The social networking phenomenon that has swept the youth of America off its collective feet is working its way into enterprise computing. And while practitioners in the enterprise IT space are beginning to realize the phenomenon will be important for them, too, they are on a quest to figure exactly how to use it.

This is where the Enterprise 2.0 Conference June 22-25 in Boston, comes in. Broadly speaking, the conference is a vehicle designed to make sense out of the social networking landscape made up of blogs, wikis, customer e-mails, web sites, and forums as well as cloud computing, that is increasingly critical to how business is conducted.

Steve Wylie, general manager of the conference, believes U.S. business is ripe for business-oriented social networking -- provided enterprises can understand it and its rapidly-changing dynamics.

"At Enterprise 2.0 we're exploring new technologies and how they're being put to work," said Wylie in an interview. "Everybody is a social media expert these days. But we're going to look at social media and distill it."

Wylie adds that attendees are interested in finding and developing cost-efficient techniques and programs during trying economic times. (To register for Enterprise 2.0, click here.)

Noting that at an earlier Enterprise 2.0 event participants were still trying to define social networking, Wylie said many participants are now starting to implement their own social networking-based strategies.

They can learn from others, such as Lockheed Martin, which has initiated leading edge social networking. Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee will moderate a panel on "Applying the Social Dimension to the Lockheed Martin Mission." Participants will feature Lockheed's Shawn Dahlen, senior media program manager and Christopher Keohane, social media program product manager at Lockheed.