Turbo Slidecast: Organizing For Social Business

I mentioned in a post recently that I was to speak at the annual WOMMA Summit (WOMMA standing for “Word Of Mouth Marketing Association”) about IBM’s efforts to better organize itself to take advantage of the social business opportunity.

After lumbering through the SlideShare “slidecast” capability and learning my way around (and no, it really wasn’t that difficult — I’m just a slow learner), I was able to create a slidecast of the presentation I gave in Las Vegas for those of you who may be interested.

As I noted in that blog post leading up to my talk, the general theme of my session there centered on the challenges and opportunities larger organizations face as they go about building their social strategies, and sharing particular insights and experiences we’ve had inside IBM on this front.

At IBM, our social business strategy has very much centered around one of our best market-facing emissaries, the IBMer! If you’ve kept pace with any of our marketing initiatives in recent times, you know that the IBMer is front and center in those communications, most notably in our TV advertising, but also extensively in the digital and social media as well.

But their participation doesn’t end there.

We’ve featured subject matter experts extensively across a wide range of topics and across a range of venues in the digital and social media space, as well as in other public and sometimes private venues (think conferences, events, customer meetings, etc.).

This direction is very much in keeping with IBM’s high-touch sales heritage, but builds on that legacy by making our people more accessible via social venues as well.

So, please, take some time out of your busy day if you’re interested in learning more about IBM’s social business efforts, and hopefully you’ll walk away with some of the actionable insights we’ve garnered that can help you and your organization in your own social business journey.

Just click on the arrow to play, kick back, and relax!

Turbo To Speak @ WOMMA Summit: Organizing For Social Business

Happy Monday.

I mentioned in a recent post that I’d be attending the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Summit next week in Las Vegas.

It’s going to be my first time attending a WOMMA event, and for that I’m most excited.  I’ll also be speaking at the event, and recently participated in an interview with WOMMA’s Jacob Hurwith to chat about some of the topics that would inevitably come up in my presentation, “Organizing For Social Business.” (Monday, Nov. 12, 4:30-5:15 PST)

The WOMMA Summit being held next week in Las Vegas will feature social media experts and word of mouth marketing practitioners from some of the leading brands and organizations around the world. I’ll also be speaking on the topic of “Organizing For Social Business,” and IBM’s Carolyn Baird will be sharing detailed results from IBM’s recent Chief Marketing Officer study.

The general theme of my session will center around the challenges and opportunities larger organizations face as they go about building their social strategies, sharing particular insights and experiences we’ve had inside IBM over the past number of years on this front.

At IBM, our social business strategy has very much centered around one of our best market-facing emissaries, the IBMer! If you’ve kept pace with any of our marketing initiatives in recent times, you know that the IBMer is front and center in those communications, most notably in our TV advertising, but also extensively in the digital and social media as well.

But their participation doesn’t end there.

We’ve featured subject matter experts extensively across a wide range of topics and across a range of venues in the digital and social media space, as well as in other public and sometimes private venues (think conferences, events, customer meetings, etc.).

As I’ll note in my talk, this direction is very much in keeping with IBM’s high-touch sales heritage, but builds on that legacy by making our people more accessible via social venues as well.

That said, don’t think encouraging very busy professionals to participate in social venues doesn’t come without some challenges — organizational, economical, cultural — all of which are an integral part of the story that I also look forward to sharing with my fellow attendees in Las Vegas.

Speaking of which, another fellow IBMer, Carolyn Baird, is also going to be presenting at WOMMA.  Carolyn will be sharing insights from IBM’s global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study, one of the largest ever conducted of CMOs worldwide.

The study revealed that CMOs are under enormous pressure to manage a much broader range of responsibilities than ever before, and that underpinning this evolution is a growing dependency on technology that is reshaping CMOs’ strategies and priorities.

Carolyn’s session will share how CMOs are managing these shifts and the impact all of this is having on the CMO-CIO relationship (Carolyn’s session takes place Tuesday, Nov. 13th, from 11:45AM-12:30 PM).

Though I’m certainly excited to sharing IBM’s social story at such a distinguished convocation, I’m even more excited about hearing from my fellow social media enthusiasts. I took the names of all the organizations expected to be presenting at WOMMA, and you can see the vast breadth and diversity of companies and organizations represented in the Wordle cloud above.

If you’re going to be attending WOMMA, please look me up and introduce yourself. It’s the rare opportunity we social media practitioners have to get together in “meatspace” face to face, so I’m looking forward to meeting some new faces, and saying hello to some familiar ones, during my visit to Vegas (My fourth trip there this year!)

To follow the tidings on Twitter from the Summit, use the hashtag #WOMMASummit.

For my session, I’ll ask that folks use the hashtag #WOMMAturbo.

Impressions From SXSW Interactive 2012: Q&A With IBM Social Leaders George Faulkner & Susan Emerick

One of the best parts of attending SXSW Interactive 2012 these days is to meet other IBMers.

That wasn’t always the case — for many years, it was a lonely IBM vista in March at SXSW Interactive.

But this year, all that changed, and two of my good friends and colleagues in particular, George Faulkner and Susan Emerick, spent some time with Scott and I on the IBM “Future of Social” couch discussing how IBM approaches the social media.

George has been a stalwart in IBM social media — I worked with him way back in the Jurassic Age of the social Web, in 2006, on the IBM ShortCuts podcast series.

And Susan has been a digital leader in and of her own right, most recently helping IBMers who haven’t been as active in the social media to get up on their feet and establish their social media eminence.

This thought-provoking interview opens the kimono a bit on the challenges and opportunities a large organization like IBM faces in opening itself up to the social media, and explains how, in fact, IBM gets 400,000 IBMers on the same page so they can successfully change the corporate social media light bulb.

Lotusphere And Connect 2012: Making New Connections

Greetings.  I meant to say in my post from earlier today a big congratulations to the U.S. Team which held on to golf’s President’s Cup after a week of turbulent golf down under at Royal Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia.

Lotusphere 2012 will be held January 15-19, 2012, in Orlando, Florida, and will feature the two-day "Connect" event for those looking to go deep and long on social business.

Despite the controversy around U.S. Captain Freddy Couples “captain’s choice” of Tiger Woods, who hasn’t exactly been at the top of his game of late, it was Woods who, two President’s Cups in a row, clinched the cup in a singles match Sunday against Aaron Baddeley.  Woods won 5 and 3.

Tiger Woods is back.  Yay for golf!

And as professional golf in the U.S. fades further into the sunset of winter, not to be fully awakened until early January, we do know what happens in Orlando, Florida, in mid-January: Lotusphere 2012, and this year’s sister event, “IBM Connect.”

For those not in the know from years past, Lotusphere 2012 is a five-day technical conference that covers a broad array of topics focused on social business, ranging from strategy and best practices, adoption and deployment, to capabilities and solutions. As usual, there will be the familiar session tracks, labs, and the Solutions Showcase.  And of course, yours truly, along with my developerWorks livecasting guru Scott Laningham, will be in attendance conducting interviews and covering the event tidings for the blogosphere.

But, there’s more.  This year, the larger event will also be hosting an “event within the event,” in the form of “Connect 2012,” a two-day social business conference that will provide a venue for company leaders and IBM experts to share strategies, challenges, and best practices (not to mention a few Twitter IDs) for exploiting pervasive social technologies to achieve tangible advances in company performance.

So, if you have a few business leaders that you’re still trying to get on the social cluetrain, IBM Connect could be just what the doctor ordered — make sure you get them the invite info.

Here’s a breakdown of the topline “tick tock” for Lotusphere and IBM Connect 2012:

• Business Partner Development Day (Sunday, January 15)
• Connect 2012 (Monday and Tuesday, January 16-17)
• Lotusphere 2012 (Monday-Thursday, January 15-19)

Here’s a link to everything you’ll need to know to register and make sure that Lotus Knows you’re planning to attend Lotusphere and Connect 2012.  Until December 2, 2011, Lotusphere registration is a mere $1,995 (U.S.), but goes up to $2,295 on December 3rd (Connect 2012 is $995 U.S.)

So register while there are still seats available, and know I’ll be sharing more details as we get closer to the two events.

Solid State, Solid Storage

Solid state has evolved way beyond simply replacing vacuum tubes.

IBM today released the findings of a customer survey that demonstrates pent-up demand for solid state disk technology as a successor to flash and hard disk drives.

Customers are embracing high-performance solid-state disks to support growing data storage demands driven by cloud computing and analytics technologies.

More than half of the customer surveyed (57%) responded that their organization needs to develop a new storage approach to manage future growth. The survey of 250 U.S. IT professionals in decision-making positions was conducted by Zogby International in August 2011 on behalf of IBM.

The survey demonstrates a need for a new class of storage that can expand the market for solid-state drives (SSDs) by combining increased data delivery with lower costs and other benefits.

Nearly half (43 percent) of IT decision makers say they have plans to use SSD technology in the future or are already using it. Speeding delivery of data was the motivation behind 75 percent of respondents who plan to use or already use SSD technology. Those survey respondents who are not currently using SSD said cost was the reason (71 percent).

Anticipating these challenges years ago, IBM Research has been exploring storage-class memory, a new category of data storage and memory devices that can access data significantly faster than hard disk drives — at the same low cost.

Racetrack memory, a solid-state breakthrough technology, is a potential replacement for hard drives and successor to flash in handheld devices. A storage device with no moving parts, it uses the spin of electrons to access and move data to atomically precise locations on nanowires 1,000 times finer than a human hair.

This technique combines the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of the hard-disk drive. It could allow electronic manufacturers to develop devices that store much more information — as much as a factor of 100 times greater — while using less energy than today’s designs. Racetrack memory is featured as one of IBM’s top 100 achievements as the company celebrates its Centennial this year.

These new storage technologies could also alleviate critical budget, power and space limitations facing IT administrators. Today, an average transaction-driven datacenter uses approximately 1,250 racks of storage, taking up 13,996 square feet and 16,343 kilowatts (kw) of power. By 2020, storage-class memory could enable the same amount of data to fit in one rack that takes up 11 square feet and 5.8 kws of power.

Following are further details from the survey:

• Nearly half (43 percent) say they are concerned about managing Big Data;
• About a third of all respondents (32 percent) say they either plan to switch to more cloud storage in the future or currently use cloud storage;
• Nearly half (48 percent) say they plan on increasing storage investments in the area of virtualization, cloud (26 percent) and flash memory/solid state (24 percent) and analytics (22 percent); and
• More than a third (38 percent) say their organization’s storage needs are growing primarily to drive business value from data. Adhering to government compliance and regulations that require organizations to store more data for longer — sometimes up to a decade — was also a leading factor (29 percent).

You can learn more about IBM Storage technologies here.  Also visit the blog from IBM storage expert and Master Inventor, Tony Pearson, who’s a longtime storage consultant and who writes on storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.

20 Years @ Big Blue

Happy Anniversary to me!

Today, I celebrate my 20th year with the IBM Company.

Turbo looks back and celebrates his 20th year working @ Big Blue.

When I tell people I’ve been here this long, they just shake their heads.  People just don’t do that anymore!

It’s been a wild and amazing ride, and the interesting thing is, it only gets that more interesting.  I can honestly say that I’ve honestly said at any number of particular points in my career, “it only gets more interesting.”

These days, it’s the opportunity to further explore the outer reaches of search marketing, customer response management online, and social media intelligence.

When I started IBM at its Southlake facility on August 19, 1991, near the DFW airport, it was desktop publishing.

In between, it was OS/2 v. Windows, the early commercialization of the Internet, the Y2K threat, IBM’s own transformation into an e-business, the rise of Linux and open computing, and so much more.

The day I started IBM was the same day that Boris Yeltsin stood on the tanks outside the Russian White House, in defiance of the coup plotters.  But instead of getting the news from my iPad, I got it from a printed edition of The New York Times.

When I started work here, I was 25 years old and greener than Augusta National golf course. I remember them telling me I had to talk to people on the phone: What was I going to say??

My computer was a PS/2 workstation when I started, running my beloved OS/2, but a lot of our work was done via the mainframe green screen (VM!).  I sometimes miss those character-based terminals.  They weren’t always pretty, but they were FAST, and they got the job done (which, for me, at the time was as a writer and editor of several IBM magazines).

I still remember putting up my first Website.  I was not then, and still am not, a programmer, but I taught myself HTML so I could publish our magazine Software Quarterly on the World Wide Web.  Nobody knew what that was at the time, but that didn’t stop me.

During my tenure, I’ve visited cities and countries that I never envisioned I would ever see in person, and in the process I’ve gained a greater understanding of the world and our collective humanity.

I’ve also witnessed some dramatic evolutions of the conditions of the IBM business, of the use of our technology to solve real-world business problems, and dramatic changes in our communications and marketing.

When I first joined, IBM was talking to the world about building solutions for a smaller planet.

Now, responding to the challenging business conditions and the unique opportunities a smaller, networked world presents, we’re talking about a smarter planet instead.

That’s a perfect reduction of my past twenty years with Big Blue — my own world has become much smaller and much smarter.

And that, I can assure you, is because of the gift of having had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented people around on this smaller and smarter world.

Because if you think it’s a small world outside Big Blue, you should see what life is like inside IBM after twenty years.

You find yourself working with people for awhile, then moving on and working with another group of people, only to years later, finding yourself working with someone else you’ve worked with before, and this time, like you never missed a beat.

I think maybe we should start referring to the company as “Small Blue” instead.

No matter the moniker, it’s the rare opportunity a human gets to do work that one loves in collaboration with people whom one greatly admires in an effort to literally change the way the world does its business, and all while having the chance to travel to the nether regions of our smaller and smarter planet.

To all of you inside and outside “Small Blue” who have played a part in my 20- year journey thus far, in this, IBM’s own centennial year, I just wanted to take this quick opportunity to say “Thanks!”

Or should I say, T-H-I-N-K.  ;  )

Having An Impact

I’m heading out to Las Vegas on Sunday.  Again.

And I’ve worn out all the “what happens in Vegas” and “Hangover” jokes, so I’ll get straight to the point:

I’m heading to Vegas to have an Impact.

Seriously.

Impact 2011 starts this weekend and kicks into high gear on Monday, and I’m going to be there to blog and provide some live videocasting support.

The IBM Impact 2011 Global Conference is expecting to bring together more than 6,600 technology and business leaders at a single event to learn how to work smarter for better business outcomes.

At Impact, IT professionals will be able to master the latest business process management, SOA and Cloud solutions and obtain certifications, and business professionals can sharpen their leadership skills and learn best practices for overcoming complexity with increased agility (including a track on marketing!)

The event will be hosted at The Venetian and Palazzo Hotels in Las Vegas, April 10 to 15, but if you can’t make it live and in person, there will be plenty of folks providing social media coverage.

Here’s how you can keep up with Impact both at the event and remotely:

First, follow TwitterID @ibmimpact and hashtag #ibmimpact

Second, check the IBM Impact Conversations site at ibm.com/social/impact.

Third, check the IBM Impact blog.

Fourth, keep an eye on the Impact Livestream channel.

And keep an eye on the main Impact portal to get a bird’s eye overview of the event agenda, speakers, and topics.

So, come on down to Vegas, leave your ATM card at home, stop by the trade show floor, keep an eye out for the klieg lights and stop by to say “hey” to Scott Laningham and I.

P.S. Speaking of having an impact, I want to take a moment to wish my esteemed IBM social media colleague, Adam Christensen, a bon voyage and best of luck in his new position as the social media lead for Juniper Networks. Adam has been a shining social media beacon at Big Blue these past few years, and I know I speak for many of his colleagues when I say we’re all very sorry to see him go, and that he’ll be very much be missed as he helped us all make IBM’s world-class social media efforts what they are today.

Clearly, our loss is Juniper’s gain, and we expect great things from him there.  But, as Adam himself Tweeted earlier, “once an IBMer, always an IBMer.”

Good luck in the new venture, buddy…we’ll all be eagerly awaiting the latlong of the best taco stands in Silicon Valley.