Here are a few companies in alphabetical order I thought had shown some real promise at the Web 2.0 Expo

Ascentium – A model for the agency of the future

I spoke to the CMO, Romi Mahajan who explained Ascentium’s go-to-market strategy to me. They are the nexus of a digital marketing company mixed with a technology firm that does Microsoft CRM, Business Intelligence and Analytics to provide creative solutions for brand perception and instantiation.

No doubt very useful and very powerful when they come together (I read this as an agency mixed with a lead nurturing platform that can track ROI!). Not only do they build cool marketing campaigns but they can connect to your sales process. They in effect unify sales and marketing so that clients see that their campaign pay off – thereby eliminating the normal tension between sales and marketing.

Romi was also a speaker on Agency 2.0 on how should agencies of the future be organized. Clearly I would think Ascentium is a model for agencies of the future.

Brickfish - Measuring Social Engagement

Brickfish offers an innovative way for brands to connect with their target audience online. They offer a launching pad for highly viral marketing campaigns that allow you to reach consumers where they live on the social web. They get them to listen to your message and interact with your brand, and more than that, they produce the results.

What does this mean – as I understood it – they make various viral marketing campaigns or social applications that can then be shared with friends who can customize them to post it to their blog or website via an iFrame. The iFrame technology allows Brickfish to measure where, when, who and how many times your messages were viewed.

Some examples are Coach engaged consumers to design a new tote. Nike asked consumers to share their inspirational athletic achievements. Kodak got consumers to share their Kodak moments to celebrate their new low-ink printer. All of these examples needed consumers to make customize the message and make it their own then spread it virally. Best off Brickfish is an all in one platform to do this.

HiveLive – Platform for building unique communities

I spoke to the CEO John Kimbel and visited with HiveLive crew on the Expo floor and was very impressed. HiveLive has a very different take on Enterprise Communities. In short, what they do is act as a platform that aggregates all your types of media (both new media and social media) to create a very different type of experience than say a standard community. So that means they integrate things like blogs, podcasts, wikis, forums into a “Hive” (one could say mashup here). That can be customized to the experience you want to create for your users.

One of their customers is Serena Software. Their CMO, Rene Bonvanie is a forward-thinking marketer who’s been leading the community charge for quite some time now at places like SalesForce, SAP, BusinessObjects, and Oracle.  Below is a video where he does a great job explaining Serena’s vision of a new model of community-powered marketing and how they’re using tools/technologies (like Facebook, HiveLive, and YouTube) to reinvent their business: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsJE98NPbM

InsideView – Smart marketing and sales tool

I was lucky enough to have breakfast with the CEO Umberto Milletti. Who started InsideView in 2005 because he saw that “business information was becoming more distributed over the web” though articles, interviews, various databases and then eventually social networks.

He viewed this as an opportunity to aggregate these sources of information to provide a composite view of a person or a company through the use of some proprietary Natural Language Processing.

All comes together in a mashup within your own CRM – InsideView integrates with all of today’s most popular CRM systems namely Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and recently announced Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Landslide.

InsideView also tells you who you are connected to in Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s a form of “Smarketing” as Umberto called it.

Over 200 companies use their application with hundreds of sales reps using the application. They sell per seat licenses but they also have a free version in the spirit of Web 2.0 with a limited version of the functionality. No doubt this is a company to watch in the coming years!

Wi5Connect – Welcome to Social Learning 2.0

I spoke to Matthew Bowman, VP of Sales and Marketing, of Wi5Connect who explained what they did as a “different approach to learning that marries two technologies – Social Networking and eLearning” into an easy to deliver SaaS solution.

Their new product LearnSocial is a revolutionary new way for businesses to train employees. Different than online learning, user manuals, or instructor lead training, LearnSocial is an online community that captures the power of social networks and fortifies with a state-of-the-art Learning Management System (LMS) platform. Finally, an effective learning tool that allows you to better engage, track the engagement, correlate progress to training, and measure ROI.

Matt called it “a way to combine the brain trust hidden in all levels of your own organization with the magic of your own corporate social network!”

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage - its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly - what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of “cloud computing” and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.

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One of my most trusted friends and mentors recently joined a very intriguing company called – SuccessFactors (stock symbol SFSF). They specialize in HR software with a SaaS product that is second to none in the market.

From a marketing and social media perspective several things about this company got my attention and my envy as a marketer.

First was the clear communications from the top down. The CEO Lars Dalgaard uses email to the entire company much like an internal blog at all hours of the day reporting back on things like successful client meetings and other interesting findings. Best of all it creates an open dialog with the entire company and builds an internal sense of community and esprit d’ corp.

Next was the sheer amount of new client wins that are coming out of this company. I monitor their RSS feed and every time I turn around they are pumping out press releases with another new client name in it. Kudos to the communications department and the sales team for making that happen!

But what really got my attention was how they unleashed their own internal community on rating and ranking each of the Presidential Candidates by 10 different competencies and published it on their public website. This is a fabulous example of demonstrating your product and its possibilities by connecting it to something that everyone is interested in.

So when last I checked here was the tally…

1. Budgets/Cost Controls – Vote McCain
2. Communication – Vote Obama
3. Decision Making/Judgement – Vote Obama
4. Dependability – Vote Obama
5. Global Perspective – Vote McCain
6. Integrity/Ethics – Vote Obama
7. Listening Skills – Vote Obama
8. Leadership – Vote Obama
9. Managing Conflict – Vote Obama
10. Planning – Vote Obama

Overall Winner - Obama

Sorry Hillary but I guess you already knew that!