Wednesday 3rd November
Well, what a way to start the day – a highly entertaining keynote from Gary Whitney from the Intercontinental Hotel Group.
- “To have customers live your brand have to engage your people”
- “A brand is delivered by the people at the front line.”
- “if you want people to love your brand, you had better love your people!”
- “It’s the first follower who makes the leader”
The last point was very amusingly demonstrated by the use of the video below – this came back to haunt us later that day during dinner when Jeff Carr started the dance in the restaurant!
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Next up, the Saba Customer Excellence Awards – I am delighted to report that Legal & General were awarded the Collaboration & Social Media Power Award for our use of the Saba Collaboration tools within Saba Learning. This is another well deserved tribute for the team – well done team!
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The next session was led by Saba founder, Bobby Yazdani and featured 6 young entrepreneurs – I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but this turned out to be a great session! Here’s some brief notes and links from this session:
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- Qwiki – this is a really cool way of delivering content – go visit the site to get the true experience of this. Pure genius!
- Meet Seymour, the AI Concierge courtesy of Cleversense
- Get your customers to add themselves to a web based CRM system – from the people who bought you webs.com, this is contactme.com.
- We saw him last night with Fitz and the Tantrums, this morning he shared his work in creating music for advertising . newmath.tv
- A moving story which led to the creation of 1000 Memories.com, a place to remember loved ones.
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Next session up was my own session – I’ll be devoting a separate post to cover my material for that shortly.
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The next couple of sessions I attended were product related – firstly, as we are just about to upgrade to 5.5, a session on product improvements which included:
- More support for blended learning
- Informal learning can now be used to close competency gaps
- Tasks can be assigned to all types of learning
- Ad Hoc reporting
- Mentors can be assigned in your profile
The next session was on the mashup portlet – as we have already deployed something similar from our friends at Comenius, I was interested to see the difference. The only addition is the ability to use Javascript as well as XHTML.
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Final session was on Content – a few new things to consider apart from the social aspects which have already been mentioned:
- Saba Publisher 10 is now GA
- Detect and fix – regress SCORM to find errors.
- Export Centra to flv, mp4, mp3
- Saba “Webster” – a new free tool to tag informal content on your intranet
- Sabasociallearning.com
David Koehn of Saba was predicting that there will be less formal learning but it will become higher value.
To finish the day, another great summary from Peter Olguin.