Social media roundtable at HP next week - speakers and topics

Next week I'll be moderating the latest in our series of "Social Media for Business" executive roundtable events in Cupertino CA on April 21.  We have a great venue / host in HP, and I'm pleased that OutStart will be again be sponsoring and helping to organize the session.  Since we have a few seats left and a terrific group of companies already signed up I thought I'd share a few highlights on the speakers and topics so far.  So here's some of what we have lined up:

• After our opening discussion of hot topics/key questions, I'll be presenting "From social networking to social business" based on some of my research and engagements over the past 6 months and a lecture I recently gave at the WPI B-school.  Specifically I'll aim to pose (and partially answer!) three questions: Where are we in the growth and evolution of social media?  How can we best apply social in mainstream marketing?  What is needed to drive business adoption more broadly?  I'll review the channel persona idea I talk about here and my checklist for social business I introduced here.  But mostly I'll try to provide some background and tee up the rest of the day. 

• Next up will be a couple of mini-case studies, including a very interesting one from Gautam Goswami at Actuate (long time client of mine) who will be sharing some of his experiences using social media to engage with a large open source developer community, their results with initial Facebook campaigns vs. Google and also how they are looking at Twitter and LinkedIn as social marketing channels.

• I am also very pleased to have long-time industry watcher, former colleague and social CRM guru Esteban Kolsky join us after the case studies to share ideas for "Building a Social Business."  He'll include his perspectives on social business models, components, rules and organizational models, and should do a great job teeing up our group discussion as well.

If you'd be interested in attending or possibly hosting a future session, please contact me, but do so quickly since space is very limit (to 30).  Looking forward to seeing folks next week!