Event Brief: Mashing up Mergers & Acquisitions and Web 2.0 at the AM&AA's Summer Conference

Web 2.0 and the Mergers and Acquisitions Industry at the AM&AA reveals how digital social networks are affecting mergers and acquisitions in the mid-market

Reports of “Character Building” Market—Significant Parallels with High Tech Bust—Plus, the Emerging Web 2.0 Vein

Web 2.0 and the Mergers and Acquisitions Industry at the AM&AAThe sub-prime induced correction of the U.S. financial sector has changed the context around M&A during the last year, and mergers and acquisitions experts met last week to share success stories, lessons learned and admonitions at the Alliance of Mergers & Acquisition Advisors Summer Conference July 22-25, 2008 at Chicago’s Wyndham Hotel. I was asked to present a new talk, “Leveraging a Web 2.0 Ecosystem to Grow Your Business,” and I had the opportunity to attend some of the other sessions. I’ll summarize their key points before adding some thoughts on the promise that Web 2.0 and social networks bring to deal marketing due to significantly decreased transaction costs.

AM&AA members hail from all parts of a rich ecosystem of investment bankers, attorneys, private equity, brokers, intermediaries, CPAs and others who specialize in every […]

Faceforce.com Pioneers Enterprise

Mashup of Social Networks and CRM Offers Glimpse of the Future: “Let Prospects Self-Report”

But Facebook Data Tickles Privacy Concerns—Will LinkedIn Seize the Day?

As a presenter at the Social Networking Conference, I was able to catch some excellent presentations, and one of the most eye-opening was Clara Shih’s “Enterprise Mashups: How Facebook Is Changing Sales and Marketing.” In a word, Clara and Facebook’s Todd Perry mashed up Facebook and Salesforce.com via AppExchange so that a prospect’s profile in Salesforce now includes select Facebook profile information in a separate pane (see illustration, right), providing a much richer “360° view” of the person to Salesforce users. The result is elegant, powerful and pregnant with social and business issues that I’ll explore briefly here.

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Reclaiming Your LinkedIn Network

Have you found yourself looking at your LinkedIn network and recognizing too few people? Here’s how to sort it out

adviceMany executives have allowed their LinkedIn networks to grow by reactively accepting invitations from former colleagues, club members, people they met networking, etc. One day, when something compels them to look at “their” networks, they are dismayed to see that it’s not a pretty picture. They don’t recognize some of the names. Others aren’t really what they think of as “trusted.” They might get requests from their connections to connect them with someone else in their network whom they barely know. They don’t know what to do, and they wonder whether they should just throw it all away and start over. This is a very predictable and normal circumstance, and here I offer a step-by-step guide to reclaiming your network.

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New Category Debuts on Global Human Capital

“Practice” Will Highlight Behind the Curtain Enterprise Innovation with Web 2.0

pract-X2I am pleased to announce the creation of “Practice,” an exciting new Category on the Global Human Capital Journal. Practice is the first new category I’ve created since launch in 2005. It will give you behind-the-scenes insights into the innovation I am conducting with clients in my consultancy, CSRA. For example, the new CSRA Social Network Roadmap is attracting extensive attention from Fortune 1000 executives in many industries: utilities, consultancies and market research firms to name three. We will begin using the roadmap to assess, test and scale their companies’ use of social networks and Web 2.0.

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Just Out: New Social Network Roadmap Provides Risk-managed Approach for Applying Web 2.0 to Business

Public Beta Release at Social Network Conference Examples of enterprise process innovation feature LinkedIn®

news_flashI am pleased to announce that I beta-released my new social network roadmap at the Social Networking Conference last week in San Francisco. The roadmap helps enterprises to effectively assess, plan and apply social networks’ new technologies and behaviors to business while minimizing risk. It offers a structured approach to evaluating and using social networks for process innovation in marketing, business development, client service, human resources, research & development and others.

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