Here’s some of the material from last week’s Conference Board workshop about how to extend brands to employees by empowering employees with social media.

The workshop was four hours, yet the time flew as there’s so much to talk about and learn in this area. What made the session especially valuable to me was the tremendous participation and insights from HR and communications executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. What a great group to teach and lead! Thanks all.

During the workshop we did an exercise about “anchors” slowing companies down from realizing the possibilities of social media, which we addressed as part of the session. Here were the biggest anchors from the group, in order of “anchor weight.” The overwhelming resistance to change was a bit frightening to me. How can companies survive, never mind grow, without some risk and and openness to new ideas?

Top anchors slowing down social media adoption

• Time and resources: Finding resources amid competing priorities, where to find budget, who to manage
• Fear: Inappropriate employee comment, fear of bad news, maintaining company secrets, afraid to fail, fear of exposure, fear of unknown - this has never been done; fear of change; loss of control
• Management buy in: Conservative culture; old guard holding on to what has always been done, senior management not in favor of “sharing”; resistance to change; senior executives are anti-communications
• Generational issues: baby boomers not always willing to embrace new technology, generational resistance
• Value: lack of clear purpose for getting involved
• Initiating: Lack of a champion who gets it; knowing how to get started, where do you begin?; no resident expertise

Additional, but less significant, obstacles

• IT: security issues; IT desire to maintain control of tools; Complexity: too many competing technologies, too complex
• HR
• Legal/risk management
• Having to try to make SAP and Sharepoint work as social tools
• Maintaining company voice
• Employees feel they are already asked to do too much

I don’t know about you but I feel overwhelmed by the number of events and conferences out there. So here’s some editing: here are three where you’ll learn a lot, meet some interesting people, and feel that it was well worth your time and money.

• Word of Mouth Crash Course: My friend and WOM expert Andy Sernovitz is hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar on July 30 and Sept. 4 in Chicago. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get a good overview of WOM. (If you use this code when you register you’ll get a $250 discount: “welovebeelinelabs.” For more: http://events.gaspedal.com.

• BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit: Oct. 15-16 in Providence, RI. This is an amazing two-day conference that I think is better than TED. Hosted this year by Bruce Nussbaum, editor of Business Week and author Bill Taylor, speakers are fascinating innovators from business, science, education, the arts, non-profits. It will open your head up in a big way.

• Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York for the first time, Sept. 16-19. We at Beeline Labs are running a three-hour experiential workshop on the morning Sept. 16 on how to create and run thriving online communities. Based on private community-building workshops we’ve recently done you’ll come away with a blueprint for creating a community for your organization. Hope you can join us! Drop me a line, lkelly@beelinelabs.com, if you want to know more.

I opened the Community 2.0 conference this morning with a few observations about what transpired so far. Personally I was left with the impression that we are facing a series of expectation gaps - many of which are related to language.

The first expectation gap happens between us, community managers, coordinators and facilitators, and corporate management. Much of that gap can be attributed to the “curse of knowledge” - which happens when your language, which is based on your knowledge, is not understood by others. Think about what we’re talking about - engagement, awareness, general marketing benefits, and customer sentiment - take that your CFO… No wonder that corporate management believes that we have a love affair with vague strategies and squishiness.

The second expectation gap is between us and the people who participate in our communities. Think about a successful community that you have participated in. What made it successful? Things like trust, ability to connect with peers, get help, get the right recommendations are probably things that come to mind. Yet as managers you are looking at success by measuring the growth of visitors, pageviews, awareness, etc.

The third expectation gap happens between the community managers and the business people whose business process those communities are supporting - customer support, new product innovation, new product development, etc. If only we could use the same language to evaluate what actually happens in those communities as it relates to those business processes, we would be much better off.

The last issue with language that struck me at the conference was how people make a distinction between B2B and B2C communities. Not too many people talked about B2E (employees) communities - even though they should be considered as low hanging fruit when it comes to leveraging communities to improve your business. More importantly - are any successful communities really B2B, B2C or B2E? Or are they P2P, C2B, C2C, E2E? It may sound like a subtle distinction, but by calling a community a B2C community you may risk to start developing bad behaviors - like running marketing campaigns within your community. That is a B to c activity after all - isn’t it?