Understanding Where Social Fits into Your Enterprise

I’m back on the road tomorrow morning, heading east again – this time to Chicago to participate in the inaugural SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs event taking place at DeVry University (1221 N. Swift Road, Addison IL) this Saturday.  The cost, as always with SPS, is zero – so if you’re in the Chicago area and would like a day of free SharePoint training, grab your co-workers and head on over. For those of you who are navigation-impaired, you can find the list of speakers here, and the event schedule here. Good stuff.

My topic this weekend is the increasingly-popular subject matter of enterprise social. Specifically, my session ‘Generating Business Value through Social’ will attempt to walk you through the best practices of doing just that – aligning your SharePoint (and non-SharePoint) social strategies with business objectives and end user adoption in mind. No, not adoption – counting the number of people who have logged into the system each month does little to tell you the value of your platform. User engagement is the real metric you want to track. It’s harder to identify and measure, but that’s where you’ll begin to unlock the real power of social within the enterprise. I’ll share case studies, show you what comes with SharePoint on prem and Office 365 (and even Yammer), and then talk to you about where to go from there.

If you are unable to attend, you can at least take a look at the slides I’ll be using. You lose a lot without the narrative and examples, but you’ll get the general idea:

In an unusual move for me, I will not be leaving town after the event. Oh no, I’m sticking around. I’ve been to the Chicago area about a dozen times, couple dozen on top of that sitting at O’Hare waiting for the fog to lift in San Francisco so that my final leg home could begin, but have never been into the City proper. I am looking forward to it. My Dad and grandparents are from there, so its about time I found myself in the area without back-to-back-to-back events happening. Plus, Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) and Kim Frehe (@kimfrehe) promised to keep me entertained.

Amidst some work activities with my Los Angeles team who will be attending SPS, I’ll also be presenting Tuesday night next week at the SPUG (at Microsoft’s Chicago offices) on a similar topic of ‘Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013.’ Jeff saw this me present this one at the Denver SharePointFest event earlier this year and made a special request. You can register via MeetUp here. And it wouldn’t be a SPUG event without a SharePint activity following close behind. Join us, and we’ll share a Diet Coke together.

On Wednesday, June 5th I’ll be attending Rightpoint’s Employee Engagement & Social Enterprise Summit, also located at the Microsoft offices. Looking forward to, once again, talk social engagement! (Btw, I just shipped some of my infamous kitten t-shirts and a couple signed books to the Rightpoint offices for giveaways at this event).

On Thursday the 6th, my team will be conducting a half-day event around Governing SharePoint in a Hybrid World. I’m going to try and participate for a couple hours, but then i will be running off to an AIIM.org leadership council event across town.

It’s going to be a long week, but i have been looking forward to this trip for a while. Hope to see you out there! Watch for my tweets and posts through these adventures.