Last week IBM invited their clients, business partners, journalists, analysts and social business enthusiasts to attend their key event in Germany in 2012: the IBM Connect at the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. And I had the pleasure to attend as an employee of IBM's PR agency in Germany. The entire event has been quite a success (I leave it to their Marketing team to use words like “huge” or “fantastic” :-), from the venue IBM picked this year to the selection of speakers.
The fact that the event was sold out with 400 people shows that the topic Social Business is definitely trending in Germany and in German companies. People are interested in learning from other companies about how they're using social software for their business, why they decided to take this step and about results.
After Maria Gomez, Director IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions IBM Germany, and Alistair Rennie kicked off the event, the attendees learned from five German clients how they're using social software: GAD, Robert Bosch, Hamm Reno, Hansgrohe and Bayer. It has been a very good decision to invite so many clients presenting their individual social business story. There are normally more IBM owned presentations at such events.
And IBM couldn't have told this story better than their clients who are using the software every day and who are also mentioning issues or challenges they're facing and how they are dealing with it. And I think that's more convincing than anything else because nobody believes typical marketing phrases that everything is working without any hiccups.
In addition to the 400 attendees on-site, more than 150 people have been watching the Livestream which is still available on demand. More than 150 tweets have been sent out on that day only using the hashtag #ibmconnect and more than 30,000 accounts have been reached, according to Tweetreach. And finally, IBM has organized two roundtable discussions with Alistair Rennie and journalists and analysts attending the event.
I really hope that events like this one will help spreading the social business story even further. It's definitely a good sign already that there aren't any condescending smiles anymore when people are listening to speakers standing on stage and talking about how using social software internally and externally makes them better in what they are doing every day.