Enterprise 2.0 Preview: Social Networking Fires Up BusinessEnterprise 2.0 Preview: Social Networking Fires Up Business

The social networking phenomenon that has swept the youth of America off its collective feet is working its way into enterprise computing. And while practitioners in the enterprise IT space are beginning to realize the phenomenon will be important for them, too, they are on a quest to figure exactly how to use it.

This is where the Enterprise 2.0 Conference June 22-25 in Boston, comes in. Broadly speaking, the conference is a vehicle designed to make sense out of the social networking landscape made up of blogs, wikis, customer e-mails, web sites, and forums as well as cloud computing, that is increasingly critical to how business is conducted.

Steve Wylie, general manager of the conference, believes U.S. business is ripe for business-oriented social networking -- provided enterprises can understand it and its rapidly-changing dynamics.

“At Enterprise 2.0 we’re exploring new technologies and how they’re being put to work,” said Wylie in an interview. “Everybody is a social media expert these days. But we’re going to look at social media and distill it.”

Wylie adds that attendees are interested in finding and developing cost-efficient techniques and programs during trying economic times. (To register for Enterprise 2.0, click here.)

Noting that at an earlier Enterprise 2.0 event participants were still trying to define social networking, Wylie said many participants are now starting to implement their own social networking-based strategies.

They can learn from others, such as Lockheed Martin, which has initiated leading edge social networking. Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee will moderate a panel on “Applying the Social Dimension to the Lockheed Martin Mission.” Participants will feature Lockheed’s Shawn Dahlen, senior media program manager and Christopher Keohane, social media program product manager at Lockheed.

The conference keynote speakers and presenters are a Who’s Who of business social networking. Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and founding partner of Blue State Digital, will be a keynote speaker. Another keynote speaker, Matthew Fraser, senior research fellow at the INSEAD Business School in France, will elaborate on his important new book, “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work, and World.”

Just one example of the growth of social networking in business is represented by IBM’s planned launch this month of a social networking site for its 100,000 partners. The site is planned to be a sort of central clearing house for the exchange of ideas and expertise and will include features enabling users to publish blogs and share wikis.

The Enterprise 2.0 June 24 keynote program will cover “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise” to be led by Irwin Lazar, vice president of Communications Research at Nemertes Research. The discussion will address how external and internal collaboration can be improved by social messaging and how its application can be leveraged in existing UC and collaboration architectures.

Other participants include: Tim Young, Founder and CEO, Socialcast; Laura Fitton, Principal, Pistachio Consulting; Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo; David Marshak, Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC2), IBM Lotus Software; Fernando Egea, Senior Director, Solution Architect, Alcatel-Lucent; Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group and Al Literati, Senior Director Engineering, Voice Technology Group, Cisco.

Participants on the panel entitled "Does Social Media and Marketing Matter?" include Peter Kim, Senior Partner, Dachis Corporation; Evelyn Varner, VP Marketing Strategy and Innovation, Fidelity Investments; Greg Matthews, Consumer Innovation, Humana; Benjamin Foster, Strategy and Content Manager, Allstate Life Insurance; and Morgan Johnston, Manager Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways.

The conference will also provide an Expo Pavilion packed with tools and solutions from more than 40 leading vendors of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In a Launch Pad event, attendees will have the opportunity to vote on the best products and ideas of the show.

To register for Enterprise 2.0, click here.

Learn about all the latest Enterprise 2.0 technologies at TechWeb’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, June 22-25. Join us (registration required).