• To ask questions of a wider audience
• To find out what their peers are doing
• To obtain validation from other members
• To get support outside of Lithium business hours
• To see Lithium’s best
• That Lithium is listening

If you've seen the news this morning you know that we announced our second round of venture funding, certainly a major milestone for our company and a source of great satisfaction for all of us who work here.  For me it's been an opportunity to reflect on my two years at Lithium and all the changes I've seen in that time.

I always say that no one was in a better position to evaluate Lithium as a product and as a company than I was back when I joined the company in May 2006.   As a researcher and a consultant, I had been following enterprise communities since 1996, when Ruth Williams, Wendi Bukowitz and I ran a research study we reported on in the pages of MIT Sloan Management Review.  By 2006, I had worked with more than 200 companies and was more than a little familiar with existing solutions in the space, having served as VP of Research at Participate Systems, where we managed enterprise communities on a dozen different major platforms, and having worked independently with companies in a wide range of industries from high-tech to media to manufacturing.   

In 2001, as the dot-com bust played out, Jim Cashel decided to host an annual invitation-only event in Sonoma every year for people working in the community space, and invited me to help him put together the invitation list.  For the next few years I spent time every spring determining who was doing with most work, and the most interesting work, for large companies -- and then inviting them to join us in Sonoma in the fall.  In 2002, I came across Lithium, and was frankly stunned when I clicked through to their customer list.  How did I not know about these guys?   I shot off an email to Lyle Fong and Michel Thouati, met them a year later, and started a conversation that led to my joining the company two years ago.

Since then, needless to say, I've had the opportunity to work closely all the folks at Lithium and just about every one of our customers.   I never cease to be amazed with the quality of people who started this company and those who have joined us on our journey thus far.  On the customer side, it's an amazing privilege to work with many of the world's leading companies, some who are just launching their social media efforts, and others who are leaders in social media in their own right -- and challenge us every single day to meet the very high standards they set.  

Where does enterprise social media go from here?  Contrary to conventional wisdom, we aren't really at the beginning of anything: we're halfway through a generation-long business transformation that began with the advent of the commercial web more than a dozen years ago.  In the first phase, we learned how to create environments in which customers would find value in interaction.  In the second phase, which we're now in, we're learning how to listen.   Before the transformation is complete, we'll see a new kind of business organization, one that creates and perfects its products and processes in an ongoing dialogue with its customers.  I don't see any company completing this cycle today.  But I think we'll see it soon -- and I've got the best seat in the house.

• Balance seemed noticeably consumer-oriented, but sizable enterprise and non-profit contingents were in attendance.
• Attendee ratio was heavily weighted in favor of industry folks over clients; however clients drove a lot of participation in the sessions. I think this lead to a healthy dose of actual experience applied to the ideas being presented.
• Great mixture of large (Wal-Mart, Google, etc.) & small (Religence, Pixish and a couple "Startup" name tags for as-yet-to-be-named companies) at the conference, and usually in the same sessions. Its good to see everyone on the same playing field in many ways.
• Yes! Lots of numbers!
  
• There still exist some real differences on key best practices, such as the appropriateness of using items of monetary value to motivate participation. The discipline is still evolving and the consensus has yet to take shape (or the hard lessons have yet to be learned by all).
  
• Great topics across the board. I had to make some very hard decisions about which sessions I would attend and which I would have to rely on the notes from others. In the beginning of the conference I was selecting sessions to attend by topic. By the halfway point, I had shifted to sessions by who was leading/in attendance. Both methods yielded worthwhile results.