A Truly Social Enterprise

Brian just wrote a great blog about the Meetup and I couldn't resist adding my usual philosophical shpiel.

The Meetup this year was interesting because of how much it was a reflection of the social collaborative dynamic of companies and communities like Liferay. Liferay is a geographically distributed, heterogenous (employees, customers and community enthusiasts) group of people using web-based tools to arrive at a common goal: creating great software. Increasingly, we're doing that using Liferay itself: we use Liferay's built in message boards for sharing knowledge, use blogs to introduce new features and share ideas like this one, and use Wikis to quickly publish documentation and how-to's on the product. But more than that, we're also using our social networking features to connect with people in the Liferay community and build relationships of value online.

In fact we used Liferay.com's social network to allow self registration for this year's Meetup, and it was a huge success. Over 100 people from Europe, North and South America signed up for and attended the Meetup, and we got a great mix of both long time and new users, developers and business users, and Liferay customers and partners. We saved countless hours of tedious work by using Liferay's built-in social capabilities for registration, but more than that we were able to build enthusiasm for the event by word of mouth.

Now that we have put names to faces, we'll be able to use the social network to follow up on sales leads, build relationships with community members, and generally keep the conversation going about how to make Liferay the best product available for creating innovative social collaborative web spaces.

There's an incredible opportunity in this market to move beyond collaboration for the sake of being social to delivering real business value, whether in increased revenues or reduced costs, through social collaborative software. Several of Liferay's clients are already doing that today and deriving tremendous returns on their investment. If your company doesn't have a strategy for leveraging these new social capabilities, you will definitely be missing out.

For those of you who did attend the Meetup, definitely let us know what you thought. Were the sessions helpful? Too detailed or too general? Did you want to hear more about Liferay?

Leaving feedback is as easy as adding a comment to this blog or leaving a message on my Wall, so I'll look forward to hearing from all of you.

Thanks again to everyone for taking the time to join us for our second annual Meetup. See you in Frankfurt!