I am just about to renew my first year’s subscription to the Adobe Connect web conferencing platform. Adobe Connect is a competitor to Web Ex built on Flash, which is already installed in 97% of browsers. I’ve been using the platform for a year now and find it to be a very cost effective way to do web presentations and training. I have the plan aimed at small business which costs $500 per year. For my renewal, Adobe has upped the number of people I can host in a conference from 15 to 150. I have Adobe Connect linked to a discounted audio conferencing system from Premier Conferencing. It is very simple to schedule a meeting on the platform. All I need to so is fill in a form and the system generates an email to the participants with the log in and call in information.

The platform is elegant and simple to use. It has modules that allow you to capture video from your camera so you can bee seen by a group; I can share any application on my mac; chat with participants; so simple polls.

I use Adobe Connect a couple of times a month to do presentations and demos and people on other end really seem to like it. It has been a great investment for me.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/productinfo/features/

Tim O’Reilly is always interesting and so insightful. I have written up some notes from an interview that he did at web 2.0 in Germany:

http://uk.intruders.tv/Web-2-0-Expo-Berlin-Fireside-chat-with-Tim-O-Reilly_a242.html
In this interview and in recent posts about the social graph, Tim O’Reilly really clarifies what is at the heart of successful web 2.0 applications:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/opensocial_social_mashups.html
#It’s the data, stupid. (Formerly “Data is the Intel Inside”)

This means applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

# Small pieces loosely joined

This means aggregating relevant data from its source rather than requiring the data to be moved from one application to another.

I agree with Tim that these are the two key principles of any successful web application and they are at the heart of our new web app for conferences: Swift.

Here are my notes:
“The best 2.0 companies are collecting really assets in data: flickr, del.icio.us, and cddb. Find new areas where there is unexploited data. Facebook tapped into building the social graph as a new domain asset.

Once you have a really large data set, people are not going to want to start over. That is where you have your advantages.

The point is to put me the user back at the center: I don’t want to see their tweets; I want to see their photos and with somebody else I want to see where they are right now.

We have all of these great datasources and they are not interoperable yet.

What is really has the potential to change things is when somebody says you are in charge of your data and you are able to delegate and say my family tree is at genie.com; my books are at amazon; and use that data please.

I’m excited about the new user interface metaphors in the iPhone.

I gave a talk to Sun’s marketing group yesterday on lead generation with web 2.0. Here is the gist of it:

In the web 2.0 world where applications are built around individuals, marketing is done one-to-one as people share information with one another or find it through aggregators, referrals, and search. Groups are out. Email blasts are out. Traditional direct marketing is out. Web 2.0 social tools are organized around individuals and what Stowe Boyd calls their “networked self-expression.”

With the publishing tools in blogs, podcasting, and Facebook, you don’t need to belong to groups to share.

So how then do you reach and influence people?

You must tap their existing networks by creating information they need and want to share. Find the influencers and hubs and integrate into their networks.

For the presentation, I shared a couple of screen shots of Swift for Facebook, our application that enables sharing of information and intention at conferences and events. With Swift for Facebook, you are able to share events you are attending and your intentions for them. When you add an event or update your status in Swift, a notification is sent to your Facebook mini-feed. You can share your events and conferences with your friends and with other attending a conference.

(We’ll be previewing Swift for Facebook later this week so if you want to be on our list of early testers, please email me kathleenceo at gmail.com.)

Through the peer to peer network around an event, a new network of highly qualified people is convened.

Podcasting can be another means to generate leads with web 2.0 technology. We have had great success with building a highly qualified audience for our Negotiating Tip of the Week podcast series. To date, we have had over 1.2 million downloads are we are now averaging about 3,000 downloads a day.

Now that we have built this base, we are doing dynamic ad insertion to promote a newsletter for the Harvard Program on Negotiation. You can listen to the ad by Bill Ury by going to Negotiating Tip of the Week on iTunes and sampling any one of the podcasts. The ad is dynamically inserted into the podcast without any manipulation of the underlying MP3 file. With podcasting you can very efficiently create high quality media to serve niche audiences. And with ad insertion you can build specific calls to action within that media.

The next phase of the Swift platform will bring podcasting and Facebook networking together. With Swift you can record your meetings in digital media, publish them to Swift as podcasts, dynamically insert messages into them and use Facebook to network around this media.

I closed with a short discussion of blogging and lead generation. Blogging is another way to build a niche audience that can be tapped for leads. I am also an advocate of creating thought leadership blogs with multiple authors on expert topics. This has been done very successfully by Francois Gossieaux and Hylton Joliffe for the Fast Forward Blog. Francois and Hylton assembled a really smart group of bloggers writing on the topics of enterprise search and new enterprise technologies. Bloggers cross published in the Fast Forward blog and on their own blogs. (See this post from Bill Ives as an example.)

Web 2.0 tools have the promise to greatly reduce the cost of B2B business development. At yesterday’s meeting at Sun about half of the group had Facebook pages and many were on Linked In. We will certainly see more and more tools that serve this function in the coming year.

Bill Ives reports that Serena Software corporation has adopted Facebook as its Intranet platform:

René explained that the firm is just over 800 employees but is still globally based (operations in 18 countries) with 35% of their employees working virtually. They are going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition. They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.

Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook, which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to documents stored securely behind the firewall. Access is just as secure as any other method. Serena employees go to specific people to get relevant information. For example, René and his staff provide press clippings and the HR people provide links to benefits information. In each case you learn about the people providing the information through their Facebook profiles, and not simply the content, itself.

Serena also has public Facebook groups to connect with customers and the broader marketplace. René said that some of his customer conversations have now moved away from email. Clients such as Stewart Cohen at Arbitron and Rajiv Amar at Intuit connect with René and his colleagues through Facebook. René is also one of my Facebook friends and I have noticed that he is usually at the top of the recently updated profile list so I can easily see what he is currently doing.

Serena has found that Facebook has also helped them with recruiting. People send their resumes through Facebook and prospective employees relate their use of the same networking tool that they use in their personal lives. Employee morale has also increased, as well as employee retention, as the whole firm is better connected. A few years ago, many people thought that blogs and business did not go together. We have seen that perception change dramatically. I wonder if the same will be soon said for Facebook and other social networking tools. Thanks to Serena for proving us with an example.

Note the highlighted passage where documents are now accessed securely from Facebook and people are the conduit for information. I think this is a bold move and will be interested to see if it is picked up by other organizations.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the initiative announced last week by Google — Open Social — a system that allows application developers to create applications that work across all of the social networks.

This means that our new service for managing conferences –– Swift (in development) –– can be integrated into any social network using the Google API. This is good for us but also good for users in that your conference information can be shared across social networks.

And as Devin writes on his Quantum Creative blog, Google has developed a new Social Network in partnership with Carnegie Mellon, called SocialStream. SocialStream allows users to “seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”

SocialStream is a research project and it is worth reading about the research and user studies done by the team to put it together. Here is a good articulation of what people need in terms of a social networking service:

* To access information with little effort
* The ability to communicate with all contacts, regardless of the sites or services they use
* To keep informed about someone through updates about their recent activity
* To have someone perform a task on someone else’s behalf
* To feel in control of what they are doing and their information
* To not have to go through redundant steps for routine tasks
* To have easy and understandable sharing

To get a good feeling for how SocialStream works, you need to download the demo movie.

Andrew McAfee at HBS has a very good article in his blog on how social networking can strengthen weak ties among knowledge workers in networks. He writes:

Consider the prototypical knowledge worker inside a large, geographically distributed organization (all of what follows also applies for smaller and more centralized organizations, but probably to a lesser extent). She has a relatively small group of close collaborators; these are people with whom she has strong professional ties. Beyond this group, there’s also a set that includes people she with worked on a project with in the past, coworkers who she interacts with periodically, colleagues she knows via an introduction, and the many other varieties of ‘professional acquaintance.’ In Granovetter’s language, she has weak ties to these people.

Beyond this group there’s a still-larger set of fellow employees who could be valuable to our prototypical knowledge worker if only she knew about them. These are people who could keep her from re-inventing the wheel, answer one of her pressing questions, point her to exactly the right resource, tell her about a really good vendor, consultant, or other external partner, let her know that they were working on a similar problem and had made some encouraging progress, or do any of the other scores of good things that come from a well-functioning tie. By the same token, if our focal worker is a person of good will, there are many other people in the company she could help if her existence, work experiences, and abilities were more widely known.

Weak ties are important because they enable people to reach beyond their intimate circles of friends and co-workers to find people and information. Weak ties are differentiated from strong ties which are among people with long-term, sustained interaction.

In his blog article, McAfee goes on to explain how weak ties are strengthened through social networking:

As I wrote earlier, enterprise social networking software lets our prototypical knowledge worker stay in touch with a large network of colleagues, allowing her to keep up to date with that they’re doing, working on, and producing. It also lets her tell this network what she’s up to.

This might sound like an only marginally useful exercise, but it can in fact be quite powerful because it’s a quick and easy way to form connections and make associations that might not ever occur otherwise. I saw this firsthand a couple days ago when one of my Facebook friends told his network via his status message that he was going to accompany a foreign head of state to a high-level meeting on technology issues. Because I was only weakly tied to this person I had no idea that he was that well connected or interested in public policy. But as a result of his Facebook update, which took him about ten seconds to type and me one second to read, I now know who to reach out to should I ever want to dive into European IT issues, or desire an invitation to the Elysee Palace wink. SNS lets its users build bridges to new human networks, and to let non-redundant information emerge.

Facebook currently lets members ask their network a question, then collects their answers on one globally-visible page. I imagine that successful enterprise Facebook equivalents will have much more advanced tools to allow members to actively exploit their networks by asking them for assistance, pumping them for information, etc. I also imagine that they’ll let users post answers to their most frequently-asked questions, then simply point seekers to this resource. The facts that Facebook has opened its platform to outside applications, and that a consortium of social media providers anchored by Google and MySpace has just announced a common specification for developers, will no doubt hasten the arrival of robust enterprise SNS.

I think this is an extremely important insight into the value of social networking for knowledge workers and why everybody should be looking at joining a social network (Facebook now and more specialized networks that emerge out of the Google Open Social Initiative later). My own experience with Facebook and Linked In is that they are opportunistic tools. While I do have good friends on Facebook, I really use it to manage my weak ties — loosely track the interests and activities of a network of people with whom I have some kind of relationship — I met them at a meeting or conference — but with whom I am not going to be in regular phone or email contact. When I need something beyond my network of strong ties (like an introduction to the people who run SXSW), I turn to my social networks. And I have been very successful at exploiting the weak ties in my network.

In his blog article, Andrew talks about how other enterprise 2.0 technologies can be used to support other types of relationships, but I think the weak tie argument is extremely cogent and compelling.