And now we get to the last day of Lotusphere 2012 #ls12. Lotusphere 2012 was my 5th Lotusphere, but it was the first time that I actually stayed the full day on Thursday and left on Friday. Usually, I would head out to the airport Thursday at noon so I had never seen a Closing General Session or participated in a Blogger Open before. Like Sharon said, I'm surprised with the number of people who leave Wednesday night or super early on Thursday.

Thursday started like any other day with customer breakfast and then customer meetings. Then it was time for the Ask the Product Managers session. As usual, Mitch Cohen live blogged that session so you can see what happened there. It was an easy session for me since I only had to answer 1 question in the whole hour :) .

Leaving on Thursday also gave me a chance to connect with more people. At lunch I finally got to see Chris Whisonant if only for a few minutes and of course got my hands on the famous pretzel cookie.

After lunch, I took a very loooong walk encouraged by Alan Lepofsky. The last 7 days I had been trapped inside the Dolphin and/or Swan so it felt great to spend time outside and breathe some fresh air. I also had never been all around the property. Given the weather was so great, I had the opportunity to take some very cool pictures.

From there I headed to go see my first ever Closing General Session. The session was mainly hosted by Andrew Zimmern, who has his own TV show on the Travel Channel: Bizarre Foods.

Before the final session started, the big screen was showing tweets from earlier in the week. I managed to grab a couple of tweets but this is the best one that came out:

I think that tweet summarizes Lotusphere 2012 very well. Looking back on Lotusphere 2011, I think it was very focused still on the "Why Social Business", whereas this year with so many customers sharing their examples it was more about "How Social Business". And this was reflected as well on my 1:1 conversations with customers. They knew they had to become a social business and they were going to do it. They didn't need me to convince them of that. Rather, they wanted to talk adoption and roll-out strategies.

Finally, after the Closing General Session, we walked to the Blogger Open for some mini golf fun. It was awesome!!!! Our team didn't win anything (sorry guys!), but still had tons of fun.

I can't wait for Lotusphere 2013!!

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