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

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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)

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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.

Lotusphere 2011 Day 3: Finally My First Session

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Day 3, Tuesday, of Lotusphere 2011 or #ls11 for those of you following in Twitter, was a fun one for me. A big part of the day was spent talking to customers and hearing their thoughts on the direction we should take for our products. That's always fun, especially when they validate what you are thinking of doing.

As it happens every day, the day started with a keynote. The keynote was titled: "Becoming a Social Business". One of the guest speakers was Jon Iwata, Senior VP Marketing Officer for IBM, . I live blogged the session along with Mitch Cohen. Jon had some very interesting quotes throughout the session:

• People are afraid of social business, just like they were afraid of giving Internet to the employees
• Is there risk in social business? Sure! Is there risk when doing business in emerging markets? Sure! But will you pass on the growth opportunities ?

Really makes you think, huh? A customer panel was also available where Cemex and State St told their stories. Definitely go check out the live blog for all the commentary, and if you want to see a replay of the session, you can see it here:

In between customer meetings, I got a chance to tour the Product Showcase. I saw some really cool solutions from our partners, but I'm not going to give them justice here. I'll blog more about those later.

Then towards the middle of the day I had a chance to finally deliver my first session at Lotusphere. Because Jay Boyd and I were tag teaming (and he was really going to dive into the technical details), I asked the audience to live tweet questions and I would answer them as a backchannel. I got some really good feedback from the audience on this approach and I thought it kept the audience engaged and that way they didn't have to wait until the end to ask questions. You can see the tweets here.

And here's the slides:

ID304 - Lotus® Connections 3.0 TDI, SSO, and User Life Cycle Management: What you NEED to know!

View more presentations from Luis Benitez.

I closed the day at a customer reception and then an impromptu team dinner. More to come.

The Future of Social Business: Live Blog from Lotusphere 2011

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Here's the Live Blog of the The Future of Social Business Keynote at Lotusphere 2011.

Becoming a Social Business: Live Blog from Lotusphere 2011

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Here's the live blog of the Becoming a Social Business Keynote direct from Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11).

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