Recap of Day 5 at SXSW Interactive

Tweet

Happy Pi Day !!! And here we come… to the end of my first SXSW Interactive. After a long week of sessions, meetings, meet ups, tweet ups, and the like, it's time to return to reality. Today is a travel day, so as I can, I'll be posting and sharing more insights on what I learned at SXSW Interactive.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was the fifth and last day of SXSW Interactive. Now, it's time for the music part of the festival. I started the day by doing a sales talk with Suzanne Livingston where we talked about how to use communities to meet various use cases and needs that most customers have.

After the sales talk was done, I headed over to the OMNI hotel to start the day of SXSW sessions. I was only able to make it to 2 sessions. Both of them were directed at community managers. The first was a panel of various community managers were they talked about lessons learned as part of their roles. My favorite panelist was @annabelleblue who offered some tremendous advice and one-liners! What I really like about these sessions is the tips and lessons learned being shared. Often we forget about some common sense behaviors that are reinforced here. For example, if you are representing a luxury brand, don't use "4" as an abbreviation of the word "for". As usual, I find that the best way to summarize the session is to highlight the most notable tweets. Here are the tidbits I liked the most in that session:

The second session was also for community managers, only this tam it was focused on those providing customer service via Facebook. My favorite comment on this session was near the beginning as one of the panelists described Content is Queen and Customer Service is King. He continued metaphor and explained: "In Chess, the Queen is the most powerful piece and can move and do whatever. However, you lose the King, you lose the game" ! Love it!!! Here are some notable tweets from that session:

And here are some notable tweets as captured by the moderator:

SXSW 2012 panel - The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands

View more PowerPoint from Social Dynamx

Something that I found interesting is that in none of the panels / sessions that I attended over the week was there any mention of leveraging your employees to be your brand voice. For example, a while ago the Social Media Examiner talked about how at IBM social media management is not centralized. Instead, it's decentralized. Instead of having a team of 10 (or so) people as our social media managers, IBM encourages its employees to be the voice of IBM (following a set of guidelines, of course). As such, there are thousands of IBMers in Twitter and thousands of external bloggers as well.

What do you think about that approach? Is it good to let employees be the voice of your product/brand/company?

Now Available: IBM Connections Wikis Tips & Tricks

Tweet

Recently, I've been working with a number of customers who are migrating content from other tools/platforms into IBM Connections Wikis.

Immediately, I started noticing a pattern in the questions and they were all trying to do very similar things. This gave me an idea to leverage the Best Practice sub-community of the IBM Connections Users community to share tips & tricks.

If you use Connections or if your company is in the process of deploying Connections, you MUST follow this community. I talked about the community last week as members came together during Lotusphere 2012 #ls12. The community is where a lot of Connections users from all over the world and from various industries and organizations are coming together to share best practices on adoption, deployment and more.

Inside IBM, a wiki had already been created to share tips & tricks. I was able to leverage that and make those examples public so that everyone could benefit from this great library of tips. In there, you'll find things like how to embed podcasts, video, Google Maps, and much more. Here's a screenshot of how it looks.

To access this wiki, click here and log in with your Greenhouse credentials. If you haven't registered yet on the Greenhouse, you can register here.

Enjoy!

Lotusphere 2012: Tuesday Recap

Tweet

Tuesday at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 required getting up very early as Mac Guidera and I had a 7am Birds of Feather (BOF) session on IBM Connections Adoption and Governance.

The sun completely threw me off and I barely got out of bed in time. As I walked towards the Swan, the sun wasn't even out and I took and shared this picture on Instagram. I did make it on time, and was surprised that the room was completely full that early in the morning which led to a great discussion.

We talked about guidelines, gamification, integration, plugins, executive engagement, and other tactics to help the adoption of social business within an enterprise. To my surprise, Michael Sampson, author of the recently published book Collaboration Roadmap made it to the session! My favorite part was getting customers to talk to each other and share was has worked for them.

Day 2 keynote was right after our BOF so we headed back to the Dolphin. Mike Rhodin, Michael Chui from the McKinsey Global Institute and Wendy Arnott VP for Social Media from TD Bank were the keynote speakers. Wendy told various stories of how TD Bank has adopted IBM Connections and are becoming a social business. She also shared some tips on what has worked for them to drive adoption:

1. Get the executives involved from the beginning
2. Set up dedicated community managers
3. Get various business units involved: Marketing, HR, Communications, IT, etc
4. Don't overlook the minor details
5. Engage employees

And speaking of TD Bank (who uses Outlook for email), I was glad to see so many customers that use competing products such as Microsoft Outlook and/or SharePoint add IBM Connections to their stack. Other examples that came up at the conference were Electrolux, Bayer, and Continental AG.

Todd Watson has an amazing recap of this opening keynote. And, if you couldn't make it to the keynote on day 2, you can catch the replay right here:

After lunch, I headed down to the Social Café where it was my turn to take on my duties as a member of "Team Social". I had various persons come up to me telling me their company had deployed IBM Connections and just wanted help on the best ways to use it. I shared my experiences and got them to promise that first thing they would do once they got back was to start using IBM Connections more.

Another surprise of the day was when I learned that I had received an award: VideoFest 2012 Super Star. Sweet!!   VideoFest is now a yearly tradition where members of the community submit videos that show tips on how to use the various products of the portfolio.

And thanks to Mitch Cohen for capturing this pic:

A great day overall!

New IBM Champions Announced

Tweet

Joyce Davis has just posted an announcement in the Social Business Insights Blog. You will remember that earlier this year, IBM announced 50 new IBM Champions. Joyce provides a great summary of what we look for in IBM Champions:

These individuals spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and resources evangelizing for IBM, sharing their knowledge and helping grow the community of users and business leaders focused on our solutions. As champions, they will receive an IBM Champion merchandise package (apparel and some cool gadgets!), increased visibility on IBM sites, invitations and discounts to IBM events, recognition at select conferences, and access to key IBM business executives and technical leaders. Visit the IBM Champion site to read more about the program and get to know the current IBM Champions.

While at the Lotusphere #ls12 and Connect conferences in January, look for the IBM Champions by looking at the ribbons in their conference badges. And, as you can imagine, MANY of them will be speaking at sessions, facilitating Birds of a Feather sessions, conducting book signings, being interviewed on video, and a number of other exciting activities. You might even be lucky enough to witness a group of them sing karaoke ("We are the Champions!") in the evening if you head over to Kimono's. Check out the Lanyrd page for Lotusphere 2012 for more information.

Once again, congratulations to the newly minted IBM Champions!!! (and stay tuned because nominations will open again for the next round in August)

Christian Henseler
Eric Carter
Fabrizio Marchesano, Frame srl
Glenn Kline, Perficient
Howard Greenberg, The Learning Continuum Company
Masahiko Miyo ef Co, Ltd
Mike Ostrowski, Ascendant
Peter Presnell, yellowverse.com
Rob Shoenfelt
Salvador Gallardo, Innexware
Sean Cull, FoCul, Ltd
Tom Simmons, Alacrinet
Weerapong Panpai, Zenith Comp Co., Ltd

SXSW 2012 Voting is Open - Please Vote!

Tweet

The staff at SXSW wants to know what kind of topics we want to hear at their event next March. So my team really needs your help in this year’s voting process!


But first - if you aren’t familiar with SXSW – (South By Southwest), it’s a set of film, music and interactive festivals and conferences in Austin, Texas. What started as a music festival that drew 700 attendees in 1987, has grown into a premiere set of events featuring new music and films and has earned a reputation as a breeding ground for emerging technologies. Last year more than 12,000 people attended.


The staff at SXSW is giving you a chance to weigh in on the event. You get to pick what panels make the agenda in 2012. Actually, your votes and comments account for 30% of the decision, the SXSW Advisory Board and staff make up the rest.


IBM has submitted more than a dozen topics – with six of them focused on Social Business. Pick one – pick them all! Those panels with the most votes have a much better chance of making the cut. Anyone can vote. You can vote for multiple sessions, but you can only vote once for each session. So please, get your mom to vote, ask your colleagues, inform your friends – and by all means, tweet about it!

Here are the IBM Social Business sessions you can vote on

• Sandy Carter: Social Media for Business: Culture eats Strategy for Lunch
• Nigel Beck & Jason Gary: Building Social Apps for Business Using Opensocial
• Kathy Mandelstein: Why Small is the New Big and Big is the New Small
• Rawn Shah: Get Lucky: Create Serendipity to Spur Innovation
• Suzanne Livingston & Luis Benitez: Enterprise Social Media Trends: Are We There Yet?
• Caleb Barlow: Enterprise grade social communications

HOW TO VOTE

To vote – you will need to create a panelpicker account. If you have an account from previous years – just login. But registering only took me about two minutes: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/


Once you are registered, vote for your favorite IBM Social Business sessions! You can see other IBM sessions that have been submitted too.


The panelpicker is open until September 2.

(originally posted in the Social Business Insights Blog -- resharing here so you can vote for my session!)

Free Webinar - Social Media Inside the Firewall

Tweet

Last Wednesday, Business Insider last week featured a tremendous article where they named IBM the Future of Social Business "because they are willing to invest, test, fail and succeed in becoming a social business". The author of the article, Mark Fidelman, interviewed IBM's VP of Social Software, Jeff Schick. The article talks about IBM's road to become a social business. In the article, Schick highlights the importance of social analytics as we move forward and make it easier for more and more people to create content.

Building on that, InfoBOOM will be hosting free webinar on Social Media Inside the Firewall at IBM. You may remember that about a year ago I was asked to do a 15-minute presentation at Public Relations conference. At that conference, I chose to talk about Social Media Behind the Firewall and shared my presentation over at Slideshare:

IBM's use of social media behind the firewall

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

For this week's webinar, I'll go through and update that presentation with the latest statistics, which coincidentally, were also highlighted in Business Insider's article last week (see below). I'll also be expanding a bit on why it's important to embrace social media behind the firewall.

As you can tell from those stats, social media tools are not just a fad at IBM, but they are actually part of our day-to-day processes! This is one of the lessons learned I'll be covering in the webinar.

If you are still on the fence on whether or not your organization can get value from social media tools inside the firewall, or if you simply want to learn more about how I use social media behind the firewall and why, I invite you to join the webinar. To register, click here.

---

Article first published as InfoBOOM Hosts Free Webinar on Social Media Inside the Firewall on Technorati.

New 60-Day Free Trial for Multimedia Library for Quickr

Tweet

Today I have something new that's available that I wanted to make you aware. Lately I feel like all I'm sharing is news around releases and new software that is available. I do have to admit that It's very exciting to see all these new things happening around IBM Connections and Quickr. I think everyone gets excited when there's such momentum around something, no?

The ibm.com pages have been recently updated to announce a new program for the Quickr 8.5 Multimedia Library. So for those of you who haven't heard about the Multimedia Library... what is it?

The Multimedia Library quickly teaches end-users essential skills, productivity tips and much more to be successful using IBM Lotus Software. The latest addition to the Multimedia Library training solution is Quickr 8.5 - enabling users to work faster, smarter, Quickr. The Multimedia Library for Quickr teaches individuals how to create, upload, send and share documents and information with team members, as well as more advanced features on how to integrate Quickr with IBM Sametime, Connections and Lotus Notes.

For all those new customers that are getting started on Quickr and also all those customers upgrading from a previous release, this is a great resource to drive end-user adoption. Quickr 8.5 has many new enhancements for end-users, such as; a better browser-based rich text editor, ability to view entire threads in a discussion form and better version management. The Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 will show you instantly how to use these new feature and more.

The great thing about the new Try & Buy program is that you can get access to the full version of the Multimedia Library for free for 60 days. If you are not convinced that the Multimedia Library is for you after 60 days, simply uninstall it.

Interested? Here's a copy of the announcement:

=======================================================================================================

ANNOUNCING THE NEW "TRY & BUY" PROGRAM

IBM Lotus Education is excited to offer you a Free 60-Day Trial of the NEW Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 (English edition). Try & Buy gives you the ability to download the full version of the NEW Quickr 8.5 training tool for your organization. It gives you access to courses, lessons and hundreds of video tutorials showing users how to realize the full value of Quickr team collaboration software. Learn about "Try & Buy" and all Multimedia Library for Lotus products. Simply click "Try and Buy", register and submit your request for a Free 60-Day Trial. Soon after you've registered for the Try & Buy program, you'll receive an email with product download and installation instructions for loading the Multimedia Library for Quickr 8.5 onto a standard web server. Your organization will then have the ability to use the product for productive use during the 60 day period. The MML product can be used for training any end users in your organization during the "Try and Buy" period. The Multimedia Library for Lotus Software is a just-in-time training tool in use by nearly 5 million Lotus software users. Contact an Education Delivery Manager in your region or your IBM Sales representative if you have additional questions about this offer or any Lotus Education offerings.

Spread the word!

---

Article first published as New 60-Day Free Trial for Multimedia Library for Quickr on Technorati.

Enteprise 2.0 Boston Conference 2011 Recap

Tweet

It's the end of the quarter and all the deals are pretty much done so I can now take a breather and do a quickr recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference which happened last week in Boston. IBM was represented very well at this conference which seems right given that IDC named IBM the world wide leader in social software platforms based on market share for the 2nd year in a row.

Monday

Monday was the pre-conference workshops. I think the highlight of Monday is the (now typical?) E2.0 Black Belt Practitioner's In-Depth Workshop. In this workshop, practitioners from all over come together to share experiences and best practices on how to best drive adoption of social software and drive the transformation to become a social business.

Emanuele Quintarelli did an amazing job summarizing this session here. In his summary, you'll see Lowe's Home Improvement's success story. Lowe's shared how they started their transformation with a simple discussion forum but then moved on to more sophisticated social business software, specifically IBM Connections.

Lowe's reported that they didn't see any new risks emerge which is good as that is often a big fear organizations have when contemplating becoming a social business. Lowe's has about 45M page views/month, 4000 communities, 3000 blogs, and 1 community manager monitoring site-wide activity. Their ROI? Well, they didn't focus on that, instead they focus on Return on Performance and how tacit knowledge comes closer to explicit activities.   

Sandy Carter also blogged about Lowe's success story and Lowe's was also feature by Alex Williams here. Congratulations Lowe's!

Tuesday

Tuesday started with a very long keynote. The keynote was a set of mini-keynotes each 15 minutes long. Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President of IBM Software was the second speaker and I thought he did a tremendous job. He mentioned that it's very important that we look at our past so that we don't repeat the errors of the past (I think he was referring to ol' KM days?). He also had a big focus on analystics and their importance to make sense of all the data that gets created in social platforms. The comments on the conference Twitter feed were also very positive. You can find a replay of they keynote here.

Alistair Rennie took the stage after the keynotes for his session Business Insight Means Better Business Decisions. I believe Alistair did a tremendous job (and I'm not only saying this because his my General Manager). Alistair's session was labeled as an IBM sponsored session and it was *packed*! I believe Alistair did a very good job at staying away from a straight vendor pitch but rather focus on the *why* social business and *how* social business.

After lunch, I headed over to the Expo floor to demo Connections to interested parties. There were tons of people that stopped by and loved what we had to offer. A potential business partner even came by and mentioned that they were working with another vendor but that they were being very rude to them so he was interested in learning how to work with us. Yay!

I kinda like the concept of mini keynotes, but it would be nice if they would at least have a consistent theme, otherwise it feels like just random things put together.

I also discovered some goodies in the bag that was given to conference attendees. For example, there was a KMWorld magazine article on how Social Software sustains Collaboration at Bayer Material Sciences thanks to IBM Connections.

You can find the full article here.

Another goodie was that I got a free sample of Sandy Carter's upcoming book which will be available on September 2011: Get Bold - Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business. You can pre-order from Amazon here.

After the conference was done on Tuesday, I headed over to Fenway Park to catch the Red Sox vs Padres game. Unfortunately, Josh Beckett couldn't pitch that day cause he was "sick". The nerve!!! I travel all the way from Puerto Rico and he calls in sick ;). The Red Sox ended up losing the game unfortunately. The weather, however, was FANTASTIC! And it was great to hang out with colleagues and prospective customers. Here are some pictures:

Wednesday

Wednesday was about the same schedule, but for me it was fully dedicated to customer meetings so I couldn't attend any sessions. When I was not at meetings, I was again at the Expo floor.

Because I was at the expo floor, I missed Rawn Shah's session: "How Do You Measure That?". Rawn shared the presentation which I've included below (now if I could only find the audio recording..:) ):

How do you measure that? (Enterprise 2.0 2011 session)

View more presentations from Rawn Shah

Luis Suarez, one of my colleagues, posted a fantastic set of highlights in his blog. I really liked how he summarized all: "Offline Social Networking Still Rules!". How true. Often I feel that I'm in a session but because there's a speaker, we all have to keep quiet. And I found that the Twitter backchannel was going so fast that it was hard to keep up with (and often a distraction).

I find, however, that at this particular conference I didn't get a chance to socialize with everyone that I wanted to. I am hopeful that perhaps next time will be better!!

---

Article first published as Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2011 Recap on Technorati.

Congratulations to the New IBM Champions

Tweet

Moments ago, Ed Brill just announced the new IBM Champions at PACLUG. For the past several weeks, I worked with a bunch of my colleagues as we went through and read all the nominations that were submitted. We worked towards a list 50 new IBM champions that are going above and beyond to evangelize solutions from IBM, especially within the last 12 months.

The IBM Champion program recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical community — and rewards these contributors by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence. An IBM Champion is an IT professional, business leader, developer, or educator who influences and mentors others to help them make best use of IBM solutions and services. IBM Champions are not employees of IBM.

Here's the list of the new IBM Champions which has been approved by Alistair Rennie, General Manager of IBM Collaboration Solutions! Congratulations to all that were selected and I hope you continue to be great evangelists for IBM!!

• Adam Brown
• Bill Malchisky
• Bruce Elgort
• Carlos Casas
• CC Liew
• Chris Miller
• Chris Toohey
• Daniel Recio
• David Leedy
• David Stephens
• Declan Lynch
• Eileen Fitzgerald
• Eric Mack
• Femke Goedhart
• Francie Tanner
• Gabriella Davis
• Giuseppe Grasso
• Handly Cameron
• John Head
• Julian Robichaux
• Kenio Carvalho
• Lidia Vikulova
• Lisa Duke
• Marie Scott
• Mark Leusink
• Mathew Newman
• Matt White
• Mikkel Heisterberg
• Mitch Cohen
• Mitsuru Kato
• Nathan T Freeman
• Paul Mooney
• Paul Withers
• Rob Bontekoe
• Rob Novak
• Sanjaya Kumar Saxena
• Serdar Basegmez
• Sharon Bellamy
• Simon Vaughan
• Sjaak Ursinus
• Steve Pitcher
• Stuart McIntyre
• Theo Heselmans
• Thomas Duff
• Tim Tripcony
• Ulrich Krause
• Warren Elsmore
• Yancy Lent
• Yoshihiro Matsuo
• Yoshio Maruyama

Please help me congratulate these fantastic community leaders. All IBM Champions will receive a lot of goodies (apparel, gadgets, etc).

To view all the champions in other brands, click here. If you would like to be considered a champion, there will be another nomination period coming up soon so stay tuned!

Recap of IBM's Social Business Jam

Tweet

As mentioned in a previous post, the IBM Social Business Jam results have been posted (no registration required).

Others have already beat me to the punch to highlight some of the results from our Social Business Jam which was held the week after Lotusphere 2011 #ls11. For example, Peter Kim from the Dachis Group offers his take here and my colleague Rawn Shah has his take over here.

The 72-hour jam brought together 2,700 participants from 80 countries (with a high profile list of special guests). According to the report, in those 72 hours, there were 2600 posts and 600+ tweets (this # seems low to me though).

Throughout the Jam there were several quick polls aimed at getting a quick pulse from the participants. One of the polls that caught my eye was: "What is most likely to encourage you to use social software more in your job?". Top answer? Social software must be embedded in the applications I use to do my job!

And that's something that I've been promoting a lot. Every customer I go to, I tell them the importance of integration, integration, and integration. Just like real estate is all about location, location, location. This poll also validates IBM's Social Everywhere strategy which was announced at Lotusphere 2010.

The jam also addressed the elusive social media ROI (retun on investment). The participants believe that social media ROI is measurable but there's a need for a new set of metrics, for example:

1. Brand mentions
2. Customer engagement (comments / re-sharing)
3. # of active advocates (outside of the brand)
4. Customer satisfaction increase
5. Increased web traffic
6. etc

I thought #3 was an interesting one. I hadn't really thought about that one and that's a good one to try and measure.
Another section of the report that caught my attention was that "the role of middle managers is changing -- or perhaps disappearing altogether". This is something that I fear prevents adoption at some organizations as some levels of management see this as a threat to their jobs. It reminded me of a blog post I read recently: Why middle management must feat social media. To address this, I often mention how middle management is going to become even more effective and productive at their work because they'll have more transparency. At the same time, they remove themselves as the bottlenecks and can focus on business decisions that require their attention instead of just being a connector.
A key point that was brought up by the participants was the role of IT in a social business. In a previous blog post, I highlighted the importance of not falling victim of the "If you build it, they will come approach". The jam participants validated this by stressing the importance of making IT a partner in this process. If IT is not nimble enough to adjust quickly to the needs of the employees, the company faces a bigger challenge: the adoption of consumer tools for internal social collaboration.   

You can download and read the full report here and read it on your way home on your iPad or favorite eBook reader.

Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council 2011 Salary Survey

Tweet

The Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council (part of the Dachis Group) released last week the results of the salary survey for those working on internal social business transformation. You may know the 2.0 Adoption Council from the This Week In Lotus podcast where Susan Scrupski, Luis Suarez, and myself participated in a podcast episode. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I strongly recommend that you do. And if you are solely responsible for driving adoption of your social business platform like Connections, I also strongly encourage you to join the council. It's a great opportunity to learn from fellow practioners across the globe and across a wide range of industries (regardless of which technology they are using).

93 of the 2.0 Adoption Council members responded to the short survey of 3 questions. The median salary for the group landed at ~$115k, and it shows that IT is no longer the gatekeeper for knowledge sharing and intellectual capital reuse.

My colleague, Rawn Shah, did a write up on Forbes as well which you should read. Rawn picked up on a statement that also caught my attention:

Working in 2.0 initiatives is not a ‘social sandbox’ for tire-kicking, groundswell, low-level employees.

Too often I hear of companies who want to follow a "If you build it, they will come" approach, and often I hear how these companies face continuous challenges to get the adoption they desire. Thus, it's important that the right people are engaged with the right plan in order to achieve this transformation.

I recommend viewing the presentation in full screen because of its high resolution graphics.

2.0 Adoption Council 2011 Salary Survey

View more presentations from Dachis Group

Now you have something to use to negotiate your next pay increase.

Achieve a Smarter Planet by Becoming a Social Business

Tweet

You are probably aware by now about IBM's Smarter Planet strategy. IBM's products and solutions are aligning and being packaged around the need to create a Smarter Planet. A key pillar to this strategy is, of course, Social Business. And to that effect, IBM has created a single page to aggregate tons of information and resources into a single place.

In that page, you'll find benefits of using social business tools, a description of what it means to be a social business, whitepapers, analyst reports, case studies, 60 seconds snapshots, and solutions to get started.

In terms of the benefits of social business tools (or the business value of social business tools), the page includes several stats such as:

• The world spends 110 billion minutes on social networks per month
• McKinsey latest study reveals that 9 out of the 10 businesses using Web 2.0 tools are seeing measurable business benefits from its use
• Standout organizations are 57% more likely than their peers to allow their people to use social and collaborative tools

As mentioned above, the site also includes various "snapshots". These are 60-second videos that show Social Business at work. One of the videos that caught my attention was the one where a group of MIT students used social networking to find hidden weather balloons across the United States. They did this as part of a challenge issued by the US Government and the team was able to find 10 balloons in less than 9 hours!

So achieve a Smarter Planet by becoming a Social Business.

How To Get The Latest Social Media Counts

Tweet

While in Argentina, Marcelo showed this cool dynamic infographic that shows you the latest social media counts in "real-time", in the last day, last week, last month or last year.

Unfortunately, I found out about it after my Social Business presentation. I think it would've been nice to show this to the audience so they get a sense, again in real-time, as to the massive amounts of activities that are going on in the different social networks out there.

There's also an iPad app you can try and download: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/social-media-counts/id392861163?mt=8%20# . You can read more about it here. It looks like this was made available back in January, but I just stumbled upon it. I think I missed it in all the Lotusphere #ls11 rush.

Want to be a Social Business? Empower Your Employees!

Tweet

Yesterday, I was invited to do a quick presentation to an internal group of IBMers on why I blog and the value that I've received from blogging at IBM. I was limited to just 10 minutes, so I had to do something that was sweet, short, and to the point. There are so many stories that I've told before that it was hard to pick something that could be impactful.

I think I first fell "in love" with blogs when an amazing connection happened while at a customer site. You see, I was trying to get some integration going, but couldn't make it work. A colleague that happened to be working at the same customer, saw the blog entry and helped me get it done the next day! You can see the whole story here or check out this video:

Another of my favorite stories about blogs, was when I got to know Alan Lepofsky through one of my blog entries. The story is all about how blogs help me gain knowledge and just share knowledge. You can see that story here. I'm also a big believer that blogs can even help you grow your career. John Pape agrees and he has created a great post on 5 Ways Blogging Can Help Your Career.

So I decided to take an approach where I mention how I started (I started as an anonymous blogger back in '06) and the barrier of entry I faced. I've mentioned this before, so you may know that I **was** a firm believer of knowledge is power (more on this later). From there, I transitioned and told the story of how I was a consultant at the same time doing the very same thing that George Clooney does in Up In The Air. This helped me describe my pain point: disorganized, too many emails, too many things going on, etc... I believe that's a pain point that a lot of people can relate to.

It's no secret that IBM has empowered its employees to blog and use other social media tools. To me, blogs have resulted in tremendous benefits such as reduced email, increased productivity, career growth and more (slide 6). To IBM, there have been even more amazing benefits (slide 7). So far, I've tracked more than $6 million in closed sales opportunities thanks to my blog!

What I've come to realize is that Knowledge is not Power, but rather Knowledge Shared Is Power. In fact, I even found a site which gives the mathematical formula to show you this is true. Using all those data points together, I created this presentation which is perfect for 10 minutes.

Why I Blog At IBM

View more presentations from Luis Benitez.

I think it's clear that empowering your employees is key to becoming a Social Business, which is exactly what I talked about in the previous blog entry.

I would like to know... why do **you** blog?

New Whitepaper: Becoming a Social Business

Tweet

IDC has just released a new whitepaper called "Becoming a Social Business". The timing for this whitepaper couldn't be better as we are all getting settled from an amazing week at Lotusphere #ls11 where the theme was Social Business. IDC believes social networking applications are now becoming a huge business opportunity. At the same time, it notes that some places still fear social networking applications because they may lead to wasted time.

In the whitepaper, IDC quotes a study it made titled Social Business Survey where 41% of respondents said they were using social software. 35% of respondents believe that social software has increased productivity in the workplace! If I'm doing my math correctly, 85% of those using social software have seen an increase in productivity, with some noting up to 30% in time savings. I think the tide is turning and 2011 is going to be a tipping point where more organizations are going to rely on social collaboration tools to become more agile and beat their competitors.

To further prove that social collaboration is valuable, IDC partnered with IBM and conducted various interviews with different divisions of IBM to understand how they were using social software to accelerate innovation, provide deeper customer/employee relationships, and achieve quicker decision-making capabilities. I was one of the interviewees along with Luis Suarez and Rawn Shah.

For each interview, IDC compiled a list of "challenges", "tipping points" and "results / ROI". In other words, it lists what challenges existed, what caused a particular individual or department to embrace social business, and what have been the benefits/value obtained since becoming a social business. Towards the end of the whitepaper, IDC captures some best practices that may help kick start adoption of social software inside of your enterprise.

If you are thinking about becoming a social business, but have doubts as to its value, this whitepaper is for you. To download the free whitepaper, go here.

The whitepaper is 12 pages long and available in PDF so it's easy to store in your iPad (or favorite eReader) to read on the go. What do you think of the whitepaper? Is it something you are going to distribute to your customers?

Lotusphere 2011 Day 4: My First BOF (Part 2)

Tweet

In the previous blog entry, I shared my recap of what happened the first part of Day 4, Wednesday, of Lotusphere. I wanted to share a bit of what happened towards the end of the day. At 5:45p I had the chance to deliver my first Birds of Feather (BOF) titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I had participated in a BOF before with Stuart McIntyre, but only as a guest speaker.

This time, however, Stuart was scheduled for a BOF at the same time as me. I had to do something to draw a crowd . I figured if I could get a celebrity in the room, that would help. Therefore, I invited Rawn Shah to come in. He couldn't make it so he instead donated 3 autographed copies of his book: Social Networking for Business (which Steve Bell reviewed here). Three lucky attendees left with a copy of the book.

The purpose of the BOF was to concentrate on bad / best practices for social software adoption inside of the firewall. I wanted to generate a discussion between customers in the room to share what was and wasn't working in their organizations as they tried to become a social business. I didn't want to touch on technical stuff because, well, because there had been plenty of technical sessions throughout the conference. As I walked towards the room I ran into Sacha Chua and invited her to come along. She agreed and even volunteered to scribe the session. I've always been a big fan of her hand drawings.

Here's what we talked about in the "words" of Sacha:

I heard from the attendees that the session was valuable so hopefully we'll repeat it next year.

One thing I would like to do different next year is set up the chairs in a circle. The chairs were organized as if I was going to do a presentation and I think a circle arrangement would've allowed customers to more easily see each other.

After the BOF was done, #ls11 attendees headed out to Islands of Adventure to check out the new Harry Potter attractions.

Lotusphere 2011 Day 4: Andy McAfee and Sandy Carter (Part 1)

Tweet

So far I've recapped Days 1, 2 and 3 of Lotusphere 2011, or #ls11 if you are following in Twitter. Wednesday was the busiest day of them all. The day started with the morning keynote titled: The Future of Social Business. The guest speaker for the keynote was Andy McAfee which was a total surprise to me. I found out early in the morning and was excited to listen to him. Before I got to the keynote, though, I went to the Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Get Up To Speed with XPages where I worked as "host" in a speedtesting game. It was tons of fun and I got a chance to meet David Leedy in person.

After the BOF was done, I headed over to the keynote. I'm so glad that we were able to get Andy on stage. For those of you who don't know Andy, he coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and is very passionate about the topic. He does research at MIT, right next to IBM's Center for Social Software.

As promised, Mitch Cohen and I live blogged the keynote. Since I'm a big fan of Andy, this day's keynote was my favorite (I also like Kevin Spacey). One of the reasons why I was so excited to hear him was to see what he would say on the whole Enterprise 2.0 vs Social Business conundrum. For those of you who couldn't make it, Lotusphere's theme this year was Get Social. Do Business.   

I thought Andy did a good job at addressing this early on. I also loved the examples he used to prove the value of the wisdom of the crowds and why businesses should Get Social. I strongly recommend you go through the live blog from the session. Additionally, you can also watch a replay here:

After the keynote, I headed over to Sandy Carter's session. Her session was titled Social Media: 10-minute update (although it lasted 1 hour ). As she started her session, I really liked what she did for an agenda slide:

A quote that stuck out was "Business Process are the 'soul' of your company - to truly be a social business, you must embed social into your soul". I believe this is critical and is something that I preach to the customers I talk to. For me, one of the things that has driven my usage of social software is the fact that Connections is embedded into everything that I do and use (email, instant messaging, mobile, etc):

Sandy closed with 11 things to do in 2011. Take this as a list of things to do this year, perhaps one thing every month of the year left:

After that I was mostly in meetings all day with customers and partners brainstorming on the future of Quickr among other things. Once those were done, it was time for me to finally lead my first BOF. The BOF was titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I think I've been talking enough in this entry, so I'll leave that for another post.

IBM's Luis Suarez Awarded Internal Social Software Evangelist of the Year

Tweet

For those of you who may have missed the news, last month at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA, IBM's Luis Suarez received the award for 2010's Internal Evangelist of the Year. I thought this was huge!!

The award is sponsored by the 2.0 Adoption Council which is part of the Dachis Group. It turns out that Luis was actually on vacation when the award was announced by Claire Flanagan. In fact, check out how Luis "accepted" his award in this photo from Alex Dunne.

For those of us who couldn't attend the conference, Claire shared the text of the speech she used to announce the winner of this year's prestigious award.

After I heard the news, I wanted to get on Luis' calendar and get his take on the award. It turns out that the This Week In Lotus podcast team beat me to it. Their December 3rd episode (Episode 29) is a must-listen as you'll hear Luis Suarez talk about social software evangelism and why it's needed. Susan Scrupski, who created the 2.0 Adoption Council, is also part of the podcast. You'll also hear my voice in parts of the podcast (you really can't tell, but I had tons of technical issues that day... Stuart McIntyre did a good job of editing that stuff out, but I digress).

I finally had a chance to "sit down" with Luis yesterday and here's what came out:

Congratulations again to Luis on this awesome award!