@Steve_Will_IBMi Twitter Digest Volume 2

A while back, I blogged about some of the things you will find out if you use Twitter to follow news using the #IBMi hashtag, specifically, what you will find me tweeting about. When I asked for reactions to that blog, I was encouraged by several readers to do a “digest” blog now and then, to allow you to catch up, and to keep some information from falling off then end of the Twitter world. So, today, we have Volume 2. I will not repeat all of my tweets, but here are some, in categories which provide some organization to the rather random nature of the Twitter-verse.

Events: As I mentioned a couple of months ago, there are many customer events that have been taking place this fall. In fact, as I write this, I have just finished my presentations at Power Systems Technical University, and I am preparing to go to Japan for a very large conference of customers who use IBM i. #PowerTechU was very energizing, with a larger set of IBM i clients than I have ever seen there before. I’d like to think it was because of the participation of so many good IBM i speakers, but we have to give some credit to the venue, too. Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is a pretty good draw. Nevertheless, we had some excellent sessions, so if you want to start planning now, you can see from my tweet that next year’s conference will be in Orlando.

At the time I wrote my “Conference Season” blog, I didn’t even have the RPG/DB2 Summit on my itinerary. It was held up in Minneapolis, though, so after running into Jon Paris & Susan Gantner at the OMNI conference in Chicago, we worked out a way for me to drive up from Rochester to give a keynote at the Summit. Great fun.

Some of my customer events are virtual, too. The top tweet in the list represents that sort of event. I was able to talk to a large set of clients of Infor, one of our key IBM i ISVs. We did a webcast with some IBM i information from me and Infor product information from their experts.

Good Reference Material: If you follow the #IBMi hashtag on Twitter, you will encounter many great pieces of information. I try to be one of the sources of that information, so when one of the DB2 team sent me the link to this video which describes how Guardium works with DB2 on i, I just had to share it.

Customer Input: A big part of our job here in the IBM i development labs is listening to customer requirements and responding to them. We had our Large User Group in Rochester for their fall meeting. Most of the week gets spent talking about Power & IBM i technology – current and future. And we always mix in discussions about requirements. The tweet mentions one specific session in which we responded to the most critical requirements this particular advisory board has on its books.

Announcement Material: On announcement day, I am not the only one providing information about IBM i and Power Systems. Far from it! So I try to point my followers to others who give out great tips and descriptions.

Of course, some of those are my fellow IBM i bloggers, but other key pieces of information are in the Information Center, in IBM i developerWorks pages, in the actual announcement letter, and from others who are tweeting as well.

You can certainly get some of this information from the blog directly, but some of these sources don’t become available until after “You and i” goes live, so the tweets help with sharing links that are useful for you. It’s my intent to make sure that those of you who can follow Twitter get good useful information as it becomes available.

I hope this has been helpful. I realize Twitter is not for everyone, and some organizations are not using social media quite as much as others are. I recently saw a statistic from B2BOnline, though, that 3 in 5 IT decision makers use social media to learn about new products and technologies. With that in mind, it’s good to have a growing community of people – IBMers and our partners and customers – using social media such as Twitter to talk about the platform which can help those decision makers run their businesses efficiently with state-of-the-art technology.

 

 

You can follow me on Twitter @Steve_Will_IBMi