Customer Communities Pros Exchange Ideas and Form Their Own Community at the 2008 Communities Exchange Summit

FAST FACTS
Where: San Jose, CA at the Dolce Hayes Mansion.

When: October 13-15, 2008

Who Attended: Customer Communities professionals from many of the top programs in the world, Amdocs, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, ENSOVIS GmbH, Fortify Software, Forum One Networks, FrontRange Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Kana, Microsoft, National Instruments, NetApp, Omniture, Oracle, QlikTech, Inc, Riverbed Technology, salesforce.com, SAS, SAS Canada, Siemens Enterprise Solutions, Software AG, Sybase, TradeStation Securities, Tripwire, WebJunction

Co-President's Award Winners for Overall Presentation:
Bob Pearson, Vice President, Communities & Conversations, Dell, for his presentation - “The Future of Digital Media: Tips for the Fortune 500”

President's Award Winner for Breakout Session:
Bob Gilbert, Director of Marketing, Riverbed Technology for his presentation - “Case Study: How Riverbed Technology Uses Communities to Leverage its Passionate Customer Base”

PEER EXCHANGE:

Led by Bill Johnston, Forum One Networks, facilitator’s and attendees had an open forum on getting started: developing a logical, phased approach to building a communities program, gaining and developing an ongoing model for executive support of a community program, attracting customers to your community and keeping them engaged, leveraging the range of social media tools to create a great community experience that develops meaningful, actionable content, managing negative community experiences and content and transforming existing 1-way communications into robust 2-way Web 2.0 communications.

WHO PRESENTED:
Presenters included:

- Forum One Networks Bill Johnston on the state of online community and findings from Forum One's latest research
- Intel’s Josh Hilliker & Rhett Livengood on taking enterprise customer programs online
- Intuit’s Scott Wilder with a case study on Intuit and its communities of innovation
- Oracle’s Jake Kuramoto on it's not about the tools: playing in the participation economy
- salesforce.com’s Kingsley Joseph on IdeaExchange and how salesforce.com built a large community of innovation
- Riverbed Technology’s Bob Gilbert on how Riverbed uses communities to leverage its passionate customer base
- WebJunction’s Laura Zingg & Zola Maddison on how WebJunction uses communities to turn customers into power users of its products and services
- EMC’s Susan Zellmann-Rohrer on customer communities: building the business case
- Dell’s Bob Pearson on the future of digital media: tips for the fortune 500

EXPERTS PANEL:
Liz Hallen, Microsoft, Andrea Davidowitz, Citrix Systems, Susan Zellmann-Rohrer, EMC and Kingsley Joseph, salesforce.com had an open discussion with attendees about when communities should be private vs. public, making sense of vendor offerings, Microsoft’s "MVP" and similar programs, Biggest mistakes you've made, lessons learned, cross pollinating ideas from different communities: support, marketing/references, innovation, plus technical aspects of communities (platform, features, etc.)

Register for the Summit