New Social Network Roadmap Service Offer at the Social Networking Conference

On January 21, I will debut a new workshop at the Social Networking Conference, “Successful Social Networking Projects in the Enterprise.” It will enable participants to approach enterprise social networks from a much more strategic viewpoint than most do now. They will learn to develop a rich understanding of the Web  2.0 ecosystem, how to determine stakesholders’ needs and how to engage them. This will prepare them to design within the ecosystem. Here I’ll share a few thoughts about how I created the workshop.

Most enterprise social network initiatives are experimental, which is typical during the early stage of adoption. Executives do not know how applicable a disruption like social networks will be, so they make measured bets. Therefore, the workshop will help participants to think more globally and to adopt an ecosystem mindset as a means to achieve a superior result.  It has three sessions:

1. Key Concepts of Enterprise Social Networks presents the ecosystem along with case studies for major brands like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Stakeholders (i.e. customers, shareholders, employees, partners…) of enterprise social networks are increasingly present in major brands, so social network organizers and designers need to design to interoperate.
2. Business Cases and Solutions takes a survey of white label and big brand business cases to explain some of social networks’ key value drivers and how the drive value.  We also present the vendor universe and give guidance for selecting partners.
3. A Pragmatic Approach to Enterprise Innovation begins by discussing emerging good practices for launching and managing enterprise social networks. The focus is on using the Social Network Roadmap to determine the need for and to launch an enterprise social network.

Concluding Points

• You will note that the first part of the workshop is based on understanding the ecosystem and why it must be the context for design for interaction. Most experimental social network projects are self-focused, which is why they enjoy limited success.
• Having an ecosystem mindset enables us to think about “vendors” and partners from a completely different viewpoint.
• The third part is a “roadmap lite” which is designed to be actionable and to enable participants to manage risk.
• Read the workshop’s news release.
• Update: read the workshop recap here.