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June 9, 2010, 1 p.m. Pacific Time, 3 p.m. Central Time, 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 9 p.m. UK Time

Isaac Garcia, Co-founder & CEO at Central Desktop
Ross Fubini, Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder at Cube Tree
Mike McGurkin, VP Services & Support at Newsgator

Join this influential panel, as we explore microblogging and social collaboration in the enterprise. As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…topics include:

Landscape – Where have we come from and where are we now?
- Communications such as mobile or e-mail have become ubiquitous
- Consumer world has adopted microblogging and social media fully
- Professionals are starting to follow suit…or are they?

Grilling question: time suck? Is this creating noise which decreases workforce efficiency? (e.g. IM)
Grilling question: it’s great that collaboration is accelerated, but what effect does that have on data governance and security?
Live polling question: are you using microblogging or social collaboration in your organization? (yes, no, don’t know)

Where are companies successfully deploying microblogging and social collaboration? Internal vs. External Communications?
- Status updates improves task management (context on progress)
- Organizations are using microblogging as a way to escalate support issues in call centers
- Sales & marketing examples

Grilling question: how successfully have these apps been integrated into core platforms such as Helpdesk Support, CRM, ERP or Marketing Automation systems
Grilling question: how realistic is it that companies will create systems outside of the above core systems
Live polling question: Do you think microblogging and social collaboration… 1. increases workforce and operational efficiency or 2. decreases workforce and operational efficiency?

Adoption & The Future
- Are professionals deploying these tools on an ad hoc basis or do many organizations centrally purchase/roll out microblogging and social collaboration?
- What needs to happen for these tools and techniques to become as ubiquitous as e-mail or mobile (is that realistic)?

Grilling question: with these tools and techniques being so early stage, is it possible to make the business case without hard data demonstrating ROI?
Live polling question: Following this round table discussion, are you more likely to adopt enterprise microblogging and social collaboration within your team or company? (yes, no)

Register for upcoming webcasts by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.

Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Twitter is now valued at around $1 billion which is 4x its Jan 09 evaluation and it now has 54 million visitors a month, which is a 10x increase on the beginning of the year. Conventional thought justifies the investment in such staggering growth. But hang on…I nearly forgot – what do the revenues look like? Oh, they haven’t figured out a business model yet? Ah well, I’m sure they’ll get there eventually…

ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?? This isn’t 1998!!! As much as I love Twitter, professionals and consumers the world over are ‘joining the conversation’ and Twitter STILL hasn’t figured out how to make money (Wikipedia shows projected revenues of $400k and this is their 4th year in business). Just to put this in perspective: LinkedIn – with 43 million registered users, is generating in the region of $75-$100m per year. Last October, one of their VCs projected solid revenue models for the first quarter of this year – that didn’t happen (the closest to a business model we got was a hypothetical e-commerce model in the New York Times in June of this year).

The latest idea is to introduce paid business services which include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts.  From a marketing perspective, this makes sense – especially if Twitter can offer integration with CRM and marketing automation systems and make its ‘touches’ part of the marketing scoring process. Still, it’s hardly big leap stuff – clearly Twitter is struggling to find answers, so why not turn to its users? The professional twitterati would be all too willing to share some thoughts on what they would pay for…personally, I struggle to understand why contextual content and advertising services remain unavailable to the marketing community. Twitter has a huge opportunity to generate revenues by facilitating more measurable connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways – let’s hope it figures out how.