Day 3, Tuesday, of Lotusphere 2011 or #ls11 for those of you following in Twitter, was a fun one for me. A big part of the day was spent talking to customers and hearing their thoughts on the direction we should take for our products. That's always fun, especially when they validate what you are thinking of doing.
As it happens every day, the day started with a keynote. The keynote was titled: "Becoming a Social Business". One of the guest speakers was Jon Iwata, Senior VP Marketing Officer for IBM, . I live blogged the session along with Mitch Cohen. Jon had some very interesting quotes throughout the session:
- People are afraid of social business, just like they were afraid of giving Internet to the employees
- Is there risk in social business? Sure! Is there risk when doing business in emerging markets? Sure! But will you pass on the growth opportunities ?
Really makes you think, huh? A customer panel was also available where Cemex and State St told their stories. Definitely go check out the live blog for all the commentary, and if you want to see a replay of the session, you can see it here:
In between customer meetings, I got a chance to tour the Product Showcase. I saw some really cool solutions from our partners, but I'm not going to give them justice here. I'll blog more about those later.
Then towards the middle of the day I had a chance to finally deliver my first session at Lotusphere. Because Jay Boyd and I were tag teaming (and he was really going to dive into the technical details), I asked the audience to live tweet questions and I would answer them as a backchannel. I got some really good feedback from the audience on this approach and I thought it kept the audience engaged and that way they didn't have to wait until the end to ask questions. You can see the tweets here.
And here's the slides:
I closed the day at a customer reception and then an impromptu team dinner. More to come.