about my thoughts and gained knowledge nuggets from the event that i will try to get up this week.

The idea to host a round table was sparked by a conversation i encouraged our Factiva Insight product folks to have with Jeremiah Owyang after i read this post about the tools that companies need to monitor the new types of media that are being produced. We listened to Jeremiah, engaged with some others and are now ready to listen some more.

The Social Media Roundtable will be taking place on Tuesday December 5th at Zibibbo in Palo Alto.CA in the late afternoon followed by dinner and drinks. The event is by invitation only since we want to keep it an intimate 'round table' event (15-20) and i am currently working off a list that a bunch of us have put together (invites to go out this week)- but if i don't know you (yet!) and you are interested in participating in an event that will help shape the solutions that companies are/will be looking for drop me a line at daniela[dot]barbosa[@]factiva.com.

I will be posting more on this subject as we work to get the event finalized- but some topics that we will be discussing include:

• Is Consumer Generated Media [CGM] important and should it be measured?
• What should we measure, and as a company how do you want it delivered?
• Will companies be weighting blogs and other CGM as part of their media plans?

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise- bridges being built

Last week i posted some thoughts about Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise which once again lead to some interesting conversations internally with some of my colleagues, in my comments section and at three different client meetings. I love the fact that i can blog about things that interest me and i feel are important to think about in the Enterprise information delivery space and folks will join the 'conversation' in whichever format they feel comfortable with. Good to see the Blog at work!

I was just checking out Emanuele Quintarelli's blog InfoSpaces and saw this post as a follow-up to the ASIS&T EuroIA conference. Emanuele has one of those cool Web 2.0 job titles at Reed Business Information. The presentation was on 'FaceTag' and they have the slides up at Slideshare. What they are trying to address is:

A middle ground between the pure democracy of bottom-up tagging and the empirical determinism of top- down controlled vocabularies. A new metadata ecology which merges and leverages emerging and traditional tools to improve findability and user experience.

While looking at the ASIS&T site i noticed that the BBC had done a poster session at the conference as well on this subject- a little more digging found me this piece in the November Bulletin about their changing approach to Metadata which presents an interesting overview of how they are approaching the bridging of the traditional and new social tagging tools.

I just RSVP'd for this week's SF Tech Sessions event because the main theme this month is SocialBookmarking and i am sure to learn something as well as meet some folks that are very interested in this topic.

Reuters bureau and first company launch on Second Life

This week the first company to be launched in Second Life will be making its debut. Neville Hobson one of the people behind crayon from "“For Immediate Release: " The Hobson & Holtz Report, blogs that crayon is a true mash-up that combines the best in traditional and new thinking about marketing, advertising and PR.

Last week i posted about Sun Microsystem's Second Life conference and the participation by companies keeps growing per this comment on TechCrunch.

Interestingly enough the publishing community is also participating with Reuters opening up bureau in Second Life and CNET already launched this summer. The Daily Graze has a good write up on Reuters with more details as well as this piece at Paidcontent.org. The news will be 'real' news as well as stories from SecondLife- like land disputes, service launches etc. I have no doubt that a crayon story is forthcoming. The Reuters RSS reader that people can use in their spaces is pretty cool but the most interesting is the Discuss an Article feature that the DailyGraze writes about:

Once a company establishes a presence in Second Life, we always ask, "“What will bring people back to your island?" The answer for Reuters is… the news!. On all of the RSS readers, there is a "“touch to chat”" function. If a news piece is interesting to a reader and they want to discuss the articles with others they can click a button on the readers. They are then presented with options to submit their name to chat with other, display a list of others who want to chat, and provide teleport to a discussion room on Reuters'’ Island. When that juicy Ginko or Anshe Chung Studios news hits the Reuters wire head to the Reuters sim and discuss it with others. The building is arranged to have discussion areas for each feed category and they display Reuters' video feeds when available.

Much of the Second Life communication is done via IM Chat features-how many times have you IM'd a news article to a friend or colleague to 'discuss'- I do it all the time. Would i do it in Second Life? Maybe but I just can't seem to find time to live a second life although i tried months ago when Business Week put it on their cover. What is going to be the compelling reason for me to do so? Going to conferences and trainings, listening to speakers - yes i think so- but living a second life- with land and another activities? not sure. Interesting to see where Reuters is looking to invest their money that they will get from the sale of Factiva- but if i was them i wouldn't spend all my money there...

If you are new to Second Life and are asking what is daniela talking about ? here is a quick Introduction to Second Life that talks about some of the economic possibilities.

Search Entertainment- Ms.Dewey

Via a post in the CARL-IT North blog i introduce you to Ms.Dewey , an interactive flash web search entry page for Microsoft's Live Search engine. According to Microsoft this site is being used as an experiment for exploring different ways to introduce people to search and Live Search specifically .

Never thought of search as entertainment but i guess now it is. Search is probably one of the most adopted internet tools that has become second nature to us so it is always interesting to see what can be done with search- like for example the experience that Yahoo! Answers has created. The results from Ms.Dewey are the same as the Live Search which i hadn't tried- so they got me to try it out and i have to admit that it was entertaining-although i probably won't go back unless it was to show someone. The results were small on the screen and unless you mute or close down the browser Ms.Dewey gets lonely if you follow your search to other pages. Of course if you look around the blog posts and comments on the subject you will find that most people are asking Ms.Dewey questions that make her have specific reactions- i will leave those to your own imagination.

World Usability Day- November 14th

Via Martin Hardee- from the Sun Microsystems, sun.com team.

Make yourself useful on the 14th of November 2006.
Celebrate usability around the world.
For more information visit: http://www.worldusabilityday.org/

This day also happens to be my father's birthday so it will be easy for me to remember because everytime i sit down with my pop to show him something on the computer that i think is 'easy' he reminds me that it could be easy for me and him only if certain principles of usability have been followed.

Factiva- now a Dow Jones and Dow Jones Company

A whole bunch of folks pinged me yesterday and today about the news that Dow Jones is purchasing the Reuters' Interest in Factiva and asked me what i thought about it. As i have posted before, i have been with Factiva since its inception and through its challenges and it triumphs over the last 7 years, i feel very passionate about what we are doing in the enterprise space when it comes to delivering business information. I am very excited about the possibilities that will now be available to Factiva, especially to the consulting services group that i have been part of for the last 3+years. I probably won't post anymore on this until the purchase goes through but if you want to talk more about it-contact me directly.

Salesforce.com Appy Awards

During last week's Salesforce.com Dreamforce user and developer conference the 1st annual Appy Awards took place to recognize some of their top client and partner achievements. They had these great statues of a hula girl (here is the Infopia team with one) and the categories where wide ranging. Some may turn their noses up at vendor given awards but i disagree- it is always great for vendors to acknowledge the clients who are doing innovative things with their products and driving their business forward. Salesforce.com is at the top of their game when it comes to listening and reacting to their clients and their client's repay them back graciously by delivering some very innovative tools to their users that drive adoption and usage of the Salesforce.com tools.

i am very proud that one of my clients who has recently integrated Factiva SalesWorks content into a custom application took home the 'Customer Innovation of the Year Award' and they were kind enough to give a shout out to Factiva during their acceptance speech. Hurray! The team has been great to work with so congrats to them!

BTW-The folks at Salesforce.com are starting to post the videos and presentations from the sessions and you can find a complete listing of those already available on their Salesforce.com official blog. With so many sessions to attend during a conference like this it is great that they are posting these up for everyone to access on demand.

Collaboration in the Enterprise- take 1 Social bookmarking

Last week i attended the Office 2.0 conference where the topic of collaboration in the enterprise was a main topic across all the Office 2.0 products and services we looked at. Sure there was a lot of conversations about the technologies- (multitenancy, issues of synchronization and data migration, connectivity, etc)- that will drive the Office 2.0 experience, but we know that without user uptake and participation the coolest and best technology supported tools will not provide the value that these vendors propose to provide in the enterprise. I have been going to KM conferences and reading about collaboration struggles in the Enterprise for years and the issue seems to be the same and one that was discussed last week- if we build it will they come? And if they come- will it stick?

How do we get people to collaborate and to sustain levels of collaboration throughout their careers at an enterprise? What is in it for them? What tools will the new digital natives coming into the enterprise need to be successful and how can we grab the knowledge that is about to walk out of the door with the baby boomers? These questions aren't new but what is being described as Web 2.0 in the enterprise could possible be a new way to try to address these issues.

Back in May i posted about social bookmarking in the Enterprise that lead to some very interesting conservations and the topic of social bookmarking in the enterprise has remained high on my list . Last week, while getting a tour of the tool, I had a chat with Puneet Gupta, CEO of ConnectBeam a new player in the social collaboration enterprise space.

Some folks in the Enterprise shriek when they hear terms like folksonomies- which can be one of the outputs of a social bookmarking tool. I don't claim to be an expert. LibraryClips has a good collection of links that addressed this topic last year that you should look at if you are interested in the folksonomy-taxonomy discussion. I spoke to Puneet Gupta and he certainly doesn't come about as someone who believes that Connectbeam and other tools out there that are targeting the enterprise are looking to replace enterprise taxonomies-augment them, yes- make them more valuable, yes- drive collaboration, yes.

From what i heard, he like others are trying to build a 'passable bridge' from what people are calling enterprise 1.0 to enterprise 2.0 (yeah don't wince)- workers do it on a daily basis with the tools they are turning to (like enterprise wikis and blogs that continue to be 'mashed-up' with enterprise applications)- Enterprises can't fight that and an enterprise metadata tool (or whatever you want to call it) that is able to take both worlds could be the needed suspension cables that flex the bridge when the wind blows yet keeps it passable and solid bi-directionally. As Peter Morville states in Ambient Findability (pg.139) "Ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies are not mutually exclusive. In many contexts, such as corporate web sites, the formal structure of ontologues and taxonomies is worth the investment. In others, like the blogosphere, the casual seredipity of folksonomies is certainly better than nothing. And in some contexts, such as intranets and knowledge networks, a hybrid metadata ecology that combines elements of each may be ideal."

Let's imagine that social bookmarking in the enterprise will take off and become accepted and widely adopted and then let's look at some of the disadvantages of Social bookmarking listed in Wikipedia. Then think about how established processes and tools can augment end-user collaboration tools like social bookmarking. The disadvantages listed include:

• no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary)-
• no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.)
• mistagging due to spelling errors
• tags that can have more than one meaning
• unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion
• highly unorthodox and "personalized" tag schemas from some users
• no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese)
  

So some questions:
-can a taxonomy co-exist with a 'folksonomy' that is user produced through an enterprise social bookmaking tool?
-what would (or does) that look like?
-what would the role of a taxonomy/ontology/metadata 'manager' or similar roles look like?

Salesforce and Office 2.0

So i was at the Salesforce's Dreamforce conference on Monday and Tuesday of this week which i really learned a lot from since i focused on attending as many sessions as i could. Today and tomorrow i am attending the Office 2.0 conference.

At today's conference one of the announcements made was the Google Docs announcement, a blog post points to some code that says that it will soon be integrated into Salesforce.com- i can see that integration to be very useful for Salesforce users.

There were many other small startups today demoing and talking about Office 2.0 spreadsheet and word web functionality- Google is not focused on them they want the microsoft desktop- but their stratedy because they are changing the business models is not to follow them from the forefront- is to deliver just enough functionality to the consumer- family, school teachers and students etc.get them hooked define the feature functions and then you know what can happen.

Brian Solis has a nice overview of who was at the pre-conference get together at the SF MOMA on Tuesday night and many others are blogging about the Office 2.0 conference. It is true that we got ipods as swag- with conference notes, calendar and bios- very cool way to distribute conference information, you can also get more information from the demo sites you visit.

I will have more thoughts about the conference tomorrow (i got home in time for another great sunset but have been sitting at the kitchen counter catching up on 'real' work), but i am agreeing that a lot of the panel and demo focus today was on the 'replacement' of office productivity software (Microsoft office) with web based applications- in order to make an impact on the enterprise, we need to not only change the business model but provide added value to the end users.

Cheers to Sun

ok call me a dork- i am and proud-but how cool is the fact that Sun Microsystems held a press conference in Second Life? Looks like among others at Sun, John Gage got it back then and gets it now.

I have to say that if the audience they are looking for are folks like me (perhaps with a little more buying power!), they have the right hook. I have met some great folks at sun in the last year and recently had the pleasure to take a tour of the Executive Briefing Center (with a walk by appearance by Scott McNealy) at the Menlo Park location and i am really impressed with what Sun is focusing on.

On the way work the other day i also watched the Robert Scoble's Podtech interview with Jonathan Schwartz. Here are my un-edited notes (well i corrected spelling) that i typed into my Blackberry on the BART as i watched:

• Free software or access to services grab early adopters
  
• Developers develop applications with open source people want to use those apps- they then buy or influence the buyers
  
• Tipping effect
  
• the majority of people in the world will see the internet first on the phone
  
• i have an official huge crush on JS
  
• Jonathan talks like other bloggers i am and run into-"on my blog i said", "on my blog i say"
• IT as a competitive advantage vs IT as a cost center but as an enabler to their business
  
• flower shop example- sun doesn't service customers who see IT as a cost center
• big providers- look at the internet as a way to increase revenue and need to develop things that are more relevant to those enterprises
• electricity- not just running fast-eco responsibilities -he plays an eco hippie on tv -Ha-
• he wished Robert a bubble-ha-ha!
• folks that drive IT decisions is what he cares about. And how it can grow his business --save money on power- good for you and me

Dreamforce User and Developer Conference

I am going to be attending Salesforce.com's Dreamforce User and Developer Conference this week. I am really looking forward to the conference. Not only are a lot of my clients salesforce.com customers, i really like how these folks run their business. For example, here are things that i have been keeping my eye on that always give me ideas of how customers could integrate customer intelligence information into sales and marketing workflows:

• Official Salesforce.com blog
• AppExchange blog where they among other things post about the App of the Week
• Popular Ideas- IdeaExchange From the site "IdeaExchange is a forum where salesforce.com customers can suggest new product concepts, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and other customers, and preview what we are planning to deliver". According to the site has released over 6500 individual customer's product ideas (no time frame defined but still impressive)
• Here you can find some Best Practices discussions

Also cool is the ConnectonDemand tool that was given to all attendees. Update your profile and your interests around the conference and then you can connect to others. Once you have your profile in the system other attendees can request to contact you. I have already reached out to a couple of attendees. The ConnectonDemand conference tool is by Leverage Software and one of the tools is a PeopleMap that let's you create a map of people you should be looking out for based on their interests. There are a lot of service providers in the bunch which i suspect is typical of these tools. From what i have read this conference has doubled in size from last year to 5000.

I just spent way to much time looking at blogs on the topic of salesforce.com. I am not going to be blogging from this event-might however post things of interest afterwards and will be blogging internally to share things with my co-workers but here are some folks that will probably be in case you are interested:

• Scott Hemmeter at Perspectives on Salesforce.com has a good listing of where to go to for information- including a del.icio.us tag
  
• SalesForceWatch.com
  
• I-dialogue- over at the Diablogue
• this fellow from Microsoft however was denyed access if he makes it in he will probably blog about it
• Salesforce Heretic
  

Here is the ConnectOnDemand badge that I produced.

did you hear, how did you know?

folks are always asking me how i have time to keep up with everything that is going on in the technology space especially things that are impacting or will impact my enterprise customers. It isn't easy, especially when i have weeks like this one where i have been traveling and onsite for many a client meeting with many follow-ups! I have posted about it before but as more and more is being produced and delivery methods are evolving- the tools are changing and my absorption methods are as well.

My RSS feed reader where i combine blog feeds, web site feeds and premium content subscriptions is still my favorite way to absorb and keep my eyes on things- Why? because i know:

• which feeds i want to read first- the 'news breaking' bloggers
  
• which ones i go to when thinking about a specific customers - the 'customer intelligence' bloggers
• where the technical products reviews and product releases are that are not going to hit the mainstream for a while- the 'web 2.0' monitors
• which ones have have industry specific information- ' the information/content delivery' bloggers
• the friends and acquintences- 'the i have met so many smart people in the last year' bloggers
  

But over the last few months i have been using news filters. Techmeme is one that i have really been turning to find out what is happening and who is talking to whom. The philosophy behind Techmeme is here. i have being running into Gabe Rivera at various events and besides have a great concept on his hands and executing on it quite well, he seems to be a super nice guy. I just added a Techmeme widget to my blog on the right side- so now you to can read what i am reading.

what i have noticed is that from a political perspective my participation in consuming information has drastically been reduced. For world news coverage- i turn old fashion and go to New York Times as well as The Wall Street Journal (free print from the 11th floor of my building since we are part of the Dow Jones companies) but i do try to keep true to my political interests and go to the Huffington Post daily and have the luxury of having my own political news aggregator in my husband.

Podcasts and more and more Videocasts (or whatever you want to call them) are also becoming a big part of my consumption pattern. I have been trying to create an OPML feed to put on my blog of podcasts i listen to for the last 30min. however it is absolutely gorgeous out today and i must go out and play among the music lovers- so i will save that for later!