On Tuesday I attend my first Social Media Leadership Forum breakfast briefing, run by IT’s Open, in London. I was invited to attend as one of our Social Business experts, Jon Machtynger (@synapticity), was going to be speaking about Collaboration in the workplace. 

I am not a morning person but really glad that I went to the event, there were some great sessions from Virgin, Person, & BUPA (and IBM!). The Q&A hosted by Tom Standage from the Economist, who posed some really insightful questions of his own to the mornings speakers, as well as taking a few from the audience.

Jon’s session started by looking at what Social Collaboration is all about and how IBM has tackled it and the trends influencing our collaboration strategy

-          - Social networks are putting people online as never before - Unified channel for discovery and interaction

-          - Mobile devices are magnifying reach and interaction -Higher frequency of (shorter) transactions Online and reachable more of the time

-          - Content analytics are making knowledge more accessible -More focus on insight rather than just transactions 

Jon spoke about the areas in which early adopters of Social Collaboration are finding value:

He then talked the audience through the Social Business journey and what organisations should consider, such as what are their strengths and weaknesses, their needs and their culture, where they are going and what they want to achieve. All these considerations mean that Social MUST be embedded in all processes. He showed everyone the integrated capabilities of IBM’s Social offering, and what aspects we use – such as blogs, wikis, files, profiles, communities, forums, activities, blogs, micro-blogs, analytics, bookmarks and mobile!

Jon then gave his view on how to drive adoption of Social Business through the use of social analytics,  which can help draw the attention on things users need to know – such as the below:

Jon finished this talk by look at the lessons learnt by IBM on our Social Business journey. The main ones being:

-          - Promote a culture of sharing with diverse groups

-          - Adoption is crucial

-           - Appeal to a broad spectrum of communication types

-           - Executives must participate and drive activity

-          - A balance of control and flexibility promotes innovation

As I said there were some great sessions by BUPA, Pearson and Virgin (even if they are using competitive software!). The final session of the day was the panel, and I loved the opening piece by Tom Standage.  He explained his view that the 1600’s coffee houses were the first example of a social platform. People would go to them to do business, to gossip, to receive mail and meet new people from across different warps of life... so basically Facebook and other platforms are just a modern day version of this. I had never thought of it this way and really liked this way of looking at it.  Another idea debated was whether or not we can measure the ROI of Social Media, and all seemed to agree that this was a tricky area. But then someone made the point that years ago we might have been debating the ROI of email, and now that would never be questioned. Jon Machtynger said that it is a question of “what’s in it for me?”  . People will have their own agenda and objectives, and those need to be met. Once they are met, then viral adoption is more likely. The speaker from BUPA also spoke about how their platform is open and transparent, and although it is monitored there are no strict dos and don’ts. He explained that when a topic is going off track, and perhaps moving to something unsuitable for an open platform, it is the community members that bring it back – not someone monitoring all conversations. The speaker from Pearson made a fantastic point about how Social is allowing a “nobody to be a somebody” – everyone is given a voice.  And that’s really how I feel about social, and why I love it so much!

If you want to follow more of my key highlights from the events I attend, then please follow me on Twitter @RSwindell. Next week I am attending an IBM Business Analytics event – so watch out for tweets from there!

Thanks for reading J