The End of the Big Social, the Future of Enterprise Social #thebigsocial

By Josette Rigsby (@techielicous) Sep 28, 2011

Today is the final day of sessions at Telligent’s The Big Social in Dallas. Attendees have a busy day ahead sharing ideas and learning about how to optimize the use of social technology within their organizations.

Big Social, Big Ideas, Big Agenda

The 300 attendees at Telligent’s first conference, The Big Social, have another busy day ahead. The final day of the event kicked off with a keynote address by former Kodak Chief Marketing Officer and author Jeff Hayzlett, who is sometimes referred to as the “Chuck Norris of marketing.” He discussed the latest ways to be successful with social media and best practices for how to transform your business by engaging. (Unfortunately, however, there were no slow-motion kicks or karate chops used to accentuate any of the topics.) Attendees received a signed copy of his book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing? after the keynote.

There is a full day of sessions with topics such as:

Building Strong Bonds Through Customer Service Communities
Microsoft’s Digital Strategy
Amplify Your Sales Teams with Communities

During lunch, there is a roundtable discussion that will allow participants to exchange ideas with peers, Telligent staff, vendors and partners. In addition, a developer jam and usability lab runs the majority of the day. Attendees can stop by and ask Telligent employees product questions.

The Future of Social in the Enterprise

Yesterday, in addition to attending sessions and meeting conference attendees, we had a chance to speak with industry analyst Larry Hawes, Principal at Dowbrook Advisory Services, about his views on the future of social within the enterprise. He predicts there will be continued momentum toward companies adopting social technology as a core part of their business strategy. According to Hawes,

What we have seen in the last couple of years is companies experimenting with social — doing small pilots or different departments within the same organization adopting social technologies for different business reasons. We are quickly leaving the experimentation phase and organizations now are working to tie social technology to support very concrete business objectives and business processes.”

Hawes also believes that social software vendors will increasingly move toward a more platform-centric model for delivering social solutions versus standalone applications. We will share additional details on this interview in upcoming articles.