The Glocal Citizen

twitter-reporter at ComEnterprise 2.0 (Madrid) March 21, 2009

When I browse the calendars of events and activities related to social media or web 2.0, I tend to feel that I’m missing all the action because they often take place in California, New York City or London… and with the “where-should-you-be-living” quiz fashion, I sometimes ask myself: “what are you doing in Madrid?”

Then again, this city is a blossoming global capital, and very innovative cutting-edge stuff happens here too. This was the case of the “Comunidad Enterprise 2.0″ event organized by everis (the company I work at) and Oracle on March 17th at the BBVA Innovation Center close to Plaza de Alonso Martínez in downtown Madrid.

ComEnterprise 2.0 (#cent20 on the twitter conversation) had an impressive agenda with top speakers from different sectors in Spain, all contributing with their thoughts to the question of how the enterprise can take advantage of the new tools provided by web 2.0 to improve sales, to get both new and loyal customers to engage and to increase in-house talent productivity.

During the event, I played the role of the “twitter guy”. Like a modern-age reporter, I listened to every conference and tried to capture what I thought were the most relevant ideas in 140-character tweets from the @ComEnterprise twitter account. The results? “highlights in one click” for every conference (thanks to twitter search).

The top ideas that continuously came up during the event’s conversation were:

- Companies should stop thinking of employees as human resources (industrial point of view) and start thinking of talent management (knowledge economy point of view).

- Companies that lead in the near future are those that successfully capitalize on the “prosumer” paradigm (user-generated content, crowdsourcing, social media, etc.)

- Open Innovation is the way to go to generate the most value given the current trends and tools (mass collaboration, creative commons, peered value, etc.)

- Innovation shouldn’t be overly focused on new technologies. Most important and most difficult to replicate is innovation on new business models.

- Everybody knows that marketing is no longer a one-way monologue, customers have taken the lead of the conversation. Strategies should be focused on getting them to engage socially with the brand.

- The crisis should be perceived as an opportunity. “When the wind blows some run and hide while others build windmills”. We shouldn’t be worrying about how long the crisis is going to be but about the new business models that will result from it.

- On internet where everything is measurable, it’s where we worst measure because of lack of standards.  (**Great spot to promote my good friend Mauricio’s CALL TO ACTION regarding Social Media Measurement**)

I look forward to more activities like this in Madrid and to get more action with my newfound vocation as a twitter-reporter.