IBM’s Lotusphere 2011 – Here We Come!

As it’s happened over the last few years, it’s that time of the year where I am starting a new season of business travelling and very soon I will get things going, once again, with my yearly pilgrimage to Orlando, FL, to go and attend Lotusphere 2011. And this year, if I were to describe what the conference event would be all about I guess I could do a pretty good job with just a single keyword: Social! Yes, that’s right! Lotusphere is, finally!, going Social and I surely can’t wait for it to get started! Are you ready, too?

With the main theme as Get Social. Do Business, you can imagine there would hundreds of activities to engage with from January 30th to February 3rd, outside of the outstanding agenda of keynote and breakout sessions that have been put together so far, like every year. So you are probably wondering what would be the best ways of keeping an eye on the overall event, and still make some sense out of it, right? Well, there are *lots* of places to keep an eye on, but I think the main one that is going to get plenty of traction throughout, even if you can’t attend the event face to face, but would still want to follow it up virtually, and that’s already happening now!, is the Lotusphere 2011 Social Media Aggregator where folks who may be attending the event have got an opportunity to sign up and register to aggregate the streams of their favourite social networking tools.

I have already done that and registered this blog, my Twitter IDs, my Flickr stream, etc. etc. and I will be surely looking forward to catching up with most of the action behind #ls11, which is the main hash tag that’s been used all along already. Of course, if Lotusphere is going to be more social than ever, I will surely be looking forward to the many face to face conversations, over a drink or two!, with fellow colleagues (My entire team will be there as well as a whole bunch of the BlueIQ Ambassadors community I co-lead), customers, business partners, 2.0 thought leaders, and good friends, who will be making their way to Orlando to participate as well from the event.

Yes, real life networking is going to be massive this year! So I am starting to come to terms with the fact that for the whole of next week I will be getting very little sleep altogether and lots of great conversations all around! W00t!! If you would want to meet up, although I am sure we will be bumping into each other throughout the event, the best and fastest way of getting hold of me would probably be through Twitter over at @elsua. Thus go ahead, say “Hi!” and let’s get together. Let’s get social! Yay!!

Another interesting thing though to watch out for during the week would be to see what IBM thinks about Social Business, specially, now that IBM itself has, finally, gone massive on Social Collaboration, as we have witnessed in the last few weeks. Yes, you can see I am pretty excited about how, at long last, IBM has finally decided to join us, Enterprise 2.0 and social software evangelists! hehe The reason why I am saying this though is because Lotusphere will be just a good entry point for a superb follow up event that till take place from February 8th to the 11th, which I am also very excited about: IBM’s Social Business Jam!

Indeed, 72 hours, non-stop action, with thought leaders from across the globe, talking, collaborating, sharing and learning from each other’s experiences on what means to be a real social business. Those folks who may be interested in attending can do so by registering at this link or if you would want additional details on it, feel free to reach out to me as well. Happy to help!

The week after Lotusphere, I will still be in the US; in New York City, actually, but that would be the story for another blog post on what I will be up to while I am there. For now though, I would want to leave you all with a lovely teaser video clip I bumped into the other day which tries to describe a little bit how social Lotusphere will become this year…

Like I mentioned above at the beginning of this blog entry, are you ready to get social and do business? I surely hope so! I certainly am looking forward to it!

(Oh, and before I let you all go, if you would want to go through a more extensive coverage of all of the activities that will be taking place next week while Lotusphere is on, I can highly recommend you have a look into the phenomenal piece of work that my good friends Stu McIntyre and Darren Duke have been putting together on a series of podcasts over at This Week in Lotus; check out specially the latest episode where they had special guest speaker Sandy Carter, recently appointed IBM’s Vice President, IBM Social Business, Collaboration, and Lotus Sales and Evangelism. It’s worth every minute of it, to say the least!)