IBM SocMed Residencies

At IBM Impact there was a fresh group of Social Media Residency people. All IBMers, unlike my group almost 2 years ago, so these people should really know what they are talking about.

The new recruits spent two days before Impact prepping and learning before they were left to go during the event to see what they could come up with on their own.

I give IBM a lot of credit for doing something like this in parallel to an event. It provides a sink or swim approach, perhaps, but really solves the biggest problem people face, namely, what am I going to write about.

While I have not blogged about every session I went to, hard to do so when you are in meetings or on calls most of the time, I do have some ideas from the sessions I did attend and no doubt so do the new recruits.

The process that Martin and his Redbooks crew have run people through is something that IBM could probably do for other companies and make some money to extend this project further. They should at least present the details at whatever conferences this could help others, maybe the Training 2015 Conference in February.

Aside from the basics like what is social media, they discuss the various ways to be social, they learn about the ways to influence and promote themselves and the products they represent. There are sessions on how to pick a topic or appropriate titles and why that is important. It is not just textual training like Twitter or blogging either, there are also podcasts, webinars and other ways for the "students" to express themselves.

In addition there is a team of editors that are managed by an excellent editor to ensure that what is published is up to IBM guidelines and standard grammar rules. Unlike my writing here and there, still not sure how they let me get away with this or this (the IBM site was unavailable for both posts at time of writing this post).

After the training there are follow up meetings, usually conference calls, where everyone gets to hash out ideas or present new topics. I miss these, aside from hearing everyone's voice, it was fun to throw around ideas and be creative.

Should you have the opportunity to be a part of these residencies, I strongly encourage you to apply and enjoy some of the most fun training IBM will ever give you.

To everyone finishing up the residency today, remember to always thank your editor for making your work better, that Martin loves doing videos so keep asking him to do them, and lastly have fun!

Who Saw Your Slides?

As part of the IBM Redbook Thought Leaders, I had originally wrote this post for the IBM Social Business Insights blog. This is my first two part post there.

Who saw your slides? Four tips on getting more shares (Part 1)

Has this ever happened to you? You spend weeks working on your presentation for the big conference and when your day arrives you get into presenter mode, show up early to your appointed room and prepare to take the stage. You think to yourself, this is going to be a great session¸ and progress through your slides. Before you know it, you’ve reached the time for Q&A, you say thank you and it's over.

Go read more over here.

A New IBM Redbook is out on CCM

Happy to announce that after a few months of effort, our Redbook is available for everyone.

Making the move to IBM Connections 4.5 and IBM Connections Content Manager

Our leader, Whei-Jen Chen deserves the credit for getting us all to finish on time and stick to her plan.

Hopefully it will help you in your quest to migrate from Lotus Quickr and into the IBM Connections.

Thank you to everyone that took part in it, including the IBM team behind CCM who answered our numerous questions around what was still in beta code when we were writing this Redbook.

I am also pointing everyone to Luis Benitez who provided these two great blog posts:

Demo: Deep Dive of IBM Connections Content Manager 4.5

A Little About IBM Connections Content Manager 4.5

It Is Official, I am an IBM Websphere Champion too

"Congratulations and Happy New Year - you have been selected as an IBM Champion for WebSphere software! "

I am stunned and amazed at this recognition, what can I say beyond thank you to the selection committee and my friends, especially Dave and Sharon, for all their technical help when Websphere got the better of me early on. Okay, it still gets the better of me, but I am more on top of it now.

The official announcement is here. Looking at the list, I am more humbled, because in no way do I represent that deep technical side of Websphere some of the people represent. One can only imagine it was because my clients helped me get here. Thanks to Bob and Jorge who nominated me.

Hopefully I can make my presence in the Websphere community stronger over time with Daphne's and Justin's help.

For the record I am not the first dual IBM Champion. But am the first to also be a Redbooks Thought Leader.

When did you first "get" Social Business?

20 years ago when I first saw Lotus Notes.


How our business benefits:
How Social Business helps in my day:
The Commercial we did for Redbooks:


Bloopers Reel:


Thanks for watching and keep reading Redbooks!

Social Residency a Review

   

graphic originally from Femke's blog

I am now an IBM Redbooks Thought Leader along with five other friends and the original six which were the startup guinea pigs of the IBM Social Residency. Now we are The Social Dozen. We also use the hashtag #ibmsocialbiz and you should follow it if Social Business, Connections or anything else is of interest.


A week in Raleigh is what it takes to enter this special group. Okay, that and an application which gets reviewed and it helps to already be blogging, social, into IBM Connections and other ICS solutions and have something unique to say at times. I was the only American in the group or if I use my irish citizenship...we were all foreigners. Something which we discussed as well along the way.

Not for the faint of heart, there are manufacturing ghosts from decades past, a surplus depot which is to die for if you are a true tech geek (oh the things one can find), lunch and coffee was a mile hike inside the building(I love old IBM buildings for their architecture, design and signage that provides us glimpses into what it was like in prior times) and many other unique items along the way of your travels, like pirates and skeletons, The Whole Internet and which beer indicates your social aptitude (pics from class of this here and here) among other interesting discussions. But enough sightseeing, what did we do and what does it all mean?

The idea was to bring in people from different parts of life such as technical, sales, blogger, wiki writer, IBMer and Business Partner. we had a great group and our evening activities only spurred us on to greater topics the next day. Indeed we felt it was like Lotusphere in some ways because it was very social and no one was left out of any outings. I guess you can't take the Lotus out of us.

The sessions we experienced spanned the ICS offerings in addition to hitting on IBM Watson, IBM Content Manager, IBM SmartCloud, IBM Cognos (which I already blogged about) and some more formal IBM guideline sessions for our blogging.

We will eventually become part of the blog posting members of this site:

screenshot from the original IBM site

But what will we discuss? This was the question which ran throughout the week in our sessions with numerous IBMers and our own brainstorming sessions.

For me the brainstorming sessions were very useful because when I blog, and presumably for most people it is the same, I rarely have a queue of topics/ideas. I have some posts on save/hold but rarely do I have a title and then go write. This forced each of us to produce 3-5 topics and titles which we then hashed out some details.

Along the way during the week we tested some ideas around Gamification, Klout(it worked), Google Plus +1, social media, Facebook Likes, customer engagements and work around when faced with challenging situations.

What does all of it mean? It means we were free flowing ideas, looking at angles to discuss and blog about and work to a greater good. It is not all altruistic, it is in essence a way to get ourselves and our companies and blogs to a new group of people who trust Redbooks and we hope in turn trust us to work with us in the future.

We shot a few short videos which highlight our usage of social tools and just before leaving we did an impromptu commercial for Redbooks. After 20 years of reading and using them, I thought we should give something back for the IBM team to show their management what we all think of Redbook's and luckily so did everyone else.


We have a weekly conference call to maintain updates on blog posts and other ideas and/or IBM info so we will maintain our efforts and not forget what it was all about. A very critical point, just because the heavy work is done, does not mean you should forget about the customer. I look forward to those calls.

It is expected we will produce 1 post a month on average with the first one due about 2 weeks within completion of the residency. The posts are reviewed for IBM guidelines among other items and then set to publish which is when I can start encouraging others to read it and mention it on my social networks. You have been warned...social media efforts will be published.

If you ever get a chance to be a part of the Redbooks you should because IBM Redbooks ROCK!

Want to do a residency? Go here to see what is available.