At last week’s Social Media World Forum (#smwf), Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of Huddle, gave a stirring presentation about their business, why and how it came to be, and why collaborative, on-demand solutions are the future.

Here’s the presentation in full (courtesy of my shiny new Flip camera – I love it!)

A bit like the new book Rework, by 37signals, that I reviewed recently, this was a must-see talk for small businesses, and a valuable lesson that often the most successful businesses are founded to ‘scratch your own itch’, or solve a problem that blights you personally in everyday life. In Huddle’s case it was how to work in teams and collaborate remotely with co-workers, without the need for email.

Another experiment in how to work sans email is being conducted by Luis Suarez over at IBM. Luis is 2 years, yes 2 years, into his experiment and has successfully reduced his inflow of emails to an average of just 14 a week. If ever there was a supporting case for the adoption of social software, this surely must be one of the most compelling!

On Monday this week I visited the Social Media World Forum at London Olympia. It’s in it’s second year (I think) and growing, and hosts a series of conferences, workshops and a walk-around exhibition. This year the event was seemingly split in two; one half of the camp representing Social Media practitioners, including PR and SM agencies and SM monitoring specialists the likes of Yomego, Huzu (hi Graeme!) and the ever-provocative Nixon McInnes, the other half more focused on Enterprise2.0, including platform providers, cloud computing businesses and other specialists software service providers including Telligent, Huddle and Siteforum.

I went along with an open mind, not sure of the quality that would be on show, or the extent of the show. While it was only relatively small – some 4,000 visitors over two days – there was a healthy buzz, particularly around the Enterprise2.0 entity. So while PR, Internal Comms and Marketing people surveyed the Social Media room, more as a catch-up than a get ahead, the Enterprise2.0 room was demonstrating that business was finally getting its head around how to harness social tools for things like productivity, collaboration, KM and the like – the constituent elements in what we at dub label Social Business Design.

The reason we set about creating dub, and what is clearly lacking based upon my observations from the Social Media World Forum, is to offer clients impartial advice and support in helping their organisation not only identify which platforms – bespoke or off-the-shelf – they should consider as part of the solution, but also to help generate user buy-in, or as one organisation put it, carry out user diagnostics.

There are more and more useful and successful on-demand products and services available, yet few organisations fully understand how to get user adoption, and how best to tackle things like internal policy and compliance. Sadly, the stories that came out of the event demonstrated that these things are the biggest challenges, and the things that often require the greatest resource and budget in order to achieve any semblance of success.

So while dub can and does create bespoke social tools, we also work with clients to understand if there are social solutions readily available that can do the job, and then, more importantly, work with the ‘people’ so that they can identify what’s in it for them, and how they can use it to help them with their daily grind.

(My next post will contain the excellent presentation given by co-founder of Huddle, Andrew McLoughlin. There’s also an alternative view/review of the show through the eyes of my colleague Dan Miles here)