Email Strengths:

• Ubiquity - Everyone has email access, and almost everyone can and does use it (even my Mom)
• Simplicity - Whatever tool you use, you have come to a level of competency  that allows you to send an email quickly without too much thought about the mechanics

Email Weakness:

• “Email is where information goes to die” - Have you ever tried to follow a long thread of emails between multiple people? Nuf said.

Wiki Strengths:

• Centrality - The information resides in one place, so there is no confusion about the “latest” information

Wiki Weakness:

• Not Ubituitious - Most people have never heard of wikis, much less have access to one.

If you look at it, the strength of each could counter-balance the weakness of the other, if we could find a way to combine the two.

A Suggestion for Google (or whoever…)

Add functionality to Gmail that will automatically direct the contents of an email, that is addressed to 2 or more people, into a Google Doc or Google Page, and then add the link to the email. So when the recipient gets the email, instead of the dreaded “Reply All”, they have a single click to edit the central doc which then automatically sends a “Notify All” response.

(Note to my Twitter followers: This is not the big plan in the works, just an idea I had this morning.)

Sounds simple. Why isn’t it?

According to the RNIA, it is because we do not have a viable “Relationship Economy”. I recently discovered the Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA), liked what I saw and joined the association.

Here is a slide deck I put together to better explain RNIA and its core concepts.

• Duke Thinking Online assesses the event positively, particularly liked the SaaS and Social Media sessions.
• Taylor Barr comments on Bob Young’s (Red Hat and Lulu.com founder) presentation.
• Online Community Strategist provides notes from the Corporate Blogging session.

Following my initial enthusiasm, I quickly became underwhelmed by the old-school atmosphere of the event. Every session, with the exception of the opening keynotes, were panel discussions, considered by many to be one of the weakest presentation formats. There was little opportunity for the “audience” to participate. The one exception was Jim Tobin using Twitter during his session to field questions. Yes, the other sessions  did take questions, but it was always just a couple of quick ones during the last 5 minutes. Not what I call engaging the audience.

Another thing that bothered me was that there was a strong theme, in the sessions I attended, toward using the internet only as a customer acquisition tool; CPC, Page views, traffic, conversion, etc. I heard almost no one talking about how online tools can also be used to keep customers and add value to the customer relationship, through things like better customer service, and communities.

And my final rant, there was no attempt (oops, my bad, there was a “networking lunch”) little opportunity for attendees to interact. Sessions were back-to-back with typically less than the scheduled 15 minutes before the next session. I would have liked to see a published attendee list, a pre-conference social space, an official conference backchannel and conference tag.

PLUS

I realize it is not like me to rant so much, but I think we have such a great opportunity to show off how this area of the country has so much to offer, and I want our local events to be excellent. And to show that I am not just sitting in the back row lobbing grenades, I would be happy to talk to the folks that put on the event and look at combining Internet Summit 2009 and BlogCarolinas next year, taking the best from both and holding a truly world class event.

I found this article as the top link on Google Finance this morning. It is a USAToday/Gannett article about how social media can be used by organizations to help employees work better together. WOW! What a concept, I didn’t see that one coming.    :-O

Some excerpts:

Social networking is going corporate.

The popular technology used by millions of people to share ideas and photos on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others is catching on at companies to improve productivity and communication among workers.

The article goes on to quote, Dan Nye of LinkedIn, Gina Bianchini of Ning, and Ross Mayfield of SocialText, among others. The primary benefits that companies can accrue from these tools, according to the article, are reduction in travel expense, which I believe is a real bottom line saving, and email reduction, which I think the jury is still out on.

But, of course, there is so much more. Over time, I think the real value organizations are going to see by making the shift to collaborative and collective systems, will be in the areas of increased employee engagement, improved employee retention, and ultimately elevated levels of customer satisfaction.

And as it just so happens, I am working on a new webinar series with Near-Time to will address these exact issues, so stayed tuned for details.

Congratulations Brian on getting this up and running.

DAY 1

Actually that would be night 1, since I didn’t arrive until 6:30 and it took an hout to get to my hotel via SuperShuttle. The one and only order of business was to make it to the TechSet party. I was able to find some friends there and have some great conversatons. Really enjoyed talking to Thomas Vanderwal and Daniela Barbosa.

DAY 2

I spent the majority of my time hanging around the Web2Open, the unconference associated with the conference. I led a conversation about Enterprise 2.0 (what else). I also ran into an old friend from business school Neal Goldman, who is here with Eluma, that has a product that he describes as del.icio.us on steriods. I plan on checking it out (unfortunately still no Mac OSX client). And for my most interesting adventure of the day: attending  Yankees game! As I was leaving the expo, I ran into Andrew Hyde and he had an extra ticket for the game, so I figured WTF. My first  (and last) trip to Yankee Stadium.  Interesting fact, the entire group that went together was only conected by Twitter.

Day 3

Still early in the day, but I did attend the keynote this morning, where Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky spoke. Tim’s main point was, if you are going to do something, do something that matters! A realy good presentation. I hope to give a better summary later. Clay talked about the fact the information overload has really been around for a long time, the problem we are really seeing now is “filter failure”. It made me think.

That’s it for now…

GoodGuide was presented at TechCrunch50 this week and selected as one of the event winners. It is an authoritative site that that provides health, safety and social responsibility information about everyday products we all use. But instead of trying to explain it all here, watch the video: