FYI, I will be speaking about B2B social networking at the upcoming Software Business SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliances, and Marketing) Conference April 3 and Web 2.0 Expo April 22-25, both in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

Here are the session abstracts-

B2B Social Networking: Important Lessons for Software Marketing and Product Development

What does the rising prominence of online social networking mean for today's B2B software companies? How can software companies ensure their marketing and product development strategies fully consider these new technologies and user behavior? What lessons can learned from the successes of consumer networks such as Facebook and YouTube?

Join Clara Shih, Founder of Faceforce, the first enterprise mash-up on Facebook, and Product Line Director of AppExchange at Salesforce.com, to learn about the future of B2B social networking and strategies for building better customer relationships and communities using social data. You will hear about innovative ways software companies are transforming their customer, recruiting, reseller, and vendor relationships with online social networking technology.

Faceforce: Bringing the Power of the Social Graph to Enterprise Apps
Clara Shih (Salesforce / Faceforce)

Faceforce, which integrates Salesforce CRM with Facebook, is the first social enterprise mash-up. Approximately once per decade, the enterprise software industry undergoes a fundamental shift ushered in by a new disruptive technology. The 70s gave rise to mainframe computing, led by companies like IBM. In the 80s, the introduction of PCs gave rise to client-server computing, dominated by Microsoft, Oracle, and others. During the 90s, the Internet shook things up once again, making possible new innovations led by companies like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Salesforce.com. Today, we are seeing a fourth wave of “socially aware” enterprise applications.

This session will walk through the thinking behind Faceforce, future development plans, and how the social networking phenomenon at large will fundamentally change how business software is developed, deployed, and used. We will explore how the lines are increasingly blurring between the consumer and enterprise spaces, and what this means to businesses trying to market and sell their products.