My good friend Arjan Radder, Social Media Sales Mgr., IBM Europe, will visit Israel next week, to speak at TheMarker Com.vention and meet some of our customers that are in various stages of social media adoption. This will be Arjan’s 3rd visit to Israel and obviously we’re excited to have him here. His agenda is filling up very quickly, but we still have some open slots.
So, if your company is looking into social media solutions – blogs, employee directory, wikis, social networks and the likes – and you want to hear what IBM has to offer, give me a ring and we’ll work something out.
TheMarker interviewed Arjan earlier this week (by phone), and the full interview is available in today’s print version, as well as online. Since both are in Hebrew, here are some notable portions of the interview. We’ll have a translated version soon, which I’ll post here as well.
When sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Youtube started rounding up fans, we realized that IBM has been deploying similar solutions for over a decade. Our internal employee directory, Blue Pages, stores over 500,000 profiles, much like an internal LinkedIn. Making internal communication efficient wasn’t easy, as IBM spans the world and works in many industries. It was simply a necessity.
Another aspect of Arjan’s interview related to the use of instant messaging solutions, such as MSN Messenger, Skype, GTalk and others, as THE corporate IM tool.
Any enterprise has to adhere to some regulatory restrictions (e.g store business transcripts for 3 years), not to mention the ability to authenticate the user – both don’t exist in public solutions. With corporate IM solutions, such as Lotus Sametime, those capabilities (and others) are built-in, not to mention the fast ROI we can show – reducing travel expenses and phone bills.
Only yesterday I spoke about Social Media Solutions for the Enterprise, at YCD/IBM event. Both of Arjan’s points, about social networks and corporate IM were discussed, with customer references showing the business value and added benefits. You can download that presentation at slideshare.net, or come to this event next Monday, and hear me speak about it.
The examples I mentioned were GE and Celina Insurance for Lotus Sametime (IM) and Ernest and Young and Sprint for social media solutions (Lotus Connections).
The full presentation is embedded below.
From left to right (some people were not tagged, yet):
