Last week, the Social Media Club of Boston and IBM partnered up to talk about the Evolution of Social Business. While I couldn't assist in person for obvious reasons, I liked the ability to catch up via the uStream replay (below). The club celebrated its 5th anniversary and the outgoing president started the meeting with a re-cap of the club. This was very interesting to me in various levels. First, as you may know, I lead the Social Media Club of Puerto Rico so I like to learn about how other clubs structure their events. Second, the event was sponsored by my employer, and, third, my big boss was one of the panelists 
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The following participated in the panel:
- Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Social Business, IBM
- Andrew Carusone, Director of Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) and Community Governance, Lowe’s Home Improvement (you may remember Lowe's awesome story on how they use IBM Connections to increase sales by million$ )
- Ric Fulop, Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners
Following the tweets generated by the event over at #SMCBoston, I knew I had to watch the replay. I specially liked these tweets:
"Awesome #SMCBoston event, "The Evolution of Social Business," last night at IBM Innovation Ctr. Learned a TON!" --Kirk Hazlett, Curry College Communication Professor; PRSA Fellow, and PRSA Director (2011-2012)
"This is not a tool discussion." @alistair_rennie at #smcboston --@jimstorer (principal at The Community Roundtable)
"Glad to see IBM support #smcboston & the local Boston community by having @alistair_rennie join us tonight #IBMsocialbiz" --Rachel Happe, former IDC analyst and principal at The Community Roundtable
"IBM has been great supporting #smcboston and other great Boston innovation communities like @MassInno Thx @#IBMSocialBiz" --Bob Collins, Partner at Human 1.0 / Digital Media & PR Strategist. Content Creator and Host of Boston's Social Media Breakfast
"Interesting demo of internal IBM employee search directory "Faces" @IBMWaltham. Very cool #SMCBoston pic.twitter.com/YOljxNeT" --Dave Cutler, Blogger, columnist and social media strategist.
The event was also highlighted by Bill Ives and in Mass High Tech.
Andrew from Lowe's did a fantastic job introducing how and why Lowe's embarked in the Social Business path. As part of his introduction Andrew told the amazing story of how they were able to increase sales at their retail stores by using social software behind the firewall (in their case IBM Connections). The specific example was about how an employee was having a challenge replenishing a specific type of pain tray. They had gone from selling 2 paint trays per week per store, to more than 15 trays per week per store. The employee didn't know how to get more trays in so they could sell more. As other employees saw the question, they wondered how this particular store was selling so many paint trays since the average was just 2 per week. The employee shared how they configured the display for the tray and all stores followed suit and they saw the same increase in sales, nationwide!
Ric is an entrepreneur and gets to read to hundred of business plans per year and has identified three trends: 1) consumerazation of the enterprise, 2) conversational web, and 3) next generation optimization. I don't want to spoil all the details so watch the recording.
Here's the video recording of the event (1 hour and 20 minutes):
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