While most people out there think that Social Software is all about new, fancy social tools, available on a more engaging and participative Web, I thought you folks would enjoy the following quote from one of my fellow IBM colleagues, Adam Christensen , who happens to know a thing or two (And plenty more! That’s a quote taken from one of his recent blog posts titled: " The Impact of Corporate Culture on Social Media (IBM’s Case Study) ", where he introduces one of his latest slide decks that he has used to present at the Social Networking Conference in Miami that

Continuing further with some of the highlights from IBM ’s Lotusphere 2009 event that I attended in Orlando, FL, in January 2009, I thought I would cover what, to me, was one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking moments throughout the entire event. The entire article is filled up with plenty of precious gems that clearly state what are some of the challenges the corporate world has to face in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, as well as some of the advantages of embracing and fostering an effective knowledge sharing culture. Specially since it ties in, quite nicely, with a couple of blog posts I have shared over here recently around the topic of Social Software and figuring out its Return on Investment or ROI.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you would know how my professional background comes from various different areas associated for quite some time now with Knowledge Management, in particular, traditional Knowledge Management: Collaboration, Community Building, Learning, etc. One of them, perhaps one of the most powerful and traditional ones, was IBM ’s Global Business Services ‘ Learning and Knowledge . Yes, I am one of those folks who eventually worked for several different projects, throughout the years, dealing with deploying successfully specific KM and community building programs for various business units.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you would know how I have been blogging for a good number of times about one of those topics that people keep asking me about to share my two cents of the conversation: Social Software Governance and what IBM is doing about it . My short answer has always been IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines . However, the long answer has always been a story of how a good number of us had been using social software behind a firewall for a while and how, in 2005, we all got together around a wiki and started working over the course of a couple weeks on the initial IBM Blogging Policy and Guidelines document.

Yes, I am talking about the IBM Blogger Q&A meeting that took place with both Irene Greif and Bob Picciano , amongst several other folks (Like Suzanne Minassian or Casey Dugan – and a few others). First, an informal conversation (The Q&A part) with both Irene and Bob, to then continue with some demo time of several IBM technologies from the Enterprise Social Software space (Like IBM Lotus Connections v2.5 , Olympus , Sametime 3D and Beehive’s Honeybees ). On my latest blog post on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference event highlights

Corporate social networking is just as essential as any other business process, knowledge sharing or collaborative tool available out there to help improve the productivity of your knowledge workers. Throughout all of that time I have come to the conclusion that without social software becoming available within the corporate environment we wouldn’t been been very much involved any longer with such key and important disciplines as knowledge sharing, nor collaboration. After the wonderful Lotusphere Comes to You 2009 events (in both Madrid & Barcelona) from last week and after taking a couple of days off to enjoy thoroughly both cities, it is time to return back home and, with that, back into my usual and regular blogging activities.

I have mentioned already a couple of times how my first contact with social software tools inside IBM , my current employer, was around the year 2000, when one of the communities I still belong to (And still one of my favourite ones , too!) decided to put together a wiki where we could all contribute and share our knowledge across. From there onwards, the continuous learning experience of transitioning from traditional collaboration and knowledge sharing tools to these social tools has been quite exciting, to say the least. But I am sure you may be wondering when did IBM

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