Enterprise Social Networking Workshop Extends to Full Day

Enterprise Social Networking Workshop Extends to Full Day: new partnership fuses strategy and practice.

Christopher S. Rollyson Partners with Clara Shih to Launch Full Day Session at London Social Networking Conference

I am pleased to announce that “Succeed with Enterprise Social Networking Initiatives” has been expanded to a full day at the London Social Networking Conference. Having conducted two successful pilots in Los Angeles and Miami, conference producer Marc Lesnick decided to expand the program. The Social Networking Conference is very enterprise-focused (click the logo right for conference and registration info). Read on for behind-the-curtain insights into the workshop.

Overview and Goals

The premise of “Succeed with Enterprise Social Networking Initiatives” is that many organizations are beginning to take social networking more seriously. Up to now, all but bleeding edge adopters have used a skunk works approach, featuring part-time employees and judicious use of outside providers to experiment with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogging and others. In 2009, firms began to see interesting results and wanted to expand their programs. This workshop introduces enterprise-strength tools and process to manage key risks of scaling up investments.

To Maximize Opportunity, Mitigate Key Risks

• Choosing “the path of least resistance” tools that are easy to procure but don’t consider stakeholders’ needs
• Not setting expectations with management regarding return on investment
• Getting caught in analysis paralysis regarding ROI, delaying the initiative and letting a competitor engage stakeholders’ finite attention
• Building an internal solution that asks stakeholders to recreate profiles and business processes that they already fulfill on external sites
• Picking the wrong platform because the team doesn’t understand the value proposition of the major sites
• Not including an explicit relationship development strategy

I will kick off the full-day workshop with the internal view of enterprise social networking. Clara will do the afternoon session that will focus on the external view.

Morning Session: Enterprise Project Management Bootcamp

You are exploring how your organization can use social networking to meet marketing or operational goals. You may have been experimenting with small projects. To succeed, you need to:

• Understand the value propositions of many of the major platforms; this will help you to evaluate whether you should engage there
• How to make the business case for the initiative; overview of various models for driving revenue, reducing operational cost, or both
• What kind of partners exist, and how do you evaluate them? Should you check another box on your Lotus Connections or Microsoft Sharepoint license, seek out pureplays or partner with B2C sites?
• What are these projects like to manage? How do you structure them to measure results and manage risk? What are best practices and pitfalls? Use a special version of the Social Network Roadmap Pilot Track to lay out your plan

Afternoon Session: Facebook & Twitter Marketing Bootcamp

The afternoon features the tactics for using two of the monster platforms that have increasingly global audiences. Clara will highlight some of the latest research about the platforms before launching into how to run Facebook and Twitter campaigns:

• Social trends: generation gaps, online identify
• How to use Facebook Ads, Messages and Fan Pages
• How to coordinate with CRM
• ROI calculations
• How to integrate with other marketing and PR channels

Parting Shots

• Enterprise social networking is disruptive in the enterprise environment whose hierarchies and defined processes are often tuned for efficiency, not innovation; without explicit tools and processes to manage the risk and realize the opportunity, project leaders will struggle to create value. This workshop is a one day opportunity to come up the curve
• If you would like to view and comment on the full agenda of the morning section, join my LinkedIn discussion here (must be a member of LinkedIn)
• Here is the conference website, along with registration information
• Report/analysis of the Los Angeles and Miami conferences
• Movie trailer of the Los Angeles conference