Making the Case for Social Media, IBM and Sugar Unite

We just returned from the IBM Innovation center in Waltham, MA. Wow, cool place and a great day.

The topic, The Social Business Roadshow. Sponsored by SugarCRM, BrainSell, and of course, IBM. The purpose of the event was to analyze how social media is changing business. I know, sounds like a well-worn topic, but it turned out to be very productive.

First speaker, Kevin Cook of BrainSell. He told the story of a client of ours, Media Star Promotions. They wanted to see their social info from Sugar in a spider graph, to identify trends that we couldn’t uncover with traditional reporting. DONE. Check out the results of how we used a threat-analysis tool to do the job. 

Clint Oram, Sugar co-founder, took the stage next, going over the new rules of Social CRM. He spoke twice and went over tight integrations that Sugar will be releasing, such as a SYNC with LinkedIn contacts. Nice.

Chris Crummey, IBM’s Manager of Collaboration and a Lead Evangelist (his actual title is too long to type out), was a fantastic speaker. Tons of great one liners.

Email – the most selfish, overused tool I’ve ever seen. we need to be nimble! @ccrummey

Email is the idontcarechain. Social media is engaging #ibmsocialbiz

He also made THE case for twitter. Boston College doesn’t give students email addresses anymore, they have students use TWITTER! These students will be coming into the work force soon and will want to communicate with social tools. IBM has some cool solutions to help with that. Lotus Live, pared with IBM Connections, lets companies make their own Facebook-like place for people to collaborate on EVERYTHING. I’m into it.

Think about it, when a person leaves a company, their email is gone. All of the collaboration is GONE.

Now imagine everything that you email is up on Lotus. Documents, message boards, everything. You live on, your work lives on, and everyone can profit from it. I like it!

Download that paper on Media Star below.