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Is when you come back and have hundreds if not thousands of emails waiting for you in the email inbox.

As everyone has experienced before in their professional life, the world does not stop when you take a vacation and regardless of your "out of the office" reply, customers, partners and specially colleagues, keep on writing emails to you.

Let's admit it, the first day back at work is always full of great anticipation. How many emails will I have in my inbox?

Sure, Blackberries and smartphones have helped us reducing the amount of emails we need to read and respond to (although a true vacation is the one where your smartphone is used only to book a restaurant or check the local weather), nevertheless you could be sure to find hundreds of emails waiting for you when you return.

Using email filters can help, but not much. How do you go about it? Your boss first. Then customers. Then all the others where your are in the "to" field (maybe sorted by subject) and the the majority of the emails that clog your Inbox: where you are "just" copied.

This activity can take up several days depending on the number of emails and your ability to filter. Number of emails depend on your position (customer facing or internal facing etc), the number of days off you take (for Europeans in summer this is a 2-3 weeks minimum), number of projects you work on etc.

How many times have you heard a customer or partner telling you when they are back from vacation, "Let's talk next week, I need to catch up with my emails"? This is very common in my opinion.

This year I managed to take 3 weeks off and did not use my Blackberry much (well I peeked every now and then). When I returned, my Inbox was surprisingly light. I would estimate a third of the usual size.

How did this happen?

BroadVision has implemented at the end of last year a Global Social Intranet (BroadVision Connect) based on our platform Clearvale.

Internal conversations have started to move gradually from emails to (micro)blogs, forums, wikis, inside various communities or personal pages. With some fine tuning, I have been able to set up my contacts, communities, content I follow allowing to set apart the relevant information from the rest or using more technical terms, signals from noise.

This is my first Summer Vacation since Clearvale was implemented. It took me half a day to go through the emails and the rest of the day to look at feeds of relevant information being discussed on the Social Network.

This activity would normally take at least 3 days for me. Let's say I am slower than average and I take more days off than the average in my company. Even if you consider just 2 days on average (I believe it is more) for people to catch up with emails and that with a social network they can cut it down to 1 day, on large numbers (thousands of employees) this could mean quite a big productivity increase. Probably this alone could be enough to justify considering the investment in a Social Intranet.

My conclusion, going on holidays is going to be more fun from now on!

Mobile Telecoms around the world are pressured by new big players like Google and Apple who have changed forever the business model in the mobile consumer market.

There is no doubt that charging consumer for data traffic, sms and minutes, is not going to be a sustainable business for years to come.

While Apple iTunes and App store (to name the most famous) have taken away a good chunk of profit from Mobile Telecoms, there is still a huge opportunity to service their enterprise customers and deliver new generation, mobile, social, agile applications to the business segment.

BroadVision has recently announced a partnership in this direction with Softbank Telecom, a large Japanese telco player and sole distributor of iPhone in Japan (press release)

Softbank understands  these challenges and is ready to tackle the Enterprise 2.0 market. Softbank realizes also that in order to do this, they need first to embrace the new business paradigm as a company and eat their own dog food.

Can other Mobile Telecoms, in Europe in particular, do the same?

I have done a small research on how the main mobile players in Europe are embracing Enterprise 2.0 to change the way the interact with customers and employees.

Here is a summary of what I have found out. I have limited this blog to 2 countries that I think can paint a picture that is not too far from the situation with the other large population European countries.

Italy

TIM: Tim Cafe This is probably the worst example. Here TIM has tried to create a Facebook like Consumer Social Networks by creating its own consumer community. The result is at least debatable. Last time I checked there where 400 users online. What is the value of that?

Vodafone: Vodafone Lab This community is the closest thing I have found to a Social CRM among the various Telco operators in Italy. It is a mix of fun and useful tips but it is far from having any real valuable impact for Vodafone's customers. There is no real integration with the main support site where users can see their accounts and bills. It is a completely separate environment that shows that Vodafone is just playing for now with the idea of Social CRM.

Of these 2 operators, only Vodafone Italy has any meaningful presence on Social Media. The Vodafone Italy Facebook page has 500.000 fans. All others are negligible.

Twitter presence does not go beyond 3000 followers.

UK

O2: O2 Forums This is a typical set of discussion forums aimed at allowing customers to exchange informations on a variety of technical issues. With 100.000 users it is barely a drop of the total O2 subscribers. Most of all, O2 has little involvement in moderating these forums, and the result is a long list of customers ranting about poor quality of customer service, like this example

It looks like they have a blog too. Once again an example of a very disjointed approach.

Orange:  Unless I missed something, Orange has no initiative worth mentioning in the Enterprise 2.0 area.

Vodafone: Vodafone's eForum introduces some concepts that are typical of an Enterprise 2.0 approach: different types of members (administrators, advanced members, member, newbie), a personal profile page with your posts, highest area of activity and reputation. The only have apparently 2 different groups where users can belong to: administrators and members.

With 90.000 registered users and no more than 60 users online at a given time (half of which probably administrators), it is clearly not a strategic channel for Vodafone. The lack of integration with the CRM/call center, makes it an isolated place.

3: The 3Blog, is a shy attempt at communicating with a young generation of customers. It is a one way communication channel where 3 employees present new products and services as well as daily work impressions. You can really just leave a brief comment. Not impressive in any way.

Vodafone leads again the Social Media presence with a tiny 187000 fans on Facebook. Twitter presence does not go beyond 3000 followers.

This assessment is far from being exhaustive and has not been conducted with a scientific approach. Nevertheless the conclusion for these first two countries I have looked at is that there is still a long way to go before we can say that the Telecom market has finally turned the attention to the new way customers around the world demand to interact with their vendor.

This means that we are probably even further away for these players to be able to address the opportunity that is presented to them by an ever increasing move to cloud computing combined with mobile access.

Enterprises around the world will be moving faster and faster into the cloud. They will be hungrier for mobile cloud based services for their workforce and for their respective clients.

It will be interesting to see if the Telecom operators leave this field to the likes of Google and Apple without putting up a fight, while they remain worried with how much they should charge for data plans...

On June 9th and 10th, Milan has become the Enterprise 2.0 capital of the world.

More than a thousand delegates have attended what many consider the most important Enterprise 2.0 gathering after the Boston E2.0 Conference.

Both conferences share many of the keynote speakers and although the Conference in Milan is of a significantly smaller scale, it confirms that in Europe Enterprise 2.0 is starting to reach mainstream.

The opening remarks by Emanuele Scotti and Rosario Sica, partners at Openknowledge, made an interesting connection between the first Enterprise 2.0 pioneers and explorers of the 15th Century like Cristoforo Colombo. What lies ahead of us is not completely known, but the potential rewards for everyone are very compelling.

The conference was then divided in three main tracks:

HR 2.0 chaired by Emanuele Scotti

Marketing 2.0 chaired by Emanuele Quintarelli

Innovation 2.0 chaired by Rosario Sica

These three tracks map very well with Clearvale’s 3 main ROI areas:

The Hidden Economy

Incremental Business

Innovation

In my opinion, there still some work to do to bridge the gap between the pioneers of Enterprise 2.0 (companies like Barilla who built a new business model using Social Networking interactions) and the followers who still fail to completely grasp the various opportunities that lie ahead of them.

There were many questions on how to change company culture, how to obtain the necessary resources and how to measure the ROI, and some of them remained unanswered.

Among the many interesting cases, the one brought by “Centro Nazionale Trapianti” (National Center for Organ Transplant) is definitely one of a kind.

It provides in fact a very compelling message to all Enterprises and Public Institutions: “It is possible to change the way we do business. It can be achieved with limited resources and an apparently conservative organizational culture”

With a team of only 2 community managers, 1 project coordinator and the assistance of 1 BroadVision consultant, CNT has been able to set up a collaborative network for hundreds of professionals in less than 10 days.

The network aims at creating a collaborative workspace for all personnel involved in the organ donation and transplant process: doctor, nurses, surgeons, volunteers and local staff.

All users of the CNT network will finally be able to meet virtually to exchange ideas, best practices, to standardize procedures and increase the engagement level especially for those more isolated in remote locations.

This project sets a very good example for future initiatives. A clear strategy, realistic expectations, executive sponsorship, thought leader participation to moderate the dialogue and a clearly perceived reward form a very good recipe for Enterprise 2.0 success.

A closing remark for the conference organizers: In the decade of open leadership, knowledge sharing and on-line social interactions, it looks very old school not having a virtual meeting place where all participants can review the keynote speeches, download presentations and follow up with the presenters.

I highlighted this disconnect in my previous blog post, “Events 1.0 to support Enterprise 2.0?” I am afraid it is still there. Fear of sharing too much perhaps? Making future events less attractive when you can find everything online?

I think this too is a cultural change we still need to go through.

If the hype and potential growth of a market can be measured by the number of conversations that are happening on and off-line, then Enterprise 2.0 in all its forms and declinations is definitely set to be a megatrend in business for the near future.

Millions of tweets are exchanged on this topic, thousands of online communities discuss about it, magazines and newspaper are reporting daily how large corporations are leveraging this new business model to get closer to their customers and employees.

Despite this exponentially growing amount of conversations, the most frequent question I hear from customers and prospects I meet is: "How do I implement this?" Or even "How can I change my company's culture to adapt?". A lot of skeptics do ask: "Is there really a proven ROI?"
And the list goes on. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what this brave new world will bring.

Unfortunately a lot of these conversations are still happening only among subject matter experts, Enterprise 2.0 vendors, analysts, gurus and so on. A very small community compared to the millions of users out there.

This is not the rule, but it is very often so.

How do we bring managers and entrepreneur closer to this topic and allow them to voice their concerns without being submerged immediately by a thousands of vendors (I include analysts in this category) trying to sell their solutions/services?
I am not saying that this should not happen (it is my job after all to sell), but I am an advocate for communities and events lead by managers for managers where we (vendors, analysts etc) share our knowledge without fear of disclosing or without the (immediate) intention of selling.

I do not say I have the solution to this, but I firmly think that there is still too little interactivity at most events which are the perfect chance for sellers to bring buyers closer to them.
Most of the time there is a uni-directional pattern where experts are on the stage with very little interaction with users.
Agendas are mostly created by the organizers without much gathering of information from the audience.

Since Enterprise 2.0 is all about people connecting and generating content, why are Events still mostly 1.0?
Users do not really connect before, during and after the event.
They do not really influence what will be discussed. User surveys are good, but definitely not enough, especially if done after the event to plan for something which will happen a year later...

And presentation material? The most simple thing any 1.0 site can do and yet most of the time customers leave with their notes and not much more.

I have yet to come across an Enterprise 2.0 (major) event where the user is at the center and where the user drives the agenda.

Next week, on the 9th and 10th of June, I will be attending the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0  

The agenda will boldly address:

* Setting up the strategy and building the business case
* New organization schemes and leadership model
* Nurturing adoption and cultural change
* ROIs, metrics and business drivers
* Frameworks to manage communities and to engage customers and users
* The impact of Social Media on business processes: BPM 2.0, CRM 2.0, PLM 2.0
* Best practices and lessons learned through national and international case studies
* From marketing to Social CRM
* Social software and collaborative platforms

I trust that users will be given the chance to interact, voice their issues, exchange opinions and specially get in the driving seat to form the agenda of the future event with continuous conversations with other users, vendors and analysts.

The conversation has already started as a thread on the Enterprise 2.0 Community  (ask for permission to join...)

and can be followed on Twitter  .

These are all very good attempts to transform an (event) industry which is still very 1.0.

If users want to get more value they have to join the conversation, share their experience and make sure they are in the driving seat.

Consumers have been doing huge steps forward in influencing the corporate agenda. Enterprise customers should do the same!

Quoting the Cluetrain Manifesto:

"Business is actually about people and conversations"

I will be reporting my impressions during and after the event.

That's all for now!

It is without a doubt that the changes that are happening right before our eyes in the consumer world, are affecting more and more the enterprise world in ways that we have yet to comprehend completely.

The power shift to the end user is clear to (almost) any marketer. Creative ways of leveraging social media are part of the news almost daily.

Corporations have started to realize that it is not a matter of “if” this change has to be embraced as much as “how” and “when” it will be embraced.

In my 15 years of experience in the internet industry with American High Tech corporations, I have witnessed very often a situation where European firms have waited to be in a “comfort zone” before adopting a new technology especially when it significantly changes the way the company operates. There are obviously many exceptions to this, most notably in the mobile space, but as far as internet is concerned we are used to have the US lead the way.

While most of the Social Networking technologies come from the US, the shift to Cloud Based services has significantly lowered the entry barrier for anyone who wants to “bravely” venture in this Enterprise 2.0 new world. The playing field is leveled and Europe (Governments, Institutions and Enterprises) has a chance to set the pace on how businesses are transformed to become the Networks of the future.

There is a good amount of pioneers in Europe among Institutions and Enterprises. My goal in this blog is to talk about them and give my small contribution to accelerating this transformation by sharing news, views and ideas from the Old Continent.

I will start by sharing a case that has become widely popular in the past weeks.

Eurocontrol is an institution that most people are unfamiliar with or simply know their name. For those of you who have never heard about them,

Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, is an intergovernmental organization made up of 38 Member States and the European Community.

This organization has been pushed in the spotlight at dazzling speed when the now famous as unpronounceable Iceland's Volcano started to erupt stranding thousands of travelers across the globe. Until April 15th 2010, only few "geek" travelers were even thinking about following Eurocontrol on Twitter. Ever since THE Volcano erupted, Eurocontrol has gathered more than 10,000 followers and has helped keeping thousand of people informed on the critical situation more than any other media could do.

As a company BroadVision was personally affected by this event as the eruption happened on the last day of our company kickoff in Redwood City, California. By constantly following Eurocontrol and creating an emergency community for all "stranded" employees, we were able to communicate on status, whereabouts, new bookings and itineraries.

While this probably did not get us home much earlier (Social Networks can't yet defeat the force of Nature although they can greatly help learning from it), it definitely helped alleviating the sense of being lost far away from home.