Recap of Day 4 at SXSWi

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Another beautiful day at Austin. Today was a day with a lot of meetings and interviews so I only attended three sessions.

First, I went to Sandy Carter's session where she was talking about her recently published book Get Bold: Using Social Media to create a new type of Social Business. The room was packed and it was standing room only. As a fellow IBMer, I decided to stand in the back and give my seat to other people. Sandy covered some interesting facts about social media and also talked about some powerful customer success stories, further validating that social media is not a fad anymore. Here are some of the notable tweets from her session:

After Sandy's session I had a meeting so I couldn't make my next session, and thus waited until the noon session with Andy McAfee and Tim O'Reilly. Those of you who attended Lotusphere 2011 probably already know Andy McAfee. He is credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0. The session was structured as a Q&A where Andy was interviewing Tim O'Reilly. I fell a bit behind tweeting in this session as the content was so good that I didn't want to miss anything. Tim was talking about the importance of creating more value than you capture. O'Reilly emphasized that truly great companies are those that have a sense of higher purpose. Even Watson and Siri came into the conversation. Here are some interesting tidbits from this session here:

After this session, I went to do an interview offsite and then hurried back for the final session of the day with Brian Solis and Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. This was a very interesting conversation on the current state of the music industry and where it's going. Billy had some very strong opinions and the language used was very strong. I still captured some great tidbits from this session here:

After that, I headed back to the IBM Social Lounge where I got to meet various companies that were interested in integrating with IBM Connections. I don't want to share too much right now on this, but it's great to see how many people are interested in being part of the Connections eco system. I also did an interview with Todd Watson which should be posted soon to the IBM Social Business channel on YouTube.

Today is the last day of SXSWi so I have to go make the best of it!

Recap of Day 3 at SXSWi

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Finally, the sun has come out!!! Today was a beautiful day over in Austin.

The day started early where Stowe Boyd, Megan Murray and others were OMNI PRESENTing on how companies have become more and more connected. One thing that was interesting was a topic around community managers within the firewall. As more and more companies deploy social software internally one of the gaps that's often present is the lack of an internal community manager. Often, companies deploy social software internally and let employees "at it". Check out the notable tweets from this session:

Speaking of community managers, my next session was a panel of community managers of successful startups like Foursquare and Airbnb. It was very interesting to hear they talk about how they work as community managers. I found that many things were somewhat common sense (be transparent, be honest, empathize, be a great storyteller, etc). However, hearing it from these people who are working with very successful companies, really validates the behavior. One recommendation that really resonated with me is that as community manager, don't try to solve the problem for customers. Instead, let the developers figure out the solution and don't take the creativity away from them. I really liked this because I often have to remind myself as product manager, that developers should really be the ones that design and codify the final solution. Check out the notable tweets from this session below:

After lunch, I headed over to the Marriott for a panel on hiring the best employees. I wasn't sure what I was quite expecting. I felt the session was a bit all over the place, though they were definitely trying to engage the audience. For some reason, the Twitter stream for this particular panel was very quiet, so I've captured a few tidbits that I thought were the most interesting.

Finally, I headed over to the convention center to listen to the CEO of Dropbox. The session was titled Building a Business Around Sharing and I was hoping to hear more about how Dropbox was built and where it's going. However, the session was just a Q&A with the CEO. For the first 30 minutes, he talked about how he got the idea, where it all started (at Boston's South Station) and how he got funded. The story is definitely interesting. I was just looking for a little more forward looking statements. You can see some of the notable tweets I captured here:

Enjoy!

Recap of Day 2 at SXSWi

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Saturday, March 10 … Day 2 at SXSW Interactive (SXSWi). It was loooooong day and the rain kept coming down hard.

The first session that I went to was Top Chef: How Transmedia is Changing TV . This session was tremendous and I liked it a lot. It was moderated by Andy Cohen, host of Watch What Happens Live and one of the panelists was Tom Collichio, a judge in Top Chef. Others in the panel included various senior executives from Bravo. They talked a lot about Social TV and the transformation that we are seeing and how Bravo has embraced media to drive ratings to their shows. While I don't watch any of these programs, it was still a very interesting panel. Andy also did a very good job of moderating and was taking questions live via Twitter. Sometimes questions came in and within a minute Andy was already pitching it to the panelists. The session was tweeted under various hashtags such as #bybravo and #sxswbybravo. My biggest takeaway from this session is that the future of social TV is content co-creation with the fans. Here are some notable tweets from that session:

After that, I headed over to Why Small is the New Big and Big is the New Small. The session was tweeted using #eggcellent as the hashtag. Kathy Mandelstein and Jason Stoddard did an interesting panel. Kathy comes from a big company called IBM and Jason typically works with very small companies. The panel covered what big companies are doing to be able to compete with the smaller ones and what the smaller ones can do to compete with the bigger ones. My biggest takeaway from this session was that social media/marketing sets a level field. Here are some notable tweets from that session:

After that session, I headed over to lunch and then over to the Omni Hotel to get ready to present for the first time to the SXSW audience. I have to say that I'm humbled by the experience. The room was packed for a 5pm session and the feedback from the session was extremely positive. Thank you all for coming and interacting with us. Hopefully we can continue the conversation on Twitter (or whatever your preferred channel is).

As promised, here are the slides from my presentation with Heidi Ambler. The session was recorded and will be available as a podcast. If I find that podcast somewhere, I'll share that here as well for those that couldn't attend SXSW.

Enterprise Social Media: 5 Emerging Trends

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

The twitter stream for my session is #socbiz5 in case you want to see what people were saying.

Enjoy!

Recap of Day 1 at SXSWi

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Yesterday, Friday, was the official first day of SXSW Interactive. It was raining throughout the day, but luckily the sessions that I had planned to attend where all happening very close to each other. It was a good thing that I got here on Thursday because I was able to pick up my badge very easily. When I went to the convention center on Friday, the line for badge pick up was almost a mile long, literally.

Even walking into sessions required a line each time since badges had to be manually scanned. It would be good if they used some sort of RFID technology in the feature to speed up the process of entering sessions.

I attended two sessions yesterday related to SoLoMo.

Here are some notable tidbits from the SoLoMo Redefined: Next Gen Social Local Mobile session, which was tweeted under the hashtag #sxsmartpush .

Here are some notable tidbits from the What's the 'Next Big Thing' in Social Networking session, which was tweeted under the hashtag #blendr .

After the sessions were done, it was time for some food & drinks and then off to bed. That was it! Later today I'll be presenting to the #sxsw audience with Heidi Ambler. I'm sure that's going to be an experience. More on that tomorrow.

Bunchball Introduces Gamification for IBM Connections with Level Up

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Bunchball, who shipped the first gamification solution 5 years ago has recently added support for IBM Connections. Leveraging Connections' extensibility points via widgets, Bunchball plugs into IBM Connections to promote end-user adoption and engagement. So far, Bunchball's platform, called Nitro, has handled 125 million users and tracked over 15 billion actions !

Gamification is certainly a topic that comes up often when discussing how to drive adoption of various systems. In fact, you may remember that it came up during the Birds-of-Feather that Mac Guidera and I hosted back at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12.

Gamification can used in various ways to help drive usage of a new system. For example, you can offer rewards or badges once a user completes his profile, creates a wiki, uploads and shares files, etc. The tricky part, of course, is to not only use gamification just during the initial adoption phase, but to keep users consistently engaged.

This is possible with Nitro's admin console where customers can very easily create an infinite number of missions, determine point economies, and establish rewards (or whatever works best to keep users engaged).

To go along with the launch, Bunchball is also offering a free Whitepaper on Enterprise Gamification (registration required).

Here's a screenshot that shows Nitro for IBM Connections in action:

One of the cool features that Level Up adds to IBM Connections is real-time feedback on awards and missions completed. To see this integration in action, check out this quick 5 minute demo of gamification with IBM Connections with Bunchball.:

To learn more about Nitro for IBM Connections, check out: http://www.bunchball.com/products/nitro-ibm-connections