Happy New Year from Stormy Shores

Dear Friends, Partners and Customers and yes, oh my dear extended social network,

as we’re reaching the end of 2011 I wanted to thank you all for your business and your inspiration.

2011 was a busy year for me – more coaching and training gigs than in past years, and a constant stream of consulting projects. I am still focused on helping companies (and the people inside them) grapple with the implications and challenges of Enterprise 2.0. Now, Social business means challenges and tasks in helping with the integration of technologies and platforms, but also – and dare I say more importantly – social business needs efficient implementation work to reach its goals. Things like widespread adoption, continuous business process- integrated and day-to-day use don’t come as naturally as we might have expected in the past. So this has taken much focus in 2011 and I am excited to continue this journey in the new year.

So as I’m grateful for all the projects underway and finished, lessons learned and wonderful stuff experienced I thank you for all the past year. I look forward to working with you in 2012 and wish you, your teams and your families a very happy and healthy new year.

Martin _ frogpond

CC Image by Joe Kovacs, who has much nicer images of Basel than mine – the sky’s pretty much the same anyway ;)

+connections

We’re living in interesting times, huh? Stressful they are, but mostly rewarding …

written 5 minutes before hopping under the shower, then the car, then the commute, then the scheduled social circle of da day work meeting ;)

GSJam11 (and prototyping very quickly)

Today I am jamming at the local Global Service Jam event in Böblingen, and blogging on a freshly-cooked temporary prototype blog platform. If you’re curious check out the site superherofinance (on the road to a better world, sometimes rolling with The Superbus) – already with a mission statement page and an initial post on the prototyping process that’s currently on the roll …

Actually this sounds more like a business model innovation design post, huh? You’re right but the prototyping method is dear to my heart and pretty close to recent real life consulting engagements of mine …

Observations

Is it ironic that while I am blogging less in here (due to heaps of non-observable or -bloggable client work) I am also installing visitor-observing software? All-friendly open-source Piwik of course, and only because I am such a nosy inquiring type ;)

Upcoming: Social Business Jam …

it’s the thing to (virtually) attend the next three days – and it starts tonight. Guess who’s on the list of guests …

It will be interesting to see which one’s of the following topics will gather most interest and action:

  • Building the Social Business of the Future
  • Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption
  • Using Social to Understand and Engage with Customers
  • What does Social mean for IT?
  • Identifying Risks and Establishing Governance

Indeed these are the pre-planned forums where people are invited to join, discuss and contribute – I will participate mainly in the strategy tracks as I call them (“Building the Social Business of the Future” and “Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption”) hoping to discuss ideas, arenas of possible uses etc.

After all it’s not about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and the Social Web by themselves but about corporate uses of it all, where the usage can regularly span corporate boundaries (even when many things are happening behind some sort of firewall it must not stop there).

So timely this Social Jam is well, huh? Well, it’s probably quite an example of using social software for innovation and idea management across traditional boundaries (who is allowed to participate, who can manage to be there, etc.), that allows wide participation (that said – it starts at 10 AM EST, which is about 4 pm my time, hence thankfully not as early as for people on the West Coast …).

Blogging Lotusphere

Even when the press room at the Dolphin is getting emptier now there’s been a lot of blogging action going on during Lotusphere. I feel the need to collect some of the best parts in here. Partly this is for me so that I can find the interesting posts easily later on (yes, one could use the blogsearch thing), but I assume that others will find this useful as well. Worthwhile blogging takes time and is also quite an effort, but then blog posts they stay longer than the gazillion tweets that we’ve had in the past days. So let’s get some limelight and drum-banging.

There’s of course the german Lotus team, ie. Stefan Pfeiffer with german language notes (see eg. OGS: Activity Streams, Mobility und Social everywhere) and the not-so-affiliated folks (Volker Weber, Alexander Kluge, die Noteshexe und mehr …).

Some of the prolific bloggers I had the pleasure to (re-)meet are Bill Ives from Portals and KM, Falk Hedemann from german magazine t3n (german blogging hence, interesting report on the RIM PlayBook), Luis Benitez and my irregular friends from the enterprise 2.0 sphere (Luis Suarez, Susan Scrupski, Bertrand Duperrin, Rawn Shah, Larry Hawes, Vinnie Mirchandani …) and other spheres (James aka Monkchips to start, I am curious to see what he’s writing, always insightful commenter on Twitter he is, plus the always knowledgeable Alex Williams from ReadWriteWeb Enterprise too – how can one person do such good live-blogging?).

I haven’t met Turbotodd so far (and it’s getting late, yes) but one can’t have everything, no?  But I have shook hands with Scott Treggiari, who’s the last press/analyst/blogger with me in the press room on Wednesday evening. More to meet at tonight’s party – an appointment with Harry Potter it is.

ps. I will update this blog post with links to the posts as they come in (and I come around reading them, tomorrows a time of travel.