This is just a really quick wrap of my expe­ri­ence at the Enter­prise 2.0 Con­fer­ence the past four days. I’ve still got a cou­ple of ses­sion posts in the pipeline. I’ll com­plete them in the next few days.

This sum­mary isn’t com­pre­hen­sive nor all inclu­sive, just some bul­let points:

  • the CIA guys were, no ques­tion, the rock stars of the con­fer­ence and read my blog! I met and talked to two real-​​life CIA ana­lysts — Don Burke and Sean Den­nehy are about the best walk­ing ad the intel com­mu­nity could have
  • there are real organ­i­sa­tions out there hav­ing real suc­cess with Enter­prise 2.0 imple­men­ta­tions. It can be scary but well man­aged risk mit­i­ga­tion goes a long way — Wachovia, Lock­heed Mar­tin, Pfizer, the CIA, Ser­ena and many, many oth­ers judg­ing from the range of com­pa­nies I saw rep­re­sented on people’s name badges
  • softly, softly may not be the answer for your organ­i­sa­tion. Both Pete Fields (my #2 super­star for the con­fer­ence — see his talk here) from Wachovia and the Lock­heed Mar­tin guys encour­age momen­tum and the occa­sional grand plan
  • there is an active and engaged com­mu­nity out there who want to do this stuff in their organ­i­sa­tions or are keen to be a part of organ­i­sa­tions that do. Hall­way buzz and will­ing­ness to chal­lenge and ask ques­tions in ses­sions were both fea­tures of the con­fer­ence. There really was a con­ver­sa­tion going on the whole time
  • video and audio are avail­able on the Con­fer­ence Com­mu­nity site
  • slides and other col­lat­eral are mostly in the Ses­sion Zone. It’s a lit­tle hard to work your way through, but per­se­vere for the gems that are there
  • the media are inter­ested in what’s going on, and not just to stir up worry. There are good news sto­ries to be told
  • the backchan­nel, sup­plied by Meebo (and on Twit­ter) was amaz­ing. They should have used Tan­gler — it would have been ideal
  • some­one please hire Isabelle Lopez as a comms con­sul­tant for their busi­ness. The num­ber of peo­ple I spoke to who were affected by speak­ing with her (she was another attendee) was astound­ing. She is a ther­monu­clear device in a 5-​​foot noth­ing, Québé­coise body

I really learnt a lot at the con­fer­ence, it was money well spent.

On top of all the learn­ing, per­haps more fun, was hav­ing the chance to meet for the first time, or catch up with an amaz­ing num­ber of peo­ple. We social tool users pro­fess to be able to form real, mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships through these media (and I truly believe we can). That said, the chance to meet some­one in real life and share a con­ver­sa­tion, a meal or a cof­fee with them is just an extra notch on the dial, tak­ing the expe­ri­ence to 11!

Every­one I met was engag­ing, engaged and pas­sion­ate. As a result, I feel very ener­gised, despite being very tired from 3½ days of 7:30AM-8:30PM conference.

It would take way too much space to list them all by full name, so in the inter­est of brevity, I’ve put their their Twit­ter han­dles below. Click through and fol­low them if you feel like engag­ing with some­one inter­est­ing. Men­tion my name.

mas­ter­mark, jen­robin­son, rhappe, doug­cor­nelius, pis­ta­chio, steve­mann, dahowlett, minass­ian, sam­lawrence, kmhob­bie, stowe­boyd, chuckstar76, roberthom­burg, georgedear­ing, elsua, absolute­sub­zero, dt, oliv­er­marks, gia­lyons, sweettt, fry­mas­ter, chris­bro­gan, mar­ket­ing­profs, 1938media, achit­wood, mkrigs­man, ben­rapin, bri­an­per­son, van­der­wal, thought­farmer, mag­giefox, jevon, itsin­sider, skem­s­ley, lee­white, astrout, roe­bot, lee­bryant, dhinch­cliffe, amcafee, jack­vin­son, ross, info­vark, isatruc, tlg, pas­calveilleux, scottmonty, steve­g­arfield, rogue­duck, lau­ren­cooney

If I met you and left you off, or don’t have your Twit­ter han­dle, I apol­o­gise. Ping me in the com­ments and we can connect.

If you are inter­ested in Enter­prise 2.0 in any way, I absolutely rec­om­mend you get your­self to Boston next June. Hope­fully, we’ll have an Aus­tralian con­tin­gent next time.