Talks about gamification, money and the future of work #socialnow

This is my final post about the SocialNow conference 2013. In this post I’d like to share some highlights from four talks. Two were about gamification, one was about money and one about the future of work.

Gamification

The presentations about gamification by Andrzej Marczewski (of Cap Gemini) and Paulo de Carvalho (of Vodafone) were very interesting. I really enjoyed how these presentations were placed back-to-back. Andrzey gave a general but very good introduction to gamification. He talked about the what, why and how. I really enjoyed how he also talked about cheating and gamification.

Paulo talked about his experiences with gamification inside Vodafone. He gave a detailled overview of how they applied gamification to certain business processes and how they deeply thought about the right metrics and incentives for the game to be useful.

Costs

Ana Neves gave a short presentation about the cost of social tools in the enterprise. Don't focus on the license fees only. The Total Cost of Ownership for Social tools is just as important as for other tools. Even een free internal tool is never really free. And make sure you pay attention to adoption costs as well. I liked how Ana also addressed the cost of not implementing social tools inside your organization.

Future of work

Stowe Boyd gave the closing keynote at the conference about the future of work in a social world. He made some really interesting remarks about the shift from collaboration to cooperation. I was planning on sharing my notes about this talk, but just saw Ana Silva has a good blogpost summarizing Stowe's talk. So, please go ahead and read her post!

Concluding

The SocialNow conference was very interesting. I thought is was even better than last year. This was due to a great panel (Ana Silva, Phil Hill and Pedro Custodio). They did a great job asking questions to the vendors and opening up the discussion with the rest of the participants. The participants had great questions as well. It was a true learning experience for this reason. There were deep and fundamental discussions about all aspects of internal social design, features, implementation, adoption, etc. Great stuff!

Furthermore I see some disappointment in the field. People have been at the break of the Enterprise 2.0 field are evaluating the past year's and wondering what the future of the enterprise 2.0 and social business market and practice will look like.
Most organizations doing internal social hardly every have one platform with all the functionality. Because the SocialNow conference is built around vendor presentations, I'm wondering how we can bring this fragmented (and more realistic?) world in the conference. Could it be that some vendors should team up and do a presentation together?

And once again we see innovation happens on the edges. Some vendors 'simply' copy the good social tools on the internet and make internal versions of them. But there are also vendors that think differently and challenge the status quo of tools and... business.

I really enjoyed SocialNow and hope to meet you there next year!