By Ben Haber
Contributed by Palmer Reuther
This is the second part of a two-part series focusing on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The first part can be seen here.
Despite the scourge of rain that has descended on Massachusetts in the last two weeks, a healthy number of folks made their way to the Westin Hotel at the Waterfront in Boston for Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Described by the organizers as a culmination of the “who’s who of the people defining, strategizing and putting Enterprise 2.0 into practice today,” the conference lived up to its billing as a top tier venue for understanding the tangible components of new workplace technologies.
What is Enterprise 2.0?
“Technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.”
The vibe at the show reflected a new generation of companies like SocialText, Yakabod and Joyent that look at the current state of enterprise technologies as a hindrance to workforce productivity. But they’re not willing to sit on the sidelines and be constrained by traditional tech tools; they’ve taken steps to leverage new tools as the foundation for a new set of high impact, high productivity technologies for today’s businesses. As Yakabod puts it, “In search of more meaningful work, [the company] decided to shake up the atrophied world of enterprise software—specifically, the catchall category labeled “knowledge management.” Socialtext and Yakabod are all about speed. SocialText’s technology enables faster collaboration, decision making and on the fly course corrections while Yakabod is all about making people more productive at their jobs.
There were a number of other companies exhibiting with similar visions about what’s next in the enterprise. It will be interesting to follow these organizations to see what meaningful technologies bubble to the surface and those that wither against Goliath – the legacy systems.
June 25th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
A friend chuckled to me the other day that ads on Facebook were going for 60 cent CPM’s. He hadn’t heard that they were actually going for
far lower than that in some cases.
Yes, Facebook continues to struggle with providing value and ROI with ad sales on the site; even though they are reaching some of the right folks with targeted ads.
However, as I’ve noted in some recent entries on Channeling Media and here, they are making very steady progress in appealing to marketers on other fronts. Fan and brand pages, check. Vanity URL’s, check.
Yesterday, Facebook took another huge step in appealing to marketers by bringing live video and real-time chat features to its 200 million+ users. To do so, it is launching the Facebook Live Stream Box: a feature that any Website or developer can use to enable Facebook users to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they watch live streaming events and video. For the time being, the most important place where it can be used? On Facebook.
Ustream which has teamed up in the past with Facebook to support streaming presentations, including a series of recent Jonas Brothers Webcasts (example above) on their Facebook Fan Page, is the first developer to offer (the extension of) their services to artists and brands under this new feature.
They’ll likely have people lining-up to take advantage of it, if the Jonas Brothers trial can be replicated in any way. According to Facebook, the live following of the Jonas brothers Webcasts led to 1.5 million updates – averaging 23,000 posts per minute – and more than 100,000 viewers.
In fact, given the demand they expect and the limited customized players they can build / support at once, Ustream has created an application process for brands and artists. Those that are chosen will have the options of: 1) A free ad-supported version – Partners Only 2) A white-label version, not supported by ads, that will cost $15,000 to develop.
While this may sound like a lot at first (especially for some artists), it’s really a small price for marketers that are used to spending 10’s of millions of dollars on television advertising. Despite some misperceptions, the highly sought after teen to twenty demographic is still watching a lot of TV, and tapping new strategies to reach them within this hybrid of a social network-based, TV experience will continue to grow in importance.
As for Facebook. It has only been able to turn analog dollars into digital dimes to date, but post-analog riches could lie ahead, if this is a sign of things to come.
A variation of this post first appeared on Channeling Media at FastCompany.com
June 25th, 2009
