Social Networking Conference Wrap: Grand Panel Wrap

The Social Networking Conference took place June 24-26 in Beverly Hills. Between leading the pre-conference workshop on Enterprise Social Networking and leading the final panel, I scribbled these notes.

Enjoy and watch for the final report within a few days!

Christopher S. Rollyson, CSRA: Emergent Thoughts from”The Grand Panel”

I had the honor of moderating the “Grand Panel” for which we had excellent attendance, even though it was the last session after two grueling days. Conference attendees were itching to get things off their respective chests. We did a few interesting things, which I’ll go into in a minute, but first, let me introduce the panelists (links to my write-ups of their sessions):

• Travis Falstad, Head Social Networking Marketing, Electronic Arts
• Sumaya Kazi, Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems
• Ben Newton, Senior Manager Associate Communications, Wal-Mart
• David Sacks, CEO, Yammer
• Aubrey Sabala, Marketing Manager, Digg
• Clara Shih, Author, The Facebook Era
• Angela LoSasso, Social Networking Manager, Hewlett-Packard
• Marius Ciortea, Senior Project Manager Social Media, Oracle

As was designed, it was pretty unstructured, and since I was moderating, I’m going from very rough and scattered notes.

• Several panelists retweeted the importance of not being afraid to experiment, and the key is to be open and sincere. This sounds basic, but it bears repeating: people know transparency and authenticity when they see it. This is table stakes if you want engaged people and community.
• We had the predictable (and lively ,-) privacy and security discussion. Several attendees wanted to know what panelists thought about the negatives of all the sharing: it’s obvious that social information is being leveraged for criminal enterprise. The panelists explained that there were numerous safeguards and tools. Of course, the consensus was that there was absolute security for anything.
• Several questions about how you approach social networking practically, from an enterprise perspective, and panelists gave great advice. This discussion reminded me that we were in the early days; many people still have a hard time getting their heads around it, something it’s too easy to forget when you’re doing it 24x7x365 for years.
• We turned the tables after a few questions. I asked the panelists to ask questions of the audience, which was kind of fun in a crowdsourcing, community kind of way.
• More discussion on the concepts of “enterprise microblogging” and the potential of loose ties.
• There was extended discussion of how to achieve business goals while being authentic.
• One of the most lively discussions was my challenge to the audience of pitching us a solid social networking venture to score $1 million in funding. One of the most impassioned contributions was a semantic web idea.
• Finally, the concept of digital goods and what role it would play (huge).