In the last two days I participated in a very interesting conference in Frankfurt called IBM Social Business JamCamp … and I must admit for IBM standards this was a rather unusal event. Of course this was aimed to customers to sell IBM’s own social business tools. But they took the titel of the conference serious - so in most part it wasn’t a marketing gig. Beside some industry speakers they had a good number of “social-natives” who - correctly - didn’t care about tools but the needed changes to become social. Unfortunately - after hearing all those “great” stats from IBM VP Sandy Carter in the opening keynote - I am not sure if IBM’s upper management does already get it right. They seem to still live the “we have the tools, now be social” dream. Doesn’t work that way! Fortunately there are forces (thanks to Stefan @Digitalnaiv Pfeiffer for organising this) that seem know that it has to be done different. And don’t get me wrong … there are a lot of less social companies out there but if you focus on “social” the way IBM does then you have to be leader of the pack. And they are not there yet. So I think this conference was not only a learing curve for customers but for IBM’ers as well. Kurt De Ruwe from BASF showed in a very good customer case how they introduced social tools and which obstacles they had to resolve: e.g. people being reluctant to tag (public sorting) instead of putting stuff into folders (personal sorting). Can’t mention all here but on the first day two sessions stuck out: One was about Dundu. Dundu is an artproject were up to 5 people move a huge figure of a human by acting on the arms, legs, head etc. seperatly. Doing this with small ones (less than a meter tall) this can be used for team and trustbuilding. Interesting and entertaining concept. The second one was called “Courage to Share” and was held by Kai @lao_tse Fitzner. He made very clear that being social needs a cultural change and mainly one were some people have to give up control. Ironically that shouldn’t be a problem at all as this “control” is an illusion anyway. A fact that could have been seen very good in the way the changes in the northern african countries happend. Control only works as long as those being controlled allow it. Of course this is not a “call to arms” but still structures in companies have to change somewhat to allow real “social”. On the second day also two sessions were especially remarkable: Uwe @bicyclist Hauck showed how the (mobile) workplace of the future can be available today already and also emphasized the needed cultural change to make it the standard instead of the exception. Gunter @wilddueck Dueck showed some entertaining psychological aspects of the whole social business world. Overall there was a lot of interesting stuff that makes you think how and when you can start introducing social business to your own company. But one thing seems to be clear: social is not just a hype … it will stay like the internet. And the needed change will come sooner or later. So it’s up to us if we want to be trendsetter, mainstream or those who have to run behind the pack or even risking to be left behind at all.