Welcome to July!
As we continue to shelter in place, I hope everyone is keeping in good health and adapting as best as possible to our different working and living conditions. Internally, we have adopted the phrase Community for Community and have tried to shift our thinking to how best can we use our platform to support people - not as customers, students, learners or experts or presenters or bloggers or members - but as humans, who need support, encouragement, a network of others to connect with, classes to enrich and build expertise, and learning opportunities to grow knowledge. In this newsletter, I'm sharing some new initiatives to check out and engage with your fellow members on.
This month we reflect on a hugely exciting and new effort we've put forth around our webinar program, executing over 32 total in June. From where we started in January, we completely catapulted our numbers while seeing incredible engagement from members:
June results:
- 32 webinars - 700% increase from January
- 7,774 registrations - 1081% increase from January
- 3,352 live attendees - 740% increase from January
- 854 questions - 649% increase from January
As we all know, COVID took quite a toll on business as we know it. IBM Community has a long history of producing digital and virtual events; so when physical events, including mega-conferences like Think, started getting canceled, we took our experience and sprung into action. We quickly produced a schedule of highly sought after community webinars across topics like Data and AI, Cloud, Security, Automation and IoT, which proved to be a key need and exclusive resource for our members.
And keeping in mind that users are always at the forefront of our efforts, we took this even one step further and designed our own virtual community event, all about User Groups.
User groups are a key, if not the most important part of our communities. They are typically run by customers and/or partners, with the support of IBMers who actively work with IBM Solutions and are interested in learning and sharing information with other members. To put this in perspective, IBM Community is home to 519 user groups with 57,045 members. We have seen at least 1,000 new users join these groups each month this year alone.
In support of our virtual event and webinar programming, we were able to quickly plan and execute a 2-day virtual event, featuring 96 sessions across 12 tracks, with topics covering Cloud, Data and AI, Middleware, IoT/Automation and Security. We were just shy of 10,000 registrants and saw a 10% increase in overall new community members for that month. You can still check out replays from this event and follow some of the blogs and discussions.
A community event like this has proven to us that addressing the users' needs and listening to your feedback helps us all succeed. We encourage you to take advantage of the education and resources that we design our community around, meet others and network, pick up a new skill, or sign up to share your expertise. Here's a list of things to check out this month:
- Visit our new Automation community, just launched on July 15 - introduce yourself there and check out some of the resources
BONUS: share in the comments below who the Automation Community rockstar is
- Register for the IBM Data and AI Virtual Forum on July 29, and new add-on this session, Partner Day! Join us June 28 for a full day of activities designed to help partners (and your customers) engage with IBM.
BONUS: Comment on our blog with your confirmed registration and what you're most excited to see
- Join our User Experience Program today, and help shape the future of the IBM product experiences we deliver for you, by providing feedback, ideas, and domain expertise
BONUS: Comment below the products you work with and the associated communities you follow
More:
Marius Ciortea
Join me for my Community 101 Session at Partner Day June 28, kicking off the July 29 Data and AI Virtual Forum: #FP-SL