So far I've recapped Days 1, 2 and 3 of Lotusphere 2011, or #ls11 if you are following in Twitter. Wednesday was the busiest day of them all. The day started with the morning keynote titled: The Future of Social Business. The guest speaker for the keynote was Andy McAfee which was a total surprise to me. I found out early in the morning and was excited to listen to him. Before I got to the keynote, though, I went to the Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Get Up To Speed with XPages where I worked as "host" in a speedtesting game. It was tons of fun and I got a chance to meet David Leedy in person.
After the BOF was done, I headed over to the keynote. I'm so glad that we were able to get Andy on stage. For those of you who don't know Andy, he coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and is very passionate about the topic. He does research at MIT, right next to IBM's Center for Social Software.
As promised, Mitch Cohen and I live blogged the keynote. Since I'm a big fan of Andy, this day's keynote was my favorite (I also like Kevin Spacey). One of the reasons why I was so excited to hear him was to see what he would say on the whole Enterprise 2.0 vs Social Business conundrum. For those of you who couldn't make it, Lotusphere's theme this year was Get Social. Do Business.
I thought Andy did a good job at addressing this early on. I also loved the examples he used to prove the value of the wisdom of the crowds and why businesses should Get Social. I strongly recommend you go through the live blog from the session. Additionally, you can also watch a replay here:
After the keynote, I headed over to Sandy Carter's session. Her session was titled Social Media: 10-minute update (although it lasted 1 hour 
). As she started her session, I really liked what she did for an agenda slide:
A quote that stuck out was "Business Process are the 'soul' of your company - to truly be a social business, you must embed social into your soul". I believe this is critical and is something that I preach to the customers I talk to. For me, one of the things that has driven my usage of social software is the fact that Connections is embedded into everything that I do and use (email, instant messaging, mobile, etc):
Sandy closed with 11 things to do in 2011. Take this as a list of things to do this year, perhaps one thing every month of the year left:
After that I was mostly in meetings all day with customers and partners brainstorming on the future of Quickr among other things. Once those were done, it was time for me to finally lead my first BOF. The BOF was titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I think I've been talking enough in this entry, so I'll leave that for another post.