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 Here's news of a special offer for readers of Business Two Zero. I've always supported SOMESSO events since speaking at their first one in Zurich back in 2008. SOMESSO stands for social media espresso - it's a strong, fast hit of social media for the corporate world. Every event so far has had top notch speakers and impressive companies and practitioners in the audience, resulting in some great discussions and conversations. Their next event is in London next week on Thursday, March 18, organized in conjunction with my friends at Headshift (now part of the Dachis Group). This one is positioned as a one day Social Business Summit, and even the title will spark some discussion. Jeff Dachis will speak on how far we've come, and the impact of social tools in business to date. My friend JP Rangaswami will then talk about where we are going, and how the socially-calibrated business of the future might operate. The rest of the day will involve more discussion on where we might be headed, along with case studies on use of social media for collaboration internally, externally for marketing, support and connecting to the ecosystem. ...
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 Last Wednesday evening, 3rd March, London Wiki Wednesdays got rebooted for 2010 and beyond, with a varied selection of great 5 minute presentations and me doing MC duty as usual. We were hosted by Alek Lotoczko and our friends at NYK. Actually, it felt like the old days. As you can see from our wiki, there was a bit of a hiatus between November 2008 and October 2009 and then to this month, excluding several informal meetings down the pub. The key issue has been the time and energy it takes to get venues and sponsors (anyone interested, please see me afterwards). However, we've decided to get things moving with a full meeting every two months (on the first Wednesday of the month) with informal meetings in between. During my intro the group agreed to broaden the topic out from just wiki related projects, to wiki plus all things enterprise 2.0 - social media tools applied to business. We will, however, retain our London Wiki Wednesday branding, rather than changing to 2.0 Tuesdays or some such. Somewhere in the handovers I also mentioned the 2.0 Adoption Council and 2.0 Adoption Community. On the night ...
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 There are changes underway across the worlds of social media marketing, social media applied inside business (what some people would call enterprise 2.0) and where these tools connect (or not) to the business processes in ( Cloud based) CRM and ERP systems. Products like Salesforce are adding Chatter, and Twitter connectivity. Enterprise 2.0 tools that started as wikis or forums are adding micro-blogging along with more and more social functionality. Content Management Systems are adding or acquiring a social dimension. Marketing departments are struggling with, or looking for tools to help with, brand reputation monitoring and management. One significant segment of this change just got much clearer with Altimeter Group's R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang producing Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. R told the Enterprise Irregulars earlier this morning that this report is the culmination of 6 months of research, collaboration, hours of white boarding, phone calls, and skype calls in the early morning and on weekends working with an ecosystem of 42 partners. The document identifies 18 use cases for Social ...
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 A few things came together for me this week around the Cloud term. I spent time with one of my best customers discussing online accounting, what we should do to improve t he product we represent in the UK, and how we should position to beat the incumbent in the small business market, Sage. But the first thing that Philip Woodgate told us was how useful the Cloud term is for the clients and business people he deals with. These are business from small, to medium to International where he struggled explaining SaaS 3 or 4 years ago when he started promoting the concept. He thinks the Cloud term makes it much easier to "get" for the average business. The next thing was this post on ReadWriteCloud with Wordpress.com founder Mat Mullenweg suggesting the Cloud is marketing speak. Mat was explaining how a recent outage in their service occurred. Alex William's wrote in the article: "The cloud gets blamed for almost any online outage these days. It used to be that we'd just say the service went down and there was a failure at the host or the data center. Sure enough, the Wordpress.com outage is not a cloud disaster. Instead, .. ...
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I'm a Twitter fan from the early days (which is only about 3 years - streuth!). For me it's a key source of trusted information, a communication mechanism, and an important way for me to extend my various, overlapping networks of interest ( amongst several other things). In recent weeks I've seen tweets from people worrying about those that have " social media guru" in their Twitter bio (there are a lot of them about). The other morning I was followed by someone new. A great tool called Topify sends me an email with their profile, details of how many people they follow and the number who follow them, their bio, links and their last few tweets so that you can make a quick decision on who they are and whether you want to follow back. This guy had " thought leader" in his bio. I immediately wondered to the twitterverse whether this was as bad or worse than having the guru thing in your bio. Here's a selection of some of the responses from the wonderful people who follow me: 
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 Last Thursday in Durham FutureStory launched as part of the North East Economic Forum. I've already blogged about why I've got involved in this joint initiative between Lucy Parker's Talent and Enterprise Taskforce and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). The BIS press release on the day started like this: "Business leaders in the North East today (on Feb 18) urged young people to proactively research local industries so they can rise to the challenge of getting a job in tomorrow’s global economy. In return they pledged to help local schools and colleges play an active role in plotting the North East’s economic future."
The NEEF annual conference was a fitting forum for promoting this new initiative. Adam Boulton of Sky News introduced a series of speakers focusing on the regeneration of the region which has moved from its industrial heritage of mining and steel to housing the UK's largest car exporter, the National Centre for Excellence in Plastics, and a whole host of low carbon initiatives. During the day we heard about huge off shore wind farms, a national training centre for Green Collar Workers that is in the process ...
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Way back in August 2006 a teacher called Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, USA created an 8 minute PowerPoint presentation with some music. It aimed to highlight the rate of change of the world we live in, and remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others. I blogged about it November 2006. It went "viral" through bloggers and YouTube so that by June 2007 it had been seen by 5 million people online. As of today, versions of it have been seen by more than 20 million people. Here's version 2.0 from June 2007:
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 This will be the first in a continuing sequence of posts here on BTZ about FutureStory, a government initiative from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) which connects businesses to schools to help make young people wake up to the opportunities, rather than the threats, of globalization. Caroline Teunissen called me and Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, and a number of other interested bloggers in to help promote the topic. Caroline introduced me to Lucy Parker, head of Talent and Enterprise Taskforce, who is spearheading the initiative in conjunction with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). So why did I think this is important? Why did I want to get involved? As we progress in to the 21st century, we live at a time of astonishing extremes and rapid change. Globalisation, climate change, the explosion of advanced technologies and what some would call a broken education system here in the West have come together to make a perfect storm of complexity. FutureStory directly addresses two of these components. Globalization is a fact of life to be dealt with. Although we hear many stories of losing . ...
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 A few weeks ago, as part of Social Media Week, Alan Patrick and I ran the very well received Social Media in Enterprise event (which we'll run again!). It provided 8 different perspectives on collaboration in the enterprise using the new tools. Amongst the many issues raised in a night of some great discussion and excellent follow up blog posts, I see two key themes: - A dichotomy between the social media practitioners, like Adriana Lukas, who think the only way to make this stuff work is a bottom up, guerrilla warfare style approach, versus those of us (including me) who see that way can be perfectly effective, but believe a top down, old fashioned approach to implementation with senior executive sponsorship can work just as well or better.
- The fact that we all talked about organizational hierarchy and culture as a major factor, and that these tools subvert the "natural" command and control management structures that most big corporations have, and which many of our newer companies grow up to adopt. The new tools are overlaying a network centric communication approach, which is beginning to flatten the organization and ...
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