A day long roundtable that brought together the brightest minds and industry leaders from vendors and brands to discuss the future of the social web and how it impacts business. Hosted by SAP, lead by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, and co-moderated by Kenny Lauer of GPJ...

Over the past couple of weeks I participated in two AMA webinars that aimed to help marketers come to grips with life after analog and (not coincidentally) promote the AMA's upcoming M.Planet 2009, where I'll be delivering a Digital Marketing Lab session entitled "Gaming, Virtual Worlds & Life After Second Life"...

What I really like about the consumer Web 2.0 world is the fact that it has given us an amazing experimental laboratory for new tools and communication techniques. It has produced a Cambrian explosion of start ups, tools, features and buzzwords, each of which has evolved very quickly through exposure to rapid feedback at scale. Conversely, in the enterprise tools space, users are of secondary importance and therefore there are few evolutionary pressures that can improve the generally poor quality tools and systems that IT departments force on the business. This is starting to change as more and more senior people ask why their children have access to more effective tools on their home PCs than they have access to in the office. "Why can't it just be simple like Google?" is a commonly heard plea. This is producing pressure for change, and at some point this will feed into budgetary pressures to force change in enterprise IT...

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours this evening taking part in Futurelab’s liveblogging event - marking the 1,000th day of their marketing and strategy innovation blog, and the release of their new Agency Report. The session was a great opportunity to share and build on ideas with others in the marketing industry, and reminded me of some of the sessions that work well in the online communities we build at FreshNetworks...

Helping online retailers thrive in an increasingly competitive environment, Guidance today unveiled a new white paper offering retailers insight into identifying which Web 2.0 and social technologies will keep customers coming back to their websites and spending money – and telling their friends to do the same. Titled, “Social Commerce: The Essential Guide to Combining eCommerce + Social Networking,” the paper focuses the discussion on social capabilities integrated into eCommerce sites – bringing the social to the commerce – rather than the other way around, where online retailers target consumers on social networking sites. Some of those social and Web 2.0 features include user-generated product reviews, forums through which people can talk to each other, video product demonstrations and many others...