Creating a culture of change starts with giving people sparks of inspiration

Yesterday I was invited to join Rabobank’ s internal social media day(#smd2011). During the last year, I have done many workshops to inform and inspire companies about the importance of conversations and how to re-connect with your consumer. Most of the time, these workshops have between 20 to 100 employees.

At Rabobank, there were about 400 people present. The goal is to inspire as many people as possible. It was an entire day with speakers with experience in using social media in the financial sector, internet pioneers and people of Rabobank who wanted to share their first experiences in this domain with their colleagues.

The atmosphere was extremely positive. They shared their learnings on their internal Yammer network but also on external channels like Twitter. I have never seen so many tweets from an internal conference before. One of the tweets even held a drawing of my speech.

Many companies want to create a culture of change. A great way to do it is through these inspirational days for a broad audience. During those days, your teams go home with loads of inspiration. And more importantly, they start the conversation, no doubt about it.

Take a look at the presentation I gave at Rabobank: