“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — but the rest of the story is that it is all captured on video.”
Great line from Cosmopolitan CEO and Jive customer John Unwin at the JiveWorld11 conference. However, the analogy to social business software only dawned on me as I sat down to write something about the show.
What you say in your social business collaboration site is all captured and can be found by compliance officers, lawyers, and external regulators. But from what I learned at Jive, most people think that it just is out there in the ether, floating around, not to be discoverable.
Now, since this is my business, I notice when people talk about compliance, or rather when they don’t talk about it, and compliance was not a big part of the show this year. There was some talk about it, and certainly more than last year (including a panel with my colleague Joe Shepley, PhD). But I still didn’t hear a lot of concern or focus on the compliance aspect of social media collaboration as a general theme. The show was about connectivity, and JiveWorld did a great job of connecting its users at the event.
Overall, fantastic show; not only was the general session DJ spinning great tunes, but the entertainment from Tony award-winning actor Sara Jones and beat-boxing flautist Annie Wu were each unique in their own personas (or multiple personalities, in Sarah’s case).
What I enjoyed most was talking to users of the Jive platform. What I usually get from a user event is a bunch of IT folks wanting to learn about how to configure the latest upgrade or API. Jive had real users who genuinely wanted to learn about how to better communicate with colleagues, partners, and customers. The folks I talked to really looked past the platforms and focused on the possibilities. It was quite refreshing.
Even better, a greater opportunity still exists for organizations to continue to scale their deployments. Many of the folks I spent time with were deploying either internal-only or external-only instances of Jive. There is great benefit to grow their single instance into an ecosystem where customers and employees are working together, growing R&D, marketing, and support exponentially. As this growth continues, there will continue to be new and exciting developments, enhanced case studies, and some of the current great case studies, like T-Mobile, will be able to relax and enjoy the show instead of being in such high demand.
I also give kudos to the show management team. I began my career in event management/planning, and this was one of the most creatively run events I have ever attended — from the conference website , to the mobile app, the meet meme cards, and the networking dinners. The event was fantastic, from both the content and the structural standpoints.
This user group continues to grow, and I look forward to seeing its continued emergence. Jive continues to have satisfied customers, and they came out to share their ideas and participate in a great program and were rewarded for it with collaboration, education, and entertainment.