Socialize Me

Announcing the IBM Connections Suite - Sweet !

2012-05-15T08:16:00.001-04:00

IBM has just announced its new social business offering: the IBM Connections Suite. The IBM Connections Suite provides the best of the best communications, content, and social capabilities in one package creating the ultimate social business offering.

How does a business become a social business? IBM has identified a foundational set of capabilities that—when implemented as a whole—can allow your business to become more social. To socially enable your workforce, improve customer care and insight, and enhance product and service innovation, an organization must consider how it will Reach, Engage, Discover, and Act as it becomes a social business. These are the 4 key services of a social business.

- Reach people where they live and work

- Enable people to engage productively in a business context

- Monitor and analyze social data to discover new business insights

- Act on insight for business advantage

The IBM Connections Suite delivers these 4 capabilities, and it's all in one package! What does it include? Everyhing you could want: profiles, communities, microblogging soft phone / VoIP, presence awareness, instant messaging, web meetings, video, forums, wikis, social analytics, blogs, media gallery, ideation, real-time collaboration with communities, peer to peer file sharing, document libraries, mobile apps, and more!

To demonstrate some of the capabilities provided by the IBM Connections Suite, I've created three demos. Each demo shows how the IBM Connections Suite delivers business value and helps companies achieve one of three outcomes: workforce optimization, improving customer care processes, and accelerate innovation.

Demo 1 - IBM Connections Suite for Workforce Optimization

Demo 2 - IBM Connections Suite for Customer Care

Demo 3 - IBM Connections Suite for Accelerating Innovation

Of course, it's hard to show the 300+ features that are in the IBM Connections Suite in a couple of 5 minutes videos, so I'll be interested in knowing what you would like me to show more of. Please let me know in the comments below.

The announcement letter with more details, can be found here.

New IBM Connections Plug-In for Symphony and OpenOffice Demo

2012-05-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I blogged about all the different plug-ins available for Symphony which brought the social capabilities of IBM Connections into Symphony. For those of you who don't know, Symphony is a free productivity suite based on OpenOffice, which coincidentally shipped a new release on Tuesday. And speaking of OpenOffice this same plugin has been released as an OpenOffice extension!!!

Of course, I'm pretty much a month late with these news, but there's now a new IBM Connections plug-in for Symphony, as Ed Brill announced earlier. The new plug-in adds the following capabilities:

Add a Lotus Symphony document to a IBM Connections activity, blog, or wiki.
Create a To Do item for an activity.
Add a Spreadsheet or Presentation document to an activity.
Add a URL as a IBM Connections bookmark.
Insert data from a IBM Connections profile into Lotus Symphony documents.
Open and share files in IBM Connections files.

And because it works inside of Symphony, it'll work in Linux, Mac, and Windows with any IBM Connections 2.5 server or above.

To me this is important because I believe in the power of bringing social to the end user to accelerate adoption of social business.

To show it off, I recorded this 9 minute demo which walks you through the features of this new plug-in plus the plug-in for the newsletter generator and a special one for those using the IBM Connections Content Edition.

For more details on this new plug-in available at no extra cost, check out the help document and to download & install it, go here (for Symphony) or here (for OpenOffice). The video above shows how to install it (hint: it's super easy!!).

Enjoy!

How To Post Events into an OpenSocial Activity Stream

2012-05-08T12:44:00.001-04:00

Back at SXSWi 2012, I presented about Enterprise Social Media Trends and talked about OpenSocial and ActivityStrea.ms. OpenSocial was also a big topic at this year's Lotusphere 2012 conference. I've gotten probably about 10-15 requests on how to use these APIs in the last week, especially as a follow on to my post on How To develop Apps for IBM Connections so I thought it was time to create a blog entry for it.

As it turns out, yesterday Suzanne posted a great tutorial on how to get started with OpenSocial and Embedded Experiences.

I went through the tutorial and within 5 minutes I already had posted an event into the OpenSocial server with an embedded YouTube video as shown below. Very easy!:

The final step is to create a JSON object to push the event into the activity stream. I'm guessing that most of the people reading this are developers, so I'm going to use curl which works in most operating systems. I issue this command from the command line:

curl --user username:password
 https://connections.swg.usma.ibm.com/connections/opensocial/basic/rest/activitystreams/@me/@all/@all 
-X POST  -L -H "Content-type: application/json" 
--data-binary @youtube.json -i -v --insecure

And here's how the JSON object looks:

{ 
"generator": {
    "image": { "url": "http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/Q5CU9cMvk7k/hqdefault.jpg"},
    "id": "ytapp",
    "displayName": "YouTube Application",
    "url": "http://www.youtube.com/"
  },
  "actor": {    "id": "@me"  },
  "verb": "post",
 "title": "Video has been posted and is live !",
  "content": " You have created a new YouTube video.",
  "updated": "2012-05-08T12:00:00.000Z",
  "object": {
    "summary": "Video posted to YouTube",
    "objectType": "note",
    "id": "yt12",
    "displayName": "YouTube Video",
    "url": "http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/ee/video.xml",
   },
   "openSocial":{
            "embed": {
                "gadget": "http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/ee/video.xml",
                "context": "Q5CU9cMvk7k"
      }
    }
  }

And voilá. That's all it takes. Now go have fun!

What It Means to Be a Social Business #socbiz

2012-04-30T11:12:00.001-04:00

As seen in our team blog, check out Heidi Ambler, IBM's Director for Social Software Product Management (and my boss), discussing:

What it means to be a social business
The trend on how business processes are changing
How business achieve business value by becoming a social business
Tools that help companies become a social business
What it takes to become a Social Business and how to start planning your own transformation.

You may remember that Heidi and I presented at SXSW and you may have even seen our video interview with the team from developerWorks. So here's another quick video (5 minutes) that I recommend you view, especially if you are trying to figure out how to leverage social networks for better business outcomes:

Demo: Blogs iPad App for IBM Connections, Wordpress, Blogger, and more

2012-04-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Are you an active blogger using IBM Connections ? Do you work remotely? Do you want to create beautiful blog entries directly from your iPad ? If any of those are true, then you definitely will want to take a peek at Blogsy, the top rated app for blogging with your iPad. In fact, I am creating this blog entry directly from Blogsy.

Blogsy also supports other blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla and more!

You may recall that I first blogged about Blogsy shortly after Lotusphere 2012 when it was first released to the App Store. I have been using Blogsy for a couple of weeks now and really like it. I can create blog entries with rich format and rich media. To add rich media you use the sidebar provided by the app. On the sidebar, you'll find quick options to quickly find videos in YouTube or photos in picass or Flickr and simply drag and drop them into the blog. Very easy!

I even have the power to edit the HTML which lets me do things like embed content from Slideshare.

There's tons of other features too! But let me show them to you instead of just writing about all of them. Check out this demo of Blogsy in action:

Want to get Blogsy, download it from the iTunes App Store by clicking here.

I would like to thank the great folks at Blogsy. As part of last week's update to Blogsy the App Store, they are giving away 3 copies of the app. Do you want in? Simply tweet a link to this blog entry and mention @BlogsyApp in your tweet to qualify. In a couple of weeks, three people will be selected at random and will receive a free copy of Blogsy.

How To Develop Apps for IBM Connections

2012-04-20T08:00:00.000-04:00

The last few weeks, especially after SXSW, have been crazy with partners and ISVs reaching out to me asking how to get started developing apps for IBM Connections. I've probably repeated the same information enough times now that it warrants a blog entry.

First, for all things social business development, the start page is here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/social/ . There you will find information on how to create apps either for our on-premises product or cloud-based product.

If you are looking to develop for our on-premises product, you can provision yourself an instance of IBM Connections which will run in our cloud. That way you can develop your app and you don't have to worry about installing Connections from the ground up. In just a few minutes, you'll have your own development environment up and going. The direct link to the instructions to provision the cloud instance of Connections (or direct link here: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/appdevwiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Collaboration_QuickStart_for_Social_Business_sbt ).

If you are looking to add your app as an widget (e.g. similar to how gamification was added to IBM Connections), then you'll want to look at the widget development guide for IBM Connections which is here: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/development-guide

Now, if you are like me, you like to learn by example. So if that's the case, take a peek at this very simple widget made up of two files (this one and this one). It's built using pure HTML/Dojo, but you can use any technology you want as long as it ultimately creates HTML.

Next, to deploy this into Connections, I followed the instructions here: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Adding_custom_widgets_to_Communities_ic301 . Basically, what you do is edit the widgets-config.xml file and add this:

and restart Connections. Then you can just edit the XML and JS files independently without restarting Connections. Also, note that your widget can be hosted somewhere else. It doesn't have to be installed on the Connections server.

Finally, if you want to leverage the Connections API to retrieve data, add data, modify, or whatever, here's the full API (there's an API for pretty much everything). And again, if you like example code, here's a good set of example code on how to make calls from our API using whatever technology you want: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/connections-social-authoring/

Enjoy! (and show me what you create!)

How Social Business Can Increase Sales [WEBCAST]

2012-04-19T09:14:00.001-04:00

Still on the fence on whether or not you should embrace Social Business? Well, here's a webcast you can't miss!

LIVE FROM SUGARCON! How Can Social Business Increase Your Sales?

Date: Apr 24, 2012

Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Eastern Time)

Social Business is real and it's about to change the world of sales as you know it. According to a new Nucleus Research report based on interviews with more than 220 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) decision makers, adding social features and mobile access to CRM applications boosted the productivity of sales people by 26.4 percent. In this webcast, Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience Software with IBM, and Chuck Coulson, VP of Business Development at SugarCRM will provide an exclusive introduction live from SugarCon!

Then Chris Lamb, Program Director for Social CRM Software at IBM will show you a day in the life of a sales person in a social business -- what it could look like and how it changes their performance. Then he will walk you through the financial analysis and impact of optimizing your sales team The analysis will help you understand what a team of top performers could mean to your bottom line.

What You'll learn:

- How sentiment analysis will help you understand your customers better than the competition

- How you can take the guess work out of decision-making with predictive analytics

- How you can make your sales teams smarter and close business faster

To register, click here . And if you would like to follow the IBM Collaboration Solutions community, check them out here.

How To Add a Web Meeting Link to IBM Connections Profiles

2012-04-13T10:17:00.001-04:00

All credit here goes to Mitch Cohen for the idea. As I've been updating my demo server this week to record a video on it, it turns out that Mitch asked how to add an attribute to IBM Connections Profiles so that it would be a clickable link to a user's web meeting (whether it's SmartCloud Meetings, VSee, WebEx, etc).

The process for adding a custom attribute to Profiles is documented here, but let me just show you how to do it specifically for web meetings. In the example below, I'm going to focus on SmartCloud Meetings, but if you want to do it for WebEx, for example, it should be very straightforward to modify the configuration that I present below:

Check out profiles-config.xml
Open profiles-config.xml with your favorite text editor
Add the following line under the <profileDataModel> - <profileExtensionAttributes> section:
<simpleAttribute extensionId="meetingId" length="64" />

Now scroll down to the <profileLayout> - <jobLayout> section (or to the <contactInformation> section depending on where you want to add it) and add the following line:

<extensionAttribute showLabel="false" prependHtml="<a href='http://apps.lotuslive.com/meetings/join?id=" appendHtml="'>Join My Meeting</a><br/>" labelKey="label.contactInformation.extattr.meetingId" editable="true" bundleIdRef="myStrings" extensionIdRef="meetingId" />

If you want, you can also add it to the businessCard section so that it appears every time a business card is shown.
Save and close the file
Check it back in
Restart Connections

Once you restart the server, you'll see something like this show up for people who have defined their Meeting ID by going into Edit My Profile.

Now if I were to pull up Jasmine's profile, I'll always be a click away to her virtual meeting room. Clicking on the link immediately launches the web meeting and I don't have to do anything else. Very easy!

Enjoy!

How To Extend Search in IBM Connections

2012-04-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm currently making modifications to my IBM Connections server to record a demo that I've been wanting to do for a week or so now. As I was making some changes, I realized that there was a new feature that was introduced in IBM Connections 3.0.1 that I may have not talked about.

Basically, the IBM Connections search box is extensible so that you can add 3rd party search providers. Say, for example, that you have deployed IBM Connections inside of the firewall and you want to give your users not only the ability to search within Connections, but perhaps integrate with your intranet search engine (e.g. Omnifind, Google Search Appliance, Fast, etc). Or maybe you have deployed Connections outside of the firewall and you want to integrate with your extranet search or provide the ability to do a Google search (or Bing, Yahoo, Quora, etc.).

Well, there's an extension for that and it's pretty easy to set up and no coding is required. Once you set it up, the additional search capability is made available to the end users and now from IBM Connections they can do searches that are handled by 3rd party providers. Very cool, huh?

Here's how it looks:

To set it up, simply follow the instructions here and off you go: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Adding_thirdparty_search_options_to_the_search_control_ic301 . In my demo environment, my intranet search is provided by Portal, so here's the URL format that I used to search Portal from IBM Connections: http://showcase1.demos.ibm.com/wps/myportal/SmarterPlanet/?uri=searchCenter%3Aquery&layoutNode=ibm.portal.Search%20Center%20Portlet%20Window&contentNode=ibm.portal.Search%20Center&query=social (of course, you'll have to update the URL based on your server name and address).

If you weren't aware of this, take advantage of it today!

Enjoy!

The State of Community Management Report for 2012

2012-04-02T15:10:00.001-04:00

For the third year in a row, the Community Roundtable has released it's State of Community Management report. Sponsored in part by IBM, the report is a must read for all community managers and those responsible for social business in their organizations.

What I like about this year's report is how it is organized into patterns of community maturity. Each pattern is associated with a list of resources (books, additional reports, and other references) for community managers to learn more. For example, if you are the community leader for an emergent community (as described in the report) you are given a list of initiatives to pursue to make sure you are following recommended practices.

For those of you who attended my session at SXSW 2012, you might recall that I referenced the 2011 State of Community Management report. And if you have read my recaps on SXSW, you'll see that a lot of my favorite sessions were on community management. I've definitely noticed an increased visibility on community leaders and how important they are as part of a social business strategy. And we can definitely see its effects (as big as they are) all over the world. From the site:

This year the primary difference that we see is in scale of initiatives and the impact of online conversations. It is no longer just about what one community leader can do but about how we can teach our organizations to operate with a community-centric perspective. We have also seen online collective action that has helped topple governments in Tunisia and Egypt, change the policies of major institutions like Bank of America and the Susan G. Komen Foundation and change the decisions of the U.S. Congress. Online communities have become a way to mitigate the risk of groundswell surprises as well as providing an opportunity to innovate more quickly.

The 64-page report in its entirety has been embedded below:

2012 State of Community Management

View more documents from The Community Roundtable

You will probably also be interested in this video interview done with Rachel Happe at Lotusphere 2012 earlier this year:

To learn more about the report, check out the blog post published last week.

IBM Connections Plug-In for Windows Explorer Now Available

2012-03-21T07:01:00.001-04:00

Stop what you are doing immediately! If you've been heads down in the past 2 days, then you've probably missed some amazing news. First, over the weekend, IBM released IBM Connections 3.0.1.1. Immediately after on Monday, IBM released the brand new Desktop Plug-In for Microsoft Windows Explorer.

Check out everything that the plug-in can do:

Upload files for personal use or to share with others
Upload files to a community or attach them to an Activity
Share existing Connections files with other users or with a community
Drag and drop files from your desktop to Connections Files or to a community
View and manage versions of your files
Add comments to files or recommend files
Edit and publish local drafts to Connections
Pin or follow folders and files for easier tracking
View business cards for people and invite them to your network
Easily access all Connections features via browser links

This is huge!!! All of this, as usual, is available at no additional cost from the IBM Connections App Catalog.

As I've mentioned before, I believe that one of the things that helps rapidly gain adoption for a social business platform is bringing social to the end user. Just like in real-estate where location, location, location is critical, I believe that in social is all about integration, integration, integration. If you can bring social to the end user, they use it seamlessly and don't have to learn a new way to collaborate and don't even have to think about it. And, of course, this is all great especially when you can achieve all this integration for free.

Want to see it in action? Check out this video that I recorded (play it in full screen for HD viewing) (oh and yes, you have to watch the whole video as my favorite feature is towards the end of the video):

Download it today and enjoy!!

IBM Connections 3.0.1.1 Now Available

2012-03-19T15:13:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend IBM released IBM Connections 3.0.1.1. I don't intend to cover all the new stuff here, but I figured I would highlight a few things.

First, the release adds new support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 9. Second, there's now integration with IBM Sametime 8.5.2 for presence awareness. Just as before with Sametime 8.5.1, users can see who is online in Connections without installing any additional software on their desktops. This is very cool because it rapidly speeds adoption and eliminates barriers to collaboration. If you are looking for the instructions on how to do that, you can find it here.

Third, administrators who like to run their servers on the latest release of RedHat, they'll be happy to know that RedHat EL 6.1 is now supported as well.

There's also several new controls available to specify how to sort and filter forums (e.g. by answered status), who can respond to community forums (e.g. members-only or everyone), and the ability to specify the default view for forums. I don't intend to cover all the new stuff here, but you can find the fix list for this release is here.

Ready to get started? Good! Here are the installation instructions to upgrade and you can download the actual fix pack from here.

Check Out These Video Interviews at SXSW Interactive 2012

2012-03-19T09:27:00.001-04:00

Now that things are starting to get back to normal I wanted to share some videos that the IBM developerWorks team recorded while at South by Southwest Interactive 2012. Thanks to Todd Watson and Scott Laningham for putting these videos together.

First, Omar Divina from Badgeville talks about gamification and how it can help companies measure and influence user behavior. Omar offers his definition of what gamification. If you are looking to learn how gamification could be used at your company, you'll definitely want to watch this. :

Next, Stowe Boyd who is part of the SXSW board and presented a panel called the Connected Company at SXSWi 2012. Stowe talks to Todd and Scott on how companies are adopting digital and how critical it is to do so. Stowe also talks about his upcoming eBook which talks about why businesses should become more social, how to do so, and some of the tool available out there such as IBM Connections . He calls these work media tools which have the fastest adoption rate as a business tool ever:

Next is an interview with IBM's VP of Social Business Evangelism and Sales, Sandy Carter. Sandy talks about 5 surprises we are seeing in the market with more and more companies becoming a social business. I don't want to give them away, so you'll have to watch:

Next, Don Tapscott, author of Macrowikinomics talks about the new generation entering now the workforce and how connected they are, how different they think, and how they "overshare". Take a peek:

Next, Tim "Washtub" Washer Social Media Lead at Cisco and who previously wrote for David Letterman and The Onion. Given his background you can tell that this is going to be a funny video. Tim also talks about the value of humor in corporate communication.

Here's a recording that Heidi Ambler and I did where we talk about our session at SXSW on the 5 Enterprise Social Media Trends:

The developerWorks team does a wrap-up on the final day of SXSWi :

To see more videos recorded at SXSWi, check them out here.

Recap of Day 5 at SXSW Interactive

2012-03-14T09:38:00.001-04:00

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?

Recap of Day 4 at SXSWi

2012-03-13T12:11:00.001-04:00

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

2012-03-12T12:31:00.001-04:00

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

2012-03-11T10:47:00.001-04:00

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

2012-03-10T08:37:00.000-04:00

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

2012-03-05T12:01:00.000-04:00

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

Demo: Monitoring Lotus Quickr Domino

2012-02-27T11:41:00.001-04:00

A while ago I got together with Steve Bystran from GSX who was here in Puerto Rico for vacation. Luckily, he was staying at a hotel that was very close to me and he offered to take an hour away from his vacation to meet with me. I had heard of GSX's monitoring solution for Quickr Domino at Lotusphere #ls12 but I hadn't seen it in person.

So we got together and I got to see a quick demo of how GSX Monitor integrates with Lotus Quickr Domino to monitor various metrics.

Today, you can use GSX Monitor to:

Monitor Quickr server and service availability
Track and monitor the availability of key places
Monitor authentication, places and catalog availability
Monitor the performance of individual places and send an alert if a particular place does not respond in a specific amount of time
Use Quickr statistics for reporting

If you haven't seen GSX Monitor with Quickr in action, here's the demo:

Enjoy!

New Quickr Domino 8.5.1 FP Released - You'll Want This

2012-02-21T10:25:00.001-04:00

As promised at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12, we have now posted a new Quickr Domino fix pack for 8.5.1. You can find this fix pack in Fix Central or go directly here.

At Lotusphere, we announced that the fix pack would be ready in the first quarter of 2012, and I'm glad that we were able to get this out the door today. The IBM Lotus Quickr Fix Pack 8.5.1.25 for Domino release delivers several features highly requested by Quickr users:

Addition of the Folder Navigator for libraries with deep folder hierarchies and the Index
Improved preview for Microsoft Office file attachments and imported pages
Support for importing HTML
Display of an attachment's last modified date on Attachments tab
Simplified place creation process that eliminates the requirement of reauthentication
The ability for editors and authors to create folders in a place.
Support for Internet Site documents

In case you missed it, here's the roadmap that I shared for Quickr Domino at Lotusphere 2012.

ID224 - What's Coming Quickr Domino Next and Beyond

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

To read what's new in this release in detail, check out What's Enhanced in Quickr Domino 8.5.1 FP 25. This fix pack includes all fix packs up to FP 13.

Now all hands on deck to finalize the new release for later this year.

Blogsy for iPad Now Supports IBM Connections

2012-02-17T14:36:00.001-04:00

Blogsy, one of the top rated blogging apps for iPad, has added support for IBM Connections, IBM's social software platform for business. For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Blogsy team in order to get support for IBM Connections added into Blogsy. It all started back in November when Blogsy reached out to me to understand our API. I got them an account to Greenhouse and they were off to the races.

They got a pretty final prototype working just before Lotusphere #ls12 and I showed it at my session on Monday. The feedback from that session was amazing and people were very excited to get their hands on Blogsy.

Blogsy has revolutionized blogging on the iPad and already interfaces with other popular blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Drupal, Posterous among others.

Blogsy also makes it very easy to add multi media capabilities to blogs by interfacing directly with services such as YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr.

Blogsy also includes a rich text editor which makes formatting very easy. For those advanced users, Blogsy also provides an HTML editor.

The latest release of Blogsy which has just been posted to the iTunes App Store also adds some other features such as:

IBM Connections support - Now bloggers that use IBM Connections can use Blogsy.
Email - Now you can create and send richly formatted emails. Now, if your blogging platform is not supported by Blogsy and provides the ability to email-to-post then you can use Blogsy to create blog posts. Or if you want to send richly formatted email to friends and family. Also other services have features provided through email. For example you can email to Mail Chimp and it will send it to all your subscribers.
YouTube double tap to open in browser. - Not sure if the YouTube video is the one you want to use? Just double tap on it and it will open in Blogsy's built-in browser where you can watch it or find out more information about it.
Blogger page support - Now you can create and edit Blogger pages.
YouTube private/unlisted videos. - Now Blogsy will show YouTube videos you have set to unlisted or private so you can now drag and drop them into your posts.

Check out a demo below of the latest features:

If you are looking for an amazing blogging experience from your iPad, you won't regret purchasing Blogsy for $4.99. To download (or upgrade) Blogsy, click here.

Article first published as Blogsy for iPad Now Supports IBM Connections on Technorati.

Polycom and IBM Help Build a Social Business

2012-02-09T14:34:00.001-04:00

Here's a cool demo created by Polycom showing how their solution integrates with IBM Sametime, IBM Connections, and other office productivity suites that I stumbled upon today.

Some of this was shown at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 during the Opening General Session.

Check it out!

Becoming a Social Business? Don't Forget About Social Business Etiquette

2012-02-07T15:40:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week IBM released a new short whitepaper on the behaviors required in a social business. While a lot of companies focus on how employees engage with others outside of the firewall, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of behavior guidelines in social media behind the firewall.

As more and more companies begin their social business transformation, most are testing the waters internally behind the firewall. One of the recommendations that often comes up as part of this transformation is to set up Social Computing Guidelines. However, those guidelines don't focus on the actual behavior and communication patterns employees use daily as they collaborate amongst each other.

Various colleagues came together to put this together. These are probably IBMers that you have already interacted with such as Rawn Shah, John Rooney, Jennifer Okimoto, Jeanne Murray, and Jacques Pavlenyi.

I don't want to give anything away so instead I'll cover the areas of etiquette highlighted in the paper:

Etiquette in building relationships
Etiquette in interactions
Etiquette in responding to others
Etiquette in including and acknowledging others
Etiquette of mass communications over social networks
Risk and governance

How do you know if this paper is for you? From the paper:

This IBM executive brief is for enterprise leaders who seek to understand the critical role that social business etiquette plays in workforce transformation and in adoption of social business programs. It explores professional interactions among colleagues over online social networks inside the firewall, with particular emphasis on colleagues who do not have an established professional relationship.

The paper is about 10 pages long and is very easy to read. If you are leading the social transformation at your organization this is a great asset to have.

To learn more, and download and read the PDF go here: http://ibm.co/SocBizEtiquette

Want to Drive Adoption of IBM Connections? Check This Out!

2012-02-03T14:47:00.001-04:00

From the Information Development team:

IBM Connections 3.0.1 has a new getting started experience to interactively guide users through steps for setting up and using IBM Connections. Each step lets you Learn more, Watch video or Do it. Want to see how other people are using IBM Connections to do social business? The new getting started walks you through the same steps others have taken to network with colleagues, join a community, start an activity, and share files.

Two ways to use Getting Started with IBM Connections:

Try out Getting Started with IBM Connections that uses IBM Connections hosted in Lotus Greenhouse. You'll need your Lotus Greenhouse credentials to log in.
Already purchased IBM Connections? Administrators can download the IBM Getting Started sample for IBM Connections and customize it for their environment. http://tinyurl.com/connections-gettingstarted

Here's how it looks:

Enjoy!