I love to share case studies and here is one from our superstar IBM team in Europe!   Mark Osborn’s (@mark_osborn) leadership was the driver to a very successful joint Sales and Technical Education event .

He leveraged Social to drive all the core and key elements in the event:  

  • Ideation:  Creation of the agenda based on the team’s  suggestions.  First requests for topics were collected in an Activity. Common themes were organised into tracks and relevant speakers identified.  Everyone voted for speakers and topics
  • Continuous Improvement.  The speakers could see the requirements from the team and posted draft agendas back to the Activity for comment, further honing their pitch.
  • Realtime Reaction.  During the event agendas and updates were made available via an event wiki.
  • Immediate Usage.  After the event speakers posted their presentations on Connections Files with the event tag, creating an event presentation feed.   Several of our speakers, were virtual and presented via LotusLive & Sametime Web Meetings
  • Best Social tools used!  Leveraged IBM Connections

The team in Europe created a ‘Ideation Blog’.   This is a blog set up for using the collective intelligence of an entire team to create ideas and build upon each others thoughts.   They took the suggested with the highest number of votes to create the agenda – there was a very high number of topics that were very popular!

And this was the Feedback from the team on this years event 97% satisfaction   This demonstrates that the social approach to planning the event was not only highly effective, but created a much stronger sense of ownership with the participants, encouraging them to feed-back.

europe ideation