Social business transformation
A new generation of social savvy workers is helping transform businesses today. Leading organizations understand that the growing range, capabilities and access to social tools are impacting how their brand and their business is experienced. More and more, success (or failure) can be driven by specific interactions and relationships enabled by social tools such as online communities, forums, wikis, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Businesses are finding new ways to utilize this new form of trust and advocacy to strengthen the way they market and sell, develop new products and manage their workforce.
In fact, becoming a social business might be one of the critical keys to staying in business. According to the 2010 IBM Chief Human Resource Officer Study, financially outperforming organizations are 57 percent more likely to allow their employees to use social and collaborative tools. However, fewer than 23 percent of employees use social networking or collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge, while just over a quarter use those tools to spread innovation throughout their organizations.
Many organizations are looking to get ahead of the curve, and Lotusphere® 2011 is one of the best ways to start. The 2011 conference breaks new ground in delivering the insight, tools and foundation for organizations to become a social business -- and it’s attracting new types of professionals from across the organization.
If you are a …
Business leader:
You can take advantage of a new Business Leadership Forum sponsored by WIRED Magazine and the business solutions track to discover new, innovative ways of attaining value from collaboration. Look at the possibilities social business can lead to and understand the challenges from a true business perspective. Plus, sessions for business leaders correspond to customer case study sessions, so you get real-world answers and experience.
Marketing leader or interactive agency:
Chief Marketing Officers and agencies are adding social capabilities to their tool sets for gaining insight into customer needs and developing new products, services and business models. Lotusphere 2011 provides you with fresh insights into technologies to build successful digital brand strategies and orchestrate social business techniques as part of your marketing strategies and tactics.
Customer service professional:
You know that knowledge is power, whether it’s to answer a customer’s questions quickly and completely or to pass on knowledge and information to other departments for service improvements and more. At Lotusphere, you’ll see new software that embeds knowledge sharing into the software’s tools. That’s what manufacturer Bayer MaterialScience recently discovered as they used social software to build networks of expertise. “You can now see what areas of interest you have in common with other people, what communities you share, and what people and information topics you are following,” said Kurt De Ruwe, CIO at Bayer MaterialScience.
Manager or Human Resource professional:
If you’re looking to boost teamwork and productivity and ensure you’re attracting and retaining employees with key social skills, Lotusphere 2011 shows you how social capabilities can play a critical role. You’ll hear stories like one from CEMEX, one of the world’s top building materials companies, who used social software to create a culture of innovation through collaboration. "What started with a few hundred users in April of this year grew to 17,500 today. But, it's not the numbers that define this success,” said Sergio J. Escobedo, Innovation Director, CEMEX. “We see a marked increase in blogs, and blog comments, as well as in the creation of more than 350 communities to bring people with common interests and goals together. Now, that's the power of social networking."
Development professional:
Innovations don’t happen in a vacuum. Today they more often originate from talking with customers and business partners. At Lotusphere 2011, network, network, network and learn how organizations are utilizing social capabilities to fuel innovation and help improve existing products or inspire new products, categories and markets.
Break down the barriers
There are many barriers to driving greater business value from improved collaboration – geographic, departmental, lingual, IT barriers, business barriers and more. What attendees of Lotusphere 2011 will see is smarter software that is expertly built to break down these barriers. That’s how Sogeti, one of the world's leading providers of professional technology services with 20,000 experts located in 15 countries worldwide, is using IBM Lotus® Connections to connect all employees across fields and borders. Lotus Connections provides Sogeti experts with personalized recommendations that help connect those that share similar interests and encourages them to participate more broadly across organizational boundaries. "With Lotus Connections as a social collaboration platform, we have a tool to connect our thousands of employees in all of the countries where we work," said Michiel Boreel, CTO of Sogeti.
If that’s the kind of connecting and collaborating that you are looking to do, then Lotusphere 2011 is for you – no matter who you might be.