We’re kicking off the last quarter of 2021 with a lot of exciting IBM Community updates and activities. Keeping the momentum from last month’s first-ever community social hour and the launch of our new and improved gamification program, we are continuing to create great energy among our members (while activating new ones), resulting in the highest number of discussion threads to date in 2021 – and the second highest number of new discussions. We had a 49% month over month increase in new blogs, and a 39% increase in new bloggers. (If you’re interested in blogging, start here).
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard to reorganize our community leaders and support team into a structure that creates direct impact for our users, such as providing top notch events and programs (for free), aligning our marketing, community, and support initiatives better, and persistently adapting to the changing needs of our users by providing valuable content and access to experts. We are pleased to see our rate of unanswered discussions going down, our event registrations going up, and our active membership increasing.
Six things to know this month:
Cybersecurity Awareness Month
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and our Community is all in. We are bringing you insights from IBM Cybersecurity experts in a special event on October 27 on IBM Expert TV. Read the blog for more information and register for our event here.
Community Festival 2021
Our annual Community Day event was so popular last year with almost 10K registrants and 2500 live viewers per hour that we decided to go BIGGER this year. This November, IBM will host a Community Festival that will span five days with live programming across three different time zones, and over 100 expert and user sessions covering Public Cloud, Data and AI, Security, Business Automation, and more. You won’t want to miss this special event created just for our users – a great chance to network, hear from the experts, dive deeper into your products, and have a little fun. New this year: a community volunteer program, drag queen bingo, lunch and learn sessions, and virtual booths (with swag!). Sign up at IBM Expert TV to join and reach out to us if you’d like to be a speaker.
Cognos Analytics is now part of the Watson family!
We have a huge user population in our community in the business analytics world, with thousands of Cognos Analytics users. We recently had a community event with over x registrants and y live participants, where an esteemed roster of IBM executives and product leaders talked through the exciting new roadmap for Cognos. Still the same great product, but the added benefit of AI. Read the article, watch the replay and spread the word!
IBM Data Science in Practice on Medium
We are pleased to have adopted IBM’s Data and AI Medium blog and are excited to reintroduce it as the IBM Data Science in Practice Medium blog. We aim to deliver high quality data science and AI resources to our community members, including tutorials, product use cases, perspectives, career advice, education and other happenings via the community with the added advantage of the Medium features we all know and love: personalized content delivered by email, enhanced SEO, shareability, easy search and sort, and all of the great articles over 25K subscribers have been consuming so far.
New Community Features
In case you missed it, our developer team has created some enhancements to our community pages to improve user experience. Most recently, we instated a user friendly mega menu. We hope you’ll find it much easier to navigate in and around the community from wherever you are on the site.
IBM Automation Adds New Community Groups
Interested in Process Mining, Turbonomic, or Instana? We now have community topic groups for these areas. Navigate to our sites (using the great new megamenu), sign in, and click Join by the groups to stay up-to-date. While you are there, consider joining our Robotic Process Automation group – we have lots of exciting things coming soon that we will post in the forums.
And the fun is just beginning!
We plan to end the year with a little fun to celebrate a great year and look ahead to an even better one. Please leave me and the team your questions and feedback in the comments and let us know how best we can support you. Cheers!
- Marius