I just stared at my phone for the whole conference...

On Monday this week I attended the Corporate Social Networking Forum at RIBA in London. The conference was a showcase of companies dabbling in social media (the agenda can be found here: http://www.corporatesocialnetworking.net/).

It was good to hear what organisations are doing in the way of social networking and the varying results they are experiencing. Feeding the Puppy blog has a very detailed write-up of each presentation (http://feedingthepuppy.typepad.com/feeding_the_puppy/2009/06/corporate-social-networking-forum-liveblog.html) that I highly recommend reading if you have an interest in using social networks in the enterprise (and who doesn’t right now...).

What made this conference different from any other that I've attended was the  sub-conference taking place on twitter throughout the day. It seemed like half the room weren’t looking at the stage, but were instead glued to their laptops or iPhones (including me).

It turns out people were posting throughout the conference on twitter using the #CSNF suffix on their tweets. They were posting key points they were hearing on the stage for the benefit of those not at the conference, as well as conference room gripes (mainly lack of power sockets) and related info on the presentations. The conference chair even asked presenters questions from the tweets he was seeing. You can get an idea of the number of tweets and what they were if you do a search for #csnf on twitter (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23csnf).

Look out for the article on the conference in this month’s edition of www.simply-communicate.com and make sure that you follow us at www.twitter.com/simplygroup.

Daniel