Connecting At IBM Connect 2013

IBM Connect 2013 and Lotusphere are the same events this year, which kicked off this morning down in Orlando, Florida.

IBM is carrying extensive live and on-demand coverage via its Livestream channel, and this year the event is following three “streams,” including “Creating A Smarter Workforce,” “Creating an Exceptional Customer Experience,” and the “Lotusphere Technical Program.”

If you’re interested in keeping apace via Twitter, the official conference hashtag is #ibmconnect.  To get a good gander from a variety of smart folks (many of whom are attending the event), you can follow this “Team Social” Twitter list.

Speaking of Twitter, there are a couple of Tweetups, one on Tuesday from 4:30-6:00 PM EST in Dolphin Suite #10-110 (and co-sponsored by Avnet).

Tonight’s Tweetup is from 7:00-7:30 EST PM in the Showcase Social Cafe, and will feature a number of IBM Champions.

You can also follow the IBM Connect action in the blogosphere, including in the IBM Social Business Insight Blog. 

Of course, Ed Brill’s blog is a must read during the event (Ed has a new book out entitled Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager, and I’m sure will have much news on his blog throughout the week).

Finally, Happy Twitter Anniversary to me.  Twopcharts informed me via Tweetdeck that today is apparently my 6 year Twitter anniversary.

At which point I immediately started having flashbacks to that 2007 SXSW when Twitter was first “tipping” and everyone used it to make their lunch plans and to do mass migrations out of really bad sessions at SXSW. I’m sure at least a few you out there remember that moment in time, and if not, you should, because it has become part of the historical lore behind the rise of Twitter.

Live From IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit: The Magic Of This Kingdom

When I arrived in Orlando yesterday for the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, which kicked off here earlier this morning, I started having flashbacks.

No, not those kind of flashbacks, the hallucinatory kind!

No, these were childhood flashbacks. To when I must have been 6 or 7, and I experienced my first firsthand brand impressions of Disneyworld.

My mom and dad were some patient people, carrying my sister and I all the way to one end of the country from Texas to experience all the magic that Walt Disney had imagined.

And magic it was.

I don’t remember much in detail, but in emotional impression, I remembered a lot. I remembered cruising along on “It’s a Small World” ride, when, in fact, the world still seemed quite big and grandiose to me.

I also remember the haunted house ride, the one where the ghost sits next to you, even if for a brief spell.  I was frickin’ mortified, terrified…and exhilirated, all at the same time.

And Space Mountain…well, don’t get me started. I might as well have been on another planet.

I haven’t even gotten to seeing the Disney characters come to life walking around the Animal Kingdom, or Snow White in that beautiful castle.

Mind you, these experiences transpired roughly forty years ago (I’m trying not to be TOO precise), and yet the fondness and remembrance they created for me were…well, simply magic.

I’m sure that’s not why we bring all our customers here to Orlando, to experience Disney’s magic.  I’m sure we’ve gotten some good economies of scale for holding our events here, and certainly we (and our own customers) get great service while staying at the Disney properties.

Then again, that kind of IS the point.

As we come together to discuss the opportunities and challenges for Smarter Commerce over the next few days, we’d be wise to remember that not everything that creates business magic is something you can sell or even mimic.

The integrity and honesty of a real and positive brand experience should have and be just that, integral and honest.

If your company genuinely desires to create a positive and integral experience, then it will be so.

But to try and put it on and wear it as an after-the–fact costume…well, Mickey Mouse will have never been outed so fast!

When IBM launched its Smarter Commerce initiative last year, we tried to make sure we were wearing an appropriate costume. IBM has invested some $3 billion in acquisitions in this space, and created an IBM Global Business Services team of 1,000 focusing exclusively on Smarter Commerce.

Our Websphere Commerce technology, which was already a leading, organic product in the marketplace, was evolved, with both client and general market feedback, to expand and cover the entire B2B2C commerce lifecycle end to end.

But probably most importantly, and not unlike Walt Disney, we recognized that our own customers’ customers were going to be the ultimate measure of our success.

We live in an amazing age of the empowered customer, one who has unlimited to access to information and who can instantly share his or her experience with the entire planet…and does!

Because technology has empowered those customers with greater access to transparency to information and raised their own expectations for relevant communications, superior price, delivery, and service, so, too, must our customers raise their game, and we at IBM, our own.

Hence the discussions you’ll be tuning into and participating in over these next three days.

Soak it up. Take notes. Talk to everybody you can. Don’t waste a moment. Some of the best minds within IBM, and the broader industry, are here just for all of you to help you on your journey.

As for me, I’ll be here, and on the Solutions Center floor interviewing some of those great minds for our YouTube channel. 

And if I can, I’m going to try and break away just for a few moments so I can go say hi, and make peace, with some old ghost friends of mine.

I have a distinct feeling Walt Disney wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Customer Sessions At The IBM Smarter Commerce Summit

Well, we’re nearly mid-summer here in the great state of Texas, the sun is shining, and IBMers are hard at work planning for the forthcoming Smarter Commerce Summit to be held down in Orlando, Florida, September 5-7.

This event is the third in a series of Smarter Commerce events we’ve held the last year. First, there was San Diego…then there was Madrid in May (You can read some of the coverage of that event here).

And now, Orlando.

But this will be no Mickey Mouse expedition.

The IBM Smarter Commerce Summit in Orlando will provide business execs and practitioners with the insight and resources they need to more effectively connect with their customers.

Orlando’s event will bring together over 150 business and practitioner breakout sessions comprised of everything from new technology to best practices to industry perspectives and yes, even some visionary thinking from the likes of tech guru Guy Kawasaki, who will be keynoting there.

But there’s another aspect of the Smarter Commerce Summit that makes it such a one-of-a-kind event: You get to hear directly from our customers.

Scores of them.

In fact, if you click here you’ll get an up-to-the-minute view of the customer-led sessions for the event thus far.  I built a quick tag-cloud this afternoon to give folks a flavor of some of the types of discussions one is likely to find in those customer sessions:

The larger words are more dominant in terms of their use, so you can judge by the cloud there’s going to be mucho focus on IBM customers, as well as topics focusing on “marketing,” “Mmanagement”, “commerce,” “global,” “integration,” and much more.

You can also find broader access to the Session Preview Tool to get a glimpse of all the currently-scheduled sessions.

You can also start following the #ibmscgs Twitter hashtag to keep up with key announcements and information leading up and throughout the course of the event.

If you’re already sold on the idea and just want to know where to go register, visit this link for all the details and the registration form.

Smarter Customers Require Smarter Commerce

Guy Kawasaki will present a keynote at IBM’s Smarter Commerce Global Summit, being held Sept 5-7 in Orlando, Florida. Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed and early stage venture capital fund. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web—the success of which is attributed to social networking tools such as Twitter. He is considered one of the top 50 most popular bloggers worldwide. Previously, Guy Kawasaki was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy Kawasaki has a BA in psychology from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

I mentioned in previous posts the upcoming IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit that will be held in Orlando, Florida September 5-7.

As the overview for the event explains, there’s no question that your customers are in charge. They now have more information, more access, and more influence than ever, and it takes a smarter marketing organization to keep up with these ever smarter customers.

The Smarter Commerce Summit 2012 provides a great venue for business execs and practitioners to come together and gain insight and access to resources that enable them to more effectively connect with those customers.

The event combines over 150 business and practitioner breakout sessions comprised of new technology, best practices, industry perspectives and visionary thinking, all to help you potimize your own business.

It is the single largest gathering of experts and peers for discovering new solutions to today’s most complex digital challenges.

We’ve recently announced our keynote speakers, including Guy Kawasaki, founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures and a one-time Apple executive. I saw Guy speak at the IBM Smart Camp Global Finals earlier this year in San Francisco, and have enjoyed his keynote discussions at SXSW Interactive for a number of years. There’s only a handful of speakers around who can get you re-energized about the opportunity technology presents for innovation, while entertaining you in the process, and Guy is definitely one of them.

At the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando, Guy will discuss “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions,” a talk based on his tenth book that explains how you can not only get your own way, but also bring about voluntary, enduring and delightful change in your organization.

The Session Preview Tool is now available to give you a glimpse of some of the sessions you’ll find on the ground in Orlando, and remember, you can also follow #ibmscgs via Twitter to keep up with key announcements and information leading up to the event.

As of press time, my associate Scott Laningham and I will be in attendance as we were in Madrid, providing on-the-ground blogging and Webcasting coverage so you can better understand how IBM is helping companies around the globe practice smarter commerce.

If you’re already sold on the idea and just want to know where to go register, visit this link for all the details and the registration form.

Urgent, Urgent, Urgent…

Excuse me while I just sing out loud to myself for a second:

You’re not shy, you get around

You wanna fly, don’t want your feet on the ground

You stay up, you won’t come down

You wanna live, you wanna move to the sound

You say it’s urgent (urgent, urgent…)

Okay, we’re gonna play human Shazam.

Name that tune!

Need a hint?  Lou Graham?  Singers of “Cold As Ice?” “Hot Blooded?” “Juke Box Hero?”

Of course, I’m talking about Foreigner.  And I’m talking about them not only because they were a band instrumental to my youth, but because they’ll be playing at the IBM Innovate event next week in Orlando.

I won’t be in attendance, but my partner-in-crime, Scott Laningham, will be there and covering the event, and I’m entirely jealous all my colleagues and our customers are going to see Foreigner and I’m not.

You can still register, and if you do, you can expect to select from over 400 technical sessions, some extended technical training with hands-on workshops, great keynotes, a comprehensive exhibit hall, and the opportunity to network with over 4,000 of your peers.

What else do you want?

We’re going to have mountaineers and string theorists among our external keynote speakers, not to mention one of my favorite IBM execs, Rational’s vice president of marketing, Gina Poole.

Here’s just a few of the key tracks you can look to follow while in Orlando: Application lifecycle management. Design, development, test and deployment. Embedded systems and software. Security. Smarter computing with enterprise modernization.

A little something for every developer in all of us.

If, like me, you can’t be there in the flesh, there’s going to be more than ample opportunity to follow the stream from beyond. First and foremost, use the #ibminnovate hash tag to keep track on Twitter.

You can also watch some of the great video content Scott and team will be producing at www.livestream.com/ibmsoftware.

Scott tells me I might even be making a guest remote appearance.

But whether I make it or not, if you’re in the software development realm, I don’t know why you would be anywhere else next week.

Just don’t tell me how great Foreigner was when you get back.

Live @ Lotusphere 2012: Day 1 Vodcast Recap

Scott Laningham is not here at Lotusphere 2012 this year…at least, not corporeally.  But he is here in spirit, and yesterday afternoon, I spoke with him live from Studio 8004 here at the Dolphin Hotel in Orlando and debriefed him on all things Lotusphere Day 1, the Turbo POV, for The developerWorks Podcast.

We discussed day 1 themes and talks, including that wonderful keynote from actor Michael J. Fox, as well as some of the key announcements and an overview of the IBM social business strategy.  Keep an eye out here on the Turbo blog and Twitter to be reminded of future Lotusphere podcasts…in the meantime, let Day 2 begin!