Just got back from Las Vegas and the Community 2.0 conference. It was one of my favorite types of conferences - big enough to get exposed to new people and ideas but small enough to get to know people, have great conversations, and not get totally overwhelmed.
I had a few agendas; One - to meet some people in person that I had gotten to know either in Twitterville or the Blogosphere. Two - to recruit some people who were willing to give me their community ramp stats so that I can build a model that can be used to simulate community growth based on the effort, content, etc. that is injected...but I need real data to make sure my model has the right assumptions in it. Three - I wanted to hear more stories from companies who were in the middle of the storm. On all fronts - I got more than I expected out of the event.
I got to meet Shel Israel who told some wonderful stories about his global neighbourhoods work with SAP. I met Jake McKee who told the Lego Mindstorm story from his perspective as the community manager. I had a great chat with Sean O'Driscoll who is having a lot of fun helping companies figure out their own community strategies. I had a very interesting dinner with Greg Schneider and John Kembel from HiveLive - John has a product design/IDEO background and great perspective on the space. Got to have a great conversation over lunch with Dan Neely from Networked Insights. Last night, Mike Walsh from Leverage Software, Dawn Lacallade from Dell, and Rawn Shah from IBM had a great dinner and discussion. In between all of that I talked to some community managers from WebEx, United Airlines, Zappos, Kawanis Club, RSA Conference, SAP, GlobalSpec, Wells Fargo, Verisgn, and Reed Elsevier.
Highlights for me:
- The people that are in this space right now are incredibly interesting, passionate, and fun. Many people commented that they hope this aspect doesn't change as the market grows.
- While there is a lot of chatter, like my recent forecast confirmed, enterprise communities are happening in all kinds of organizations to address a number of different challenges.
- Perhaps the most revealing moment of the conference was when two different Microsoft people stood up, one to say how community focused his group was while another to say how not community focused her group was but how much she wanted to get there.
- Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh gave a keynote about community and values as Zappos and how that is their brand and they use it to guide all of their decisions. For me, the vision that he is executing on is part of the reason I am so passionate about this space. I don't believe we need to compromise and resign ourselves to corporations who treat their employees and customers like widgets with the excuse of expense or distraction. Tony is showing that you can do the right thing (and some would call it the obvious thing) and build an incredibly successful business doing it.
- Listening to Tony Hsieh and Shel Israel reinforced something I have been thinking for a while which is that storytelling is the most effective way to transfer knowledge - regardless of the topic or context. Stats, theories, and details are important backup but it is the stories that people remember and it is stories that inspire.
While those are the highlights there were also many other wonderful presentations and I caught up with many friends - well worth the long flight and dry desert air (I swear I don't ever remember being so dehydrated) More post-conference content is posted at the Community 2.0 Blog
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