Woo Hoo!! Earlier this week I was notified that I was named one of BlueIQ's Most Valuable Ambassadors for Q4 2008. In case you don't know what BlueIQ is, it's the executive-sponsored program within IBM led by Gina Poole. The mission for the BlueIQ team is to show the business value of social tools both inside and outside of IBM and how these tools can help you be more productive. To achieve its mission, the BlueIQ team established the BlueIQ Ambassadors community where volunteers from all over the world, from different IBM divisions get together and further evangelize the value of social software. The community currently has over 400 members, and the core BlueIQ team is about 6-7 people.
Does that mean that there are only 400 social software ambassadors within IBM ? Nope! While the core team is about 7 people, and there are over 400 "official" social software ambassadors, there are many more. In fact, I didn't become an official ambassador (i.e. I hadn't clicked the button to Join the Community) until the 3rd quarter of 2008. And as you know, I've been evangelizing social software for much more longer than that.
Every quarter, the BlueIQ team names its most valuable ambassadors. In Q3, the winners were sent to Germany for the Web2.0 conference over there. Gina Poole, in fact, presented at that conference (see below). The winners for this quarter were going to be sent to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston later this year. Unfortunately, due to the economy, that's not going to happen. Hopefully, I can find another way to get to the conference this year 
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It's a honor to have been selected among so many great ambassadors within IBM!