Social Tools for Business Use

Today and tomorrow I'm attending a conference 'Social tools for Business Use: Web 2.0'. The speakers today included many ground breaking figures who've worked and continue to work to use on-line technologies and approaches innovatively in their field. These include Euan Semple who developed the use of social tools internally in the BBC and Lee Bryant who co-founded Headshift who work with Demos, Involve, the Power Enquiry and Patient Opinion among others.

There was much of interest, and I'll blog more fully on the individual speakers tomorrow. The discussion included a good balance of the practical (particular tools, specific approaches), the theoretical/big picture (what is web/enterprise/management 2.0) and case studies (that IBM are having business meeting in Second Life was the least impressive thing I learnt about the social tools they're using to work together).

Perhaps one problem I've had so far is around scaling. Most of the presentations came from people working for corporates and the message that social tools 'are those which unlike traditional tools improve as more people use them' was strong. I was struggling at times to translate this back to the view from an SME. Clearly IBM need a good tool which tells you who you're video conferencing with in any given meeting, what they look like and what time zone they're in with real time translation from English to Japanese but I can just shout at my collegues if I need their attention. Badgering each speaker about it in the Q&A helped broaden the discussion out of the corporate sector.

For more detail on the individual speakers check Roo Reynolds, he's a 'Metaverse Evangelist' at IBM, which if nothing else is a very cool job title. He gave a talk about virtual worlds, I was quite taken with it but was brought sharply to earth when I got home logged onto to Second Life thinking I could go and check out the IBM innovation center and the viewer promptly ate all my system resources and (briefly) killed my laptop. He's also live blogging from the conference.

More tomorrow...

Comments

[Euan]

Just to clarify my responsibility was only for internal use of social tools - others were responsible for our online presence.

[ben wild]

Thanks pointing that out Euan, I've corrected the post.