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The design brief is simple: integrate the outgoing supply chain that takes corporate product or service documentation out to users with the social media that may arise to address those same products or services. The benefits are also clear: leverage user experience, interest, and advice to everyone's advantage.

After that, it gets confusing.

Corporate structures are brand-directed and very controlled, while social media is uncontrollable, individualistic (if not anti-brand), and hyperbolic. That's why we love it, but how could a corporation trust it with their babies?

What does integration mean in this context? If you hire someone to help with social media, you may lose the integrity of independence. If the social media is independent and you endorse it, do you taint it? It's likely to change rapidly, so how can you keep your position up to date? If you just react to it, how is that different than focus groups? I'll argue that integration means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.

The scariest scenario is bringing independent outsiders to your breast and having them blast your new release. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so the question is how quickly you'll respond, and how? Who said "Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?"

But let's draw a distinction between unaffiliated commentators and those who are working in companies that are your customers. The former are always going to be less controllable, while the latter will likely cooperate with a cross-company integration. Just as an enlightened company will look to incorporate social media into its communications strategy, its customers will be exploring social media for its user-centric focus as a means of improving its own business practices.

Let's assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation's goals. When it works because all of the stars have aligned, as has happened at moments for Apple, Google, and even IBM and Microsoft, then it can be great. At other times, it may be ugly. Perhaps it's just too early to draw those people too close.

But when the audience is composed of social media practitioners at client companies, then the field is open to all forms of social media: blog, wiki, twitter, IM, and other practices. For example, it's easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release...

These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?

We updated all our blogs to MT 4 back in January. That upgrade was pretty straightforward, and the backwards compatibility was great. Unfortunately, to take advantage of all the new features possible with Movable Type 4+ it is necessary to use all their newer templates - I'm sure a large number of you who have been involved in CMS projects know what that can mean. Anyway, we are finally getting around to the template changes, as you can see. We should have all the blogs done in a week or two and then will look at some of the new "community" capability.

Suggestions, especially if your are familiar with specific MT features, are welcome.

The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.

Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.

If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.

It seems hard to believe that we've been too busy to blog about our annual upcoming conference in Boston. Fortunately it has a life of its own and doesn't depend on our blogging activity. This year's event is our largest yet, and we'll be blogging more regularly about it to help make sure you don't miss some of the nuggets.

Today, I just want to note that (one of the reasons we've been so busy is) because have a number of research projects and studies underway, and the results of some of these will be discussed at the conference, as well as on some of our track-specific blogs. For example, Geoff blogged yesterday about the research we are doing on collaboration, social computing, and "Web 2.0" technology use in the enterprise. Geoff will be leading a panel on this and other research at the conference. Stay tuned both here and on our topic area blogs for more info on this and other research.

Activity for our 4th Gilbane Boston conference at the Westin Copley November 27 -29 is ramping up quickly. The conference schedule and session descriptions have been posted. The early list of exhibitors and sponsors is also available. And, online registration is open. We'll be updating the site on a regular basis from now on, usually daily, so bookmark the pages that interest you to keep up-to-date.

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March! For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested. Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity). An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studies/blogstudy3.cfm from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.

Here is a chart including the data from the poll described yesterday from 500 25-34 year old facebook users combined with the results from the same poll given to 500 18-24 year old facebook users. There is certainly a difference. But the most surprising results are the extremely low expectations about the use of blogs and wikis, and even social networking software. These findings, informal as they are, would make me very nervous if I were a start-up hoping to make it by capturing the facebook generation as they stream into the workforce.

I joined facebook a few days ago to check it out and to get an idea about the approach's relevance to enterprise applications. I need to use it some more before I reach any conclusions, but since I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference this week I decided to use the new facebook poll feature to see what the facebook crowd thinks about collaboration as they enter the workplace. The poll feature is limited (1 multiple choice question) but it provides direct access to the tens of millions of facebook users and you can choose from a couple of demographic options. Also, you can get the results very quickly - in my first poll I received 500 responses in about 9 hours!

I will blog about the results more later and will also include all the graphs, but in the meantime, everyone I mentioned the poll to at the conference has wanted the results, so here they are the basics:

Question: Which collaboration technologies will you use the most in your job in two years?

• SMS text messaging 6% (30)
• email will continue to dominate 66% (328)
• instant messaging 16% (53)
• facebook-like social networking tools for business 11% (53)
• blogs and/or wikis 2% (8)

Keep in mind that the 500 responses all came from the 25-34 age group who are presumably mostly in the workforce. I just started the same poll with the 18-24 age group and will provide those results for comparison later tonight. UPDATE: The combined poll results are now available.

Between the two age groups we will have some info direct from the generation that Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee and others are making predictions about (we refer to some of this here). This is of course a very informal poll, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had the results in time to provide Andrew and Tom Davenport for yesterday's debate!

At last week's conference in Washington (where Tony Byrne did a great job with the program), we had a lively discussion in the opening keynote panel after I made a disparaging comment about "Web 2.0". Of course I was referring to the term not to the various technologies or concepts that the term may or may not include depending on who is attempting to define it as a "thing-in-itself". But somehow I wasn't clear about that and, judging by the reaction, there appeared to be a generational-like difference of opinion, which was complicated by this classic problem of confusing a name with an object. In any case it was fun, and the debate carried on through some of the other conference sessions. I also brought up "Enterprise 2.0" which I've discussed before, but for some reason couldn't remember Andrew McAfee's name when I was recommending further reading, so here is his blog.

For those of you attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week, or who are local, there will be a debate between Andrew and Tom Davenport, who have different opinions on Enterprise 2.0. The debate itself is open to the public even if not registered for the conference. Here is more info. We are media sponsors of the conference and have a special discount available. Just register and use discount code MLQTEB16 when you register.

Also keep in mind our own annual Boston conference in November where we'll be continuing our coverage of "enterprise social software" technologies.

I haven't been very good at blogging about this conference as it has been a busy Winter and early Spring. In any case, there is still time to join us, especially if you are in the Bay area. Registration is still open online as of this post, and is also available on site at the Palace hotel through Thursday. If you can only get away for one day, make it Wednesday for the keynote with Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The technology showcase is also open on Wednesday (with a reception) and Thursday. http://gilbanesf.com/conference_grid.html