Charlene Li formerly of Forrester and author of Groundswell (with colleague Josh Bernoff) gave an interesting talk at the SF AMA meeting held at Adaptive Networks in SOMA: The Future of Social Networks.

While it started off a bit slow, with an new agey: “Social Networks will be like Air” it got better. Overall, Charlene’s comments were very thoughtful though anecdotal at times but ultimately practical…she also did a good job of “crowdsourcing” and engaging the group of attendees.

“Nice-to-have” would have liked more formal research to back-up some of her propositions; granted, social media is likely to evolve for a while as a medium and marketing channel. Though the venue was a bit small and stuffy there were plenty of snacks to be had. All told, for $50 it was just this side of worth it.

The presentation deck is also available here:
The Future of Social Networks