In the previous blog entry, I shared my recap of what happened the first part of Day 4, Wednesday, of Lotusphere. I wanted to share a bit of what happened towards the end of the day. At 5:45p I had the chance to deliver my first Birds of Feather (BOF) titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I had participated in a BOF before with Stuart McIntyre, but only as a guest speaker.
This time, however, Stuart was scheduled for a BOF at the same time as me. I had to do something to draw a crowd 
. I figured if I could get a celebrity in the room, that would help. Therefore, I invited Rawn Shah to come in. He couldn't make it so he instead donated 3 autographed copies of his book: Social Networking for Business (which Steve Bell reviewed here). Three lucky attendees left with a copy of the book.
The purpose of the BOF was to concentrate on bad / best practices for social software adoption inside of the firewall. I wanted to generate a discussion between customers in the room to share what was and wasn't working in their organizations as they tried to become a social business. I didn't want to touch on technical stuff because, well, because there had been plenty of technical sessions throughout the conference. As I walked towards the room I ran into Sacha Chua and invited her to come along. She agreed and even volunteered to scribe the session. I've always been a big fan of her hand drawings.
Here's what we talked about in the "words" of Sacha:
I heard from the attendees that the session was valuable so hopefully we'll repeat it next year.
One thing I would like to do different next year is set up the chairs in a circle. The chairs were organized as if I was going to do a presentation and I think a circle arrangement would've allowed customers to more easily see each other.
After the BOF was done, #ls11 attendees headed out to Islands of Adventure to check out the new Harry Potter attractions.