It has been nearly a month and a half since the latest installment of Webcom in Montreal; however, the study we did and passed around at K3 Media’s conference booth was just too interesting to let lie…

Working with Aleece Germano, we produced a report and found many insights into how people use and perceive BareMinerals makeup, a top-selling foundation in the US from BareEscentuals.

Aleece is an internet consultant with 8 years of experience in the cosmetics industry. She’s also a musician, an event organizer, and luckily for us, our neighbour at Station C. Yet more proof that Station C is more than just a beautiful co-working space - it is a spawning ground for new ideas and a crossroads of top notch Web 2.0 artisans.

The results of our research were very interesting, to say the least. A hint: just because something is organic doesn’t mean you should put it on your face.

Download our BareMinerals blogosphere graph and lexical analysis fact sheet here.

Here are some impressions I had related to the talks I saw at Webcom Montreal 2008:

• Early in the day I listened to Andrew McAfee’s talk about Web 2.0 in the enterprise. He laid out the case for the Enterprise 2.0 very clearly, emphasizing the importance of weak ties in the pursuit of individual knowledge workers’ goals. This is an important point, and though it’s something that most of us that have studied sociology at any level know, it’s far too often ignored in the context of the study of online social networks. McAfee also did a good job of giving an overview of the challenges to embarking on Enterprise 2.0 projects in companies, which are well known and range from cultural issues to the need for control within organizations and the general difficulty of unseating incumbent technologies. There was one challenge that he missed (probably to his credit - it’s a pretty cynical point): the difficulty corporate IT seems to have admitting that relatively inexpensive tools can be the secret to leveraging (unused) six-figure KM platforms and the like. Pride, not sound business decisionmaking, seems to rule in many IT organizations.
• Fred Cavazza gave a great talk in French that underlined that in the social media/network environment, a company’s brand doesn’t really “belong” to it anymore. This is a point that is fundamental to what we do at Exvisu, and experience has taught us that this is absolutely true today, though obviously many are still fighting against this fact. At the end, Fred did a good job of identifying several new roles that are rising to prominence: Community planner, social media manager, community architect, virtual community moderator, social analytics experts, and social coach. Key take-away: No engagement, no response… and those folks are what will give you the engagement you require.
• Later on I sat in on Jon Husband’s talk about the new work environment ushered in with Web 2.0. Jon is a very experienced management consultant who several years ago decided that the existing models or approaches were broken and set out in search of alternatives. Jon told a funny story about early in his career when a (more senior) colleague complained about his reading the newspaper “on company time”. At a certain point in our history, general knowledge of the environment was not seen as a competitive advantage, let alone a food-water-shelter kind of necessity. Now, however, both general and specific knowledge of the environment in which a company works has become absolutely essential. Companies seem to be struggling to confront this reality.
• In parallel with the main webcom event, the organizers were gracious enough to host an unconference called WebCamp, which I had a real pleasure sitting in on for a while. WebCamp was a semi-structured roundtable that featured some of the key members of the Montreal and Quebec web world, people like my friends Patrick Tanguay, Sebastien Paquet and new friends like Martin Lessard, Mario Asselin and others. A conference like Webcom has a serious program, but nevertheless is primarily designed (as far as I can tell) to bring advanced subjects to a generalist audience. It is great to have a (free) event alongside where specialists with years of experience can share - something that is altogether too rare now that people are getting busier and busier.

This morning, Claude and I went to a breakfast mini-conference hosted by the AMM-PCM (the Association marketing de Montréal) at the HEC: Les blogues d’entreprise en 3 temps. The conference was very well put together and considered three themes: business transparency, blogs and authenticity, and the risks associated with employee blogging.

Sometimes events like these in Montreal are entirely populated by established experts, but it was very nice to see that this one included a mix of experts and people who wanted to learn more about blogging and the enterprise. Even better was the fact that the meeting was very much focused around discussions that were animated by the presenters (i.e., not a lecture).

Congrats to Muriel Ide for putting on a great event and to Martin Ouellette, Mario Asselin and Isabelle Poirier (among others) for some particularly good interventions in the discussion this morning.