The Woman Who Speaks Portuguese

Have you seen the new(ish) pieces on YouTube about Connections? Look here http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw2j0YOqKoo and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q83utEQsHRM . I think they're really good - in fact I think they are the best pieces of marketing I've seen out of the Lotus brand in years. We're using them with everyone, not just customers. Our Telemarketing agency, our sales team, our senior management - anyone who needs to get the message about how good this product is.

Watching these short pieces reminded me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a Local Government Authority. They're not yet a customer of ours, though of course we'd like them to be, but they do like the Lotus product family, and as a result three of their people rocked up to a recent event organised by IBM, focused on Connections. They were interested in the Social Collaboration pitch delivered by Brendan Tutt, and they got stuck into the hands-on session as well. After lunch they listened with great interest and enthusiasm to a customer presentation, and then it was our turn. The last session of the day. We're the only thing between them and the drive home. Always an "interesting" slot for a presentation.

So, we didn't do a presentation. Well, not in the traditional way. We used a bunch of slides and delivered what we hoped were some key messages, but we also asked a lot of questions about how the audience viewed Social Computing, what their problems were and how they thought this stuff might help them. And as we went on, you could (almost literally) see the lights coming on!

We started talking about the issues that this Local Authority faced, and two things came shining through. The need to be more efficient (I liked this one a lot, as a tax payer), and the need to know more about the workforce, and to engage with them more effectively. What opportunities, we asked, are currently being missed in terms of getting the best out of your people? And the examples started to surface.

• They have a big education department, but no way of connecting with the large number of their employees who are School Governors. Wouldn't it be great if these two communities could share?
• They have buildings all over the place that the public need access to at odd times of the day and night. How good would it be if they could identify employees who live locally, and who would be prepared to carry a set of keys?
• And, to refer back to the title of this piece, who speaks Portuguese? Or Tagalog? or Hungarian? Who can speak Sign Language? They know that these people exist amongst their employees, but they have no way of profiling the skills, knowledge and abilities of their people, other than in the strict context of their every day job. So they pay interpreters when they might not need to, and sometimes struggle to help their customers - the public - as efficiently as they might.

Of course, there were other things as well, but you get the drift. Simple issues about helping people to work better together. So, the last session of the day, the "graveyard" session, actually went really well, and bizarrely we actually talked about graveyards. It was the language thing again - they try to help families who'se first language isn't English, by providing real-time translations during burial and cremation services.

And, just as they left at the end of the day, one of them said "I loved the YouTube clips. They really helped me to understand what Connections is for". Which is great.