Took some time to relax from the busy week we had, and ponder about some of the meetings, and now I’m ready to tell you how was the event.
We had over 80 social software advocates attending the event last Thursday (March 20th) – a pretty good attendance. 35% of participants were not IBM/Lotus customers, which shows the growing interest in Israel around social networking solutions.
Alan Lepofsky is great!! Really. Excellent speaker. The feedback from the audience was superb, and even thou his presentation was 30min longer, no one cared. He even got ‘a compliment’ from a customer in a follow-up meeting, but I’ll leave it to him to tell the story. I heard this subject (Collaboration) presented many times before, but Alan provided a new take on the subject, giving customers examples from his numerous customer visits around the globe.
Arjan Radder took the stage after Alan and talked about social networking in the public life and its corporate implications. Most of his time he didn’t mention IBM solutions, which was very unique, but good at the same time – we’re not talking in logos or solutions but in context. The goal is to provide a platform for the business, whilst allowing the employee to keep using his known applications – but in the context of collaboration. For instance – on my Lotus Notes 8.0.1 client I have a Twitter extension, which allows me to update my Twitter status (along with other IBM internal communities) right from my messaging application.
Inbal Ronen from HRL showed us some cool stuff being developed at the labs. Most of the projects are being used internally at IBM, and some may find their way to future releases of Lotus Connections and/or Lotus Quickr and/or Lotus XXX… Stay tuned.
Alex and I then went on stage to show Lotus Collaboration demo. We had a script all planned out, but then Alex had to step outside and I was left to do the demo alone… np. I showed how to work with a messaging platform that provides email/calendar/address-book capabilities, add extensions, plugins and right-click actions , integrate with the corporate instant messaging application, paste a file into a chat/email from my shared online space, lookup contact in the employee directory, read my RSS feeds and open Office documents – all without having to leave my messaging application. Using the corporate social software solution I could search for help based on tags and keywords, learn about a colleague’s experience and expertise, read his/her blog, subscribe to the webpages she reads (bookmarks) and join the communities he/she are part of. There are some videos over at YouTube that will make this last paragraph much clearer.
Last but not least, Jason Risley came up, to wrap this event with WebSphere Portal overview.
I’ve seen couple of his slides before, but I never heard the full story behind Swift Transportation and their super-cool intranet site. I’m not sure if I can post screenshots here, so I won’t, but trust me – it’s like a live comics, really… amazing!! So simple, and so smart.
Facebook contribution:
As the event focused on social software for the enterprise, I thought it would be fitting to open up an event page on facebook and invite my friends, that would invite their friends, and their friends, and so on. What was facebook contribution to the audience tally? depends how you define ‘contribution’. 23 people RSVPed the event, 13 actually came. However, I did get many ‘messages’ from friends asking “what’s this laptop party all about?” So there was some contribution… I’ll definitely use facebook again, as its reach is far beyond the usual corporate distribution lists – facebook is the home of social software advocates, the people working at businesses who are looking for similar corporate tools, behind the firewall.
Facebook and other social networks are the medium to reach that audience.
Pictures from the event can be seen at my flick account. The presentations will be available at the event website, ibm.com/il/news/events/collaboration (will update when it’s ready), along with links to Lotus demos on YouTube. My slideshare space has more stuff you’ll probably be interested in.
To wrap this long summary, personal feedback, to improve and preserve (accordingly):
- Time – we were late on the agenda by 20min, which is pretty normal in Israel, but still not an excuse. We started late, but made up for lost time during the presentations.
- Focus on demo – presentations are very good to convey a message, but if you want to engage the audience, demo is the best method. We did 2 live demos, one from HRL and the other by Alex and myself, which got great reviews in the feedback form.
If you attended the event or have other comments, I’d appreciate your feedback.
This is actually the first event at IBM Israel (that I’m aware of at least) that was advertised using social media only, without the traditional DM (direct marketing) tactics – email, distribution lists, advertising, articles, interactive, phone calls, etc. Sometime next week, after we’ll have time to study and evaluate the outcome, I’ll post my impressions (and lessons learnt) of organizing an event using social media only.
