[Post adapted from an article written by Jerry Janda]

On Tuesday, November 9, SAP hosted an event for social media in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. A sold-out crowd of corporate social media leaders packed the auditorium for “BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media.”

The BlogWell conference featured eight case studies on the best social media programs at large corporations. GasPedal, a consulting company specializing in “word-of-mouth” marketing, held the event along with the Social Media Business Council, a community of social media leaders from large companies.

SAP is a founding member of the Social Media Business Council, a fact that Chip Rodgers, vice president and COO of SAP Community Network, acknowledged during his welcoming remarks. He told the standing-room-only audience how the council helps corporations navigate the quagmire of social media for big business – tackling topics such as compliance, legal, marketing, branding, and communications.

Chip also shared the evolution of SAP’s online community, which is now at 2 million members strong, with a million unique visitors per month and 5,000 contributions per day. He added that SAP has built social media into its culture and stressed its importance for large corporations.

“There’s a lot of value for us as a company, and I think for you as a company as well, to jump in, engage with your audience, your customers, and your partners, and have a conversation and pull them in,” he said. “That’s what BlogWell and the Social Media Business Council is all about – helping you to understand how to do that successfully.”

SAPPHIRE (here and) NOW

In addition to hosting the event, SAP presented one of the eight case studies. Brian Ellefritz, senior director of Global Social Media Marketing, explained the company’s strategy for a “virtual” SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s flagship event held concurrently in Orlando and Frankfurt in May. The goal was to use blogging, Twitter, and an online presence to generate excitement about the event – and to make those who couldn’t attend feel part of the SAPPHIRE NOW experience.

SAP faced challenges at the time. SAPPHIRE NOW was the first major event featuring the company’s relatively new co-CEOs, and the company had been criticized earlier for not listening to customers. Therefore, the social media strategy emphasized a tone change for the brand – treating the audience members as peers, not recipients – while still making sure key messages were communicated.

To create real-time accessibility, the SAPPHIRE NOW Web site streamed live sessions and offered replays from the Frankfurt and Orlando events. It was a big production. In fact, during the week of SAPPHIRE NOW, the site’s video bandwidth exceeded CNN’s.

SAPPHIRE ambassadors shine

Additionally, to truly provide “eyes and ears” for those who couldn’t attend, Brian’s team recruited and trained social media “ambassadors” to report from the shows. There were 12 ambassadors – six at Frankfurt, six at Orlando, each one dedicated to a specific newsworthy topic: SAP Business Suite, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP BusinessObjects, innovation, SAP Services, or SAP EcoHub.

Armed with Flip video cameras, the ambassadors roved the show floor in search of customers and other experts who could answer questions about their topics. They shot and posted videos, wrote blogs, and tweeted their observations (with hashtag #SAPPHIRENOW, as well as a hashtag for their topic, to make it easier for readers to keep up with what was happening). In the end, the ambassadors contributed 41 blogs, uploaded 152 videos, and attracted thousands of followers on Twitter – with viral reach going much, much further through word of mouth, retweets, and news feeds.

The SAPPHIRE NOW social media strategy was a success, and it also taught some valuable lessons. For example, preparing all the videos for the live blogs proved overwhelming for the production editor in each location, necessitating a change in the process.

On the other hand, potential minuses turned out to be plusses. Some ambassadors were savvier in social media than others, and with 12 of them on the beat, diverse skill sets might have resulted in chaos. In actuality, however, inconsistencies didn’t hurt overall impact. Combined with news coming out of other teams, such as media relations, the collective activities created real-time energy. That’s more important than individual performance. As Brian advised companies that might want to follow in SAP’s (virtual) footsteps: “In general, you look for the cumulative effect, and you’ll be in good shape.”

On the case

Other case studies came courtesy of pharmaceutical company Pfizer, food corporation Hershey, Scholastic Book Clubs, the Discovery Channel, IT services company SunGard, the BlackRock asset management firm, and Johnson & Johnson, a manufacturer of healthcare and pharmaceutical products. The studies covered all aspects of social media – from getting a program off the ground to launching creative campaigns.

Midway through the event, Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council, took the stage to give a presentation called “Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of Trouble.”

True to its name, the presentation offered tips to comply with regulations from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Specifically, companies must disclose and be truthful in social media outreach (meaning if you pay someone to blog for you, you must state it), monitor conversations and correct misstatements (meaning if a blogger calls your product a “miracle cure,” you must set the record straight), and create social media policies and training programs. To help satisfy the latter regulation, the Social Media Business Council provides ready-to-use templates.

Don’t lie to your mother

Sernovitz had much simpler suggestions to stay safe: Don’t write checks for positive third-party coverage, be honest about your relationship with a blogger, and don’t lie to your mom. In other words, if your mother can’t distinguish paid advertising from editorial in your social media, shame on you.

This approach to social media not only protects companies from the FTC, it also builds authentic relationships with target audiences. If a corporation gets caught paying for a positive blog, it will have a tough time regaining public faith. “Trust is the medium in which we work,” Andy said.

For companies still uncertain about what constitutes unethical practices, Andy closed with one final piece of advice: “If you have to ask,” he noted, “the answer is no.”

Please turn ON your mobile devices

Unlike other conferences where attendees are reminded to turn off their phones and laptops, BlogWell encouraged people to tweet and blog throughout the day. Based on the hundreds of tweets with hashtag #blogwell, attendees were pleased with the event – praising the sessions, sharing nuggets of wisdom from the speakers (often in real time), and gushing over the Philly-flavored snacks (Tastykakes and soft pretzels: staples of the local diet).

SAP was pleased as well. By hosting and presenting at BlogWell, the company further proved its position as a leader in social media and online communities.

“With so much buzz around social media,  it’s exciting that SAP is in such a leadership position,” Chip said. “It’s something we can all be proud of.”

Read the “Top TakeAways from BlogWell Philly 2010” by Michael Brinner

Other Useful Links:

• BlogWell event website
• Photo stream of the event
• Session coverage, live from BlogWell
• #Blogwell on Twitter
• Social Media Business Council
• GasPedal
• SAPPHIRE NOW Online
• #SAPPHIRENOW on Twitter

I believe SAP is an under-appreciated leader in the Web 2.0 space, and this blog attempts to explain why. First, I should first point out that there are three distinct categories you can talk about SAP interacting with Web 2.0 technology:

• Web 2.0 by SAP – Web 2.0 products and services SAP provides to customers
• Web 2.0 with SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 techniques to interact with our customers and partners
• Web 2.0 at SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 technology within SAP

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Web 2.0 by SAP

The term Web 2.0 means different things to different people, but generally people use it to encompass one or more of the following categories:

Easy, Powerful Interfaces

Web 2.0 products have simple, interactive, attractive, and intuitive interfaces that let people access information and carry out tasks without training.

SAP is a strong believer in design thinking across all aspects of the product solutions. Technology examples include:

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated, that lets you browse through billions of rows of corporate data as easily as you browse the web, using innovative memory-resident analytics coupled with an interface that automatically proposes appropriate analyses.
• SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, providing attractive, interactive dashboards that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday business activities. For example, a presenter can show the effect of changes to forecasted variables in real time, directly within a PowerPoint presentation.

On-Demand, Mobile, and Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 applications are available on-demand, with a variety of different devices, with an internet-based platform that scales smoothly as demand grows.

SAP has a clear on-demand and cloud strategy:

• John Wookey and Peter Lorenz have outlined a clear on-demand strategy
• SAP Business ByDesign is now achieving wide recognition as a well-designed, flexible, on-demand business application, and its intuitive user interface now enables users to customize their own KPI dashboards and integrate third-party Web services such as GoYellow, Google Maps, or Map24.
• The SAP BusinessObjects on-demand platform has long been the clear leader in business intelligence as a service, letting organizations cleanse, store, analyze and share information effectively without having to install any hardware or software.
• SAP partners provide on-demand extensions to existing in-house functionality.

Collaboration

Web 2.0 tools let people work together to achieve common goals, frequently crossing traditional fault lines such as country, culture, or company boundaries.

SAP believes that collaboration tools should be aligned with business process. Example of technology include:

• The SAP Netweaver Portal provides discussion forums, lets users comment on, rank, and tag content, and integrate SAP content seamlessly into other platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
• Collaboration can be analyzed and optimized, like any other business activity. Jive software, the leading independent vendor of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, provides SAP BusinessObjects’ on-demand analytics as an integrated part of their product offer.
• Data from SAP systems can be used to augment conversations on platforms such as Google Wave.
• The SAP Gravity prototype lets users of Google Wave bring together technical and business experts to collaborate on business process
• The new SAP BusinessObjects 12sprints prototype supports directed, collaborative decision-making.

Social Networking

Web 2.0 tools let people make connections and share status updates.

SAP gives organizations the tools they need to monitor and optimize social networking inside and outside organizations.

• SAP’s text analytics provide organizations with the ability to do “sentiment analysis” across social media, and automatically integrate
• SAP’s CRM solutions provide a seamless customer experience across networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• The Social Network Analyzer prototype lets organizations bring together and analyze the relationships that are created between employees, and between the company and its customers. It makes it easy to mine the the wealth of data stored in existing corporate systems, such as the organizational hierarchy from a human capital management system, informal organizational information stored in email distribution lists and project systems, the sales relationships from the customer relationship management system, inquiries made through the support platform or web site, etc.
• Twitter is fast becoming a platform for crowd-sourced data gathering. SAP prototypes allow people to avoid traffic in Australia and make presentations an interactive, collaborative experience by showing the “backchannel” twitter feed directly within the presenter’s slides, and allowing voting via twitter.

Mashups

Web 2.0 tools are open and easily integrated with other solutions.

SAP is the clear leader in real-life business process, and realizes that it’s essential to bridge systems and combine information from multiple sources

• SAP is a leading proponent of services-oriented architectures, that allow organizations to easily and seamless provide an end-to-end business process across multiple different application architectures.
• For individuals, the SAP rooftop marketplace prototype lets business people easily integrate information from multiple different sources and applications using open interfaces.

Web 2.0 with SAP

SAP Community Network

The SAP community network site (SCN) is rated as the best in the industry. It gives the SAP ecosystem of customers, partners, solution providers and employees a platform to share questions and expertise. A wide range of different business, solution, and technical areas are covered, and it is . A full set of Web 2.0 tools are provided for members, including discussion forums, blogs (over 5,000 contributors, of whom only 30% work for SAP), e-learning, wikis, and reputation and recognition programs, and there are tight links with other platforms such as LinkedIn and the SAP Social Media page
The site has dedicated spaces for the developer network, the business process expert (BPX) community, a Business Objects community, a university alliance community, a community career center, an interactive documentation space called docupedia, an Innocentive innovation challenge program, EcoHub, a community-driven online marketplace, and a soon-to-be-launched code exchange area.

SCN has over 2 million members, who post around 6,000 messages a day in over 200 different discussion forums, and over 250 blog posts each month. People from 229 countries and territories visited the site over 28 million times in 2009, and viewed over 200 million pages.

The growing involvement in these communities helps SAP get closer to customers, partners and stakeholders for product and service innovation. For example, SAP product marketing managers use the BPX community to share product information and best practices for product use and get product feedback. And SAP customers share their own best practices with their peers and get unbiased advice.

SAP’s Community Workspace platform provides customers and employees with the ability to set up invitation-only collaboration forums to discuss common interests, such as “business process in the Oil and Gas Industry”. Over 60,000 people from over 2,000 different customers participate in over 3,500 different forums, visiting the site more than 260,000 times each month.

SAP Influencer Program

SAP provides what many consider the gold standard program for industry analysts, journalists, and bloggers. The program involves regular meetings and virtual events, and a hosted platform for quick answers to questions. It is famous for providing exceptionally open access to senior executives, company directions, and product plans, and for openly accepting and integrating regular critics of the company.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

SAP is taking an increasingly Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Modeled on the Google Labs, the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center lets customers trial early prototypes and give feedback, long before traditional product development lifecycles. The center receives thousands of pieces of feedback each week that are used to adapt and improve products.

Web 2.0 at SAP

All SAP employees have access to full collection of Web 2.0 tools through the internal corporate portal, including blogging, wikis, discussion forums, collaboration areas, and microblogging.

SAP was one of the earliest members of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group dedicated to collecting and sharing best practice use of Web 2.0 to improve employee productivity and collaboration. Employees are encouraged to participate in external social media, and have been provided with a clear set of social media guidelines.

SAP and Web 2.0

In the end, it’s all about bringing together the best of SAP and the best of Web 2.0

For more information about any of these topics, please browse the other posts on this blog.

SAP Influencer Summit

Let’s start with the SAP Influencer Summit. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in SAP Web 2.0 technology, you’ll find examples in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Visha’l Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey.

And take a look at one of the featured videos, about “Real Real-Time Computing”, a subject that came up regularly throughout the sessions:

Several hundred people attended the event in Boston, and there’s been lots of coverage, from the analysts and bloggers who attended – here’s a small sample:

• InformationWeek: SAP Outlines Five-Year Enterprise Plan
• ITBusiness.ca: SAP Wants to Transform its ERP Image
• SearchSAP: SAP: We’re Serious about SAP On-Demand
• InfoWorld: SAP plans to open up on-demand development platform
• Ray Wang: Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit – SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
• Oliver Marks: The Clear Path Forward for the SAP SuperTanker
• Merv Adrian: SAP Promises Acceleration on a “Clear Path” – Will it Be Enough?
• Mark Smith: SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy
• Michael Krigsman: SAP ByDesign: Taming the Multi-Tenant Beast
• James Governor (@monkchips)’s post SAP: Out with the Old, Shrugging Off The Tag
• And a whole collection of articles from the Enterprise Irregulars and other bloggers

There was also a full virtual conference set up using the inXpo platform. I’ve used this platform several times in the past, when it has been used to recreate a “virtual show floor experience”, and I’ve found it to be a frustrating experience.

On this occasion, I think it was used much more successfully, to show the keynote presentations live and to host “ask an expert” sessions.

But crucially, there wasn’t any attempt to use the platforms closed communication tools – the backchannel was kept firmly in the open, where everybody could see it. There was a clear hashtag announced in advance (#sapsummit), and attendees were encouraged to use it.

It was clear in advance that Twitter would be the key backchannel for the event. The Enterprise Geeks did put together a public Google Wave for the event and encouraged others to help summarize content. But as Mark Madsen remarked:

“Tried to use Google Wave at #sapsummit, found that the UI is terrible, abandoned quickly”.

And — at least at the time of writing this — the resulting Wave is a lot closer to a messy email thread than a tidy wiki page.

Many of the invited attendees were Twitter users – in the Web 2.0 world, an active stream of Tweets is rapidly becoming considered essential part of doing business (at Le Web, technology evangelist Robert Scoble got very angry when he heard French Tech CEOs were too busy to have a Twitter account).

The #sapsummit conversation opened as people announced their travel plans, and quickly accelerated as the sessions opened on the first day. If you’re interested, you can see all of the tweets here in an 8Mb pdf document, from http://wthashtag.com/sapsummit.

Rather than just being a discussion forum for the audience, SAP employees used Twitter to clarify points made by the presenters, monitor feedback, and reacting it. And as the presenters came on stage, several of them mentioned that they had been watching the feed, and then addressed any points that had come up. As I tweeted early on:

“Looking at twitter feed from #sapsummit, I get the impression the “backchannel” is becoming almost the front channel…”

Jonathan Becher, SAP Executive VP of Marketing and host of the event gave his impressions in a blog post about the event.

“When I was asked to be the “official” blogger for the SAP Influencer Summit, I assumed that it would end up following a similar flow as I used for SAPPHIRE 09 earlier this year.  That is, I would write up some short observations after each of the morning’s keynotes and post them throughout the day.  Later in the evening, I would provide some more general observations about the event, with perhaps some on-site tidbits to share with those that couldn’t attend in person.

It didn’t turn out that way at all.

I wrote the initial post [about the Summit] during the relative calm of the night before the Influencer Summit.  I planned to write my second post during the break after Jim Snabe’s and Vishal Sikka’s morning keynotes.  Since we expected that the influencers to be very active on twitter, I also decided to monitor the #sapsummit hashtag live during the morning keynotes.  If specific issues came up, I could respond to them myself and, if anyone made any relevant comments, I could refer to them during my slots between the other presentations.

I knew that I was going to be busy but I wasn’t quite prepared for the firestorm of tweets… [not] just from the attendees in the room but also from those attending virtually. All of this meant I had no time to write the second blog entry…”

During the Q&A session with John Schwarz (left in the photo above), Jonathan also had an earphone and an audio feed that could give him feedback of audience reactions.

As I remarked on Twitter,

“#sapsummit is the first I’ve seen that comes close to using the possibilities of real-time Twitter”

And not just in real-time. The tweets themselves are a valuable resource that SAP can use to collect and study reactions to the presentations. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@DealArchitect) mused :

#sapsummit wondering if SAP or someone else is mining the huge tweet stream – lots of instant reaction from so many watchers

And he went on to hope that SAP would summarize the feedback as a follow up to the summit. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of Twitter, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

And a couple of days after the event, Jonathan Becher tweeted on progress:

Working on sentiment analysis for #sapsummit: OnDemand & ByD top mentioned terms, keyword with most positive mentions: BusinessObjects

Le Web

The annual Le Web conference in Paris is a much larger, general conference, focused mainly on consumer web technology. It also featured (excellent) live video-streaming of presentations (using USStream), and also had a very active Twitter channel (#leweb), with over 15,000 tweets from over 5,000 different people.

But interestingly enough, there was a much clearer separation of the presenters and the audience. I didn’t watch all the sessions, but the backchannel – although very active – seemed to stay firmly in the background. There was no obvious interaction between the people on stage and the people watching and tweeting – the closest I saw was the tweets that both Queen Rania, and Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet sent just before going on stage.

Even sessions all about Twitter, such as the Twitter Apps Panel didn’t actually use Twitter in any way as part of the presentation – when it came to Q&A, they used an open microphone in the session room.

The Future of Conferences

There’s been a lot of interest recently in Open Space meetings, Bar Camps, and other types of Unconference, where the audience takes a much larger role in the planning and delivery of conference materials. I suspect it’s going to be quite a long time before these take over from the more traditional conferences, at least enterprise software.

Both conferences included lots of real-time Twitter, and live video streaming. Attending conferences virtually becomes a real possibility – certainly compared to the hassle and expenses of actually being physically present. As Utku Can put it:

“Hello we’re the #leweb attendees. We’ve paid €1500 to sit together and check Twitter.”

Although, of course, it can never completely replace the real thing. As  Andy Bitterer put it:

“Attending an event virtually like this week’s #SAPsummit still not the same thing as being there. Miss the live interaction.”

I believe that in the future, more conferences will start to look like the SAP Summit, which is just part of a much longer ongoing dialog with a group of “stakeholders”, that also plays out through SAP’s Developer Network, and other regular meetings and communication, including platforms like Twitter.

Audiences are going to find it increasingly easy to get information before the event, and less patient with the rephrasing of messaging they’ve already heard before. The sessions are going to get more interactive. The audiences will want to ask more questions, earlier, and will expect their comments on Twitter or other channels to be included. Presenters will have to be more flexible, adapting their contents in real time to the audience.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

It’s a sunny Fall morning in San Francisco, and Steve Wylie of TechWeb kicked off the first San Francisco version of the E2.0 event, talking about the changes he’s seen over the last few years. In particular, he pointed to the the rich case studies, larger vendors, and dedicated service providers that are present at today’s event as evidence of the industry’s increasing maturity.

Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation, started her keynote with a prediction that this year will be seen as the “ah-ha” year, when organizations really started implementing Enterprise 2.0 technology. She explained that, as with every new technology, the early focus is on the technology itself, but it will ultimately lead to big changes in the the way organizations work. For example, the invention of the telephone enabled management at a distance, and the creation of head offices far from the plants and factories.

She went on to outline the changes she sees in the future:

Over the last 100 years, we’ve developed organizations perfectly adapted to prior challenges – but not the challenges of the future. The icons of the future will be those organizations that have harnessed the power of Enterprise 2.0 technology in organizations, bringing information together in powerful new ways.

The organizational structures of today’s organizations are not adapted to the new methods. We need more flexible team structures that have ability to effect change. And beyond the structures, there are a series of deeply-embedded assumptions that need to be surfaced and addressed.

For example, there’s assumed to be a tradeoff between loyalty, and protection and care. Most corporate policies – such as pension plans and promotions – are based on this. But we know as employees that we can no longer companies to protect us – but as yet, there’s no replacement pact yet to take its place. Another assumption has been about individual autonomy – the notion that “you do your job, I do mind”, and that peers don’t have any right or ability to comment on my work.

Today, almost all the unwritten rules in our organizations actually discourage collaborative behavior, and this has to change. The future will see a move to more of a “Plug and Pay” structure, where employees can come in for specific roles for which they are best qualified.

nGenera’s research shows there are ten behaviors that enable collaborative capacity:

• Highly engaged, committed participants
• Trust-based relationships
• Networking opportunities
• Selection, promotion and training practices based on collaboration
• Organizational philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
• Executives who create a “gift culture”
• Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
• Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
• Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
• Important, challenging tasks

Executive concerns about Enterprise 2.0 are clearly diminishing – fewer people consider it a luxury, or simply a sop to Gen-Y employees. Organizations are realizing that these are business tools that have substantial implications for the way we carry out activities.

But there’s still confusion – we lump together a very wide range of different activities and technologies under the “Enterprise 2.0” banner. The reality is that Enterprise 2.0 can take many forms – and it’s not always worth it.

So what do people mean? There are typically “ten collaborative intents”:

1. Connect previously-unrelated ideas
2. Access untapped people or expertise
3. Distribute work or risk
4. Co-create
5. Detect emerging patterns or trends
6. Pool judgments
7. Determine group-wide preferences
8. Air and debate multiple views
9. Influence views or norms
10. Coordinate in time and space

One of the biggest future challenges is engagement: you can’t make anyone collaborate. You don’t really know if I’m really putting forth my “best effort”. So the way we’ve learned to manage, by setting directions and controls, and monitoring success – has to change. The new management challenge will be engagement: the job of a manager is to help employees want to share, to collaborate. This requires a very “authentic” organization – one that is true to “what it means to work here”

Tammy outlined four common corporate positions today:

• Technology-led
• Culture-based
• Executive-led
• Skunk works

In each of these cases, the approach isn’t yet balanced – one of the elements dominates over the others (strategy, structure, culture, technology, or engagement) – or, in the skunkworks case, there’s only some development in each area..

Microsoft’s presentation featured a mock “social speed date”  between Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft, and Alina Fu, SharePoint product manager.

Andrew McAfee, first coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in an article in 2006, and literally wrote the book about the subject.

He agreed with Tammy that there’s been a sea-change in interest in Enterprise 2.0, and that executives have moved from skepticism to awareness, or resignation, or even some enthusiasm. But there are also some danger signs – hence the title of his presentation: “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory""

First, the evidence that Enterprise 2.0 is thriving. Andrew’s favorite case study comes from the intelligence community: “if they can do it – with a strong “need to know” tradition of information sharing – then anybody can.” When he asked a member of that community what had changed, they said:

“Philosophy used to be that if we shared information too much, people would die. But after 9/11, we realized that if we DON’T share information enough, people could die.”

Andrew pointed to the growth of case studies and organizations such as the Enterprise 2.0 adoption council as an example of the increasing maturity of the industry (plus, they have great swag!)

Andrew quoted from various studies including one from McKinsey called “how companies are benefiting from Web 2.0”, which showed big increases in access to knowledge, to internal experts, employee satisfaction, increasing innovation, and customer satisfaction.

What are the dangers? What could we do to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here are some common mistakes Andrew sees:

Declaring war on the enterprise. As Andrew points out, this is a really bad sales pitch – if the goal is to make the executives go away, they are unlikely to sign up for the plan. Plus, and more importantly, it’s flat-out empirically wrong – there’s still need for some hierarchy, there’s still need for management. To illustrate the point, Andrew pointed to a news story from the satirical journal, the Onion — “Marrxist’s apartment a microscosm of why Marxism doesn’t work”.

Allow walled gardens to flourish. Create mutually inaccessible silos of information. The web works because there’s “a” web, not lots of different webs. He illustrated this with a picture of walled fields from Normandy France.

Accentuate the negative. The risks are manageable, and shouldn’t be ignored, but shouldn’t stop things going forward. For example, one organization implemented a “flag” that could be set to show a potential problem – but so far it’s never been used.

Try to replace email. We’re not going to replace email any time soon. It works well for a lot of people, and in particular, senior decision-makers are happy with it, especially the “one stop shop” aspect of the inbox.

Fall in love with features. Users don’t want more bells and whistles. We have a tendency to cram in more features – but this doesn’t make it any easier to use. The phrase to retain is “what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

Overuse the word “social”. The word is technically accurate, but “I’ve rarely come across a work that has so many negative associations for managers” – it sounds like “technology to organize social hour” (cue picture of Woodstock: chaos, despair, etc.)

In the final keynote of the morning, Rob Tarkoff, VP and General Manager, Business Productivity Solutions for Adobe explained that enterprise software is failing because of the lack of attractive interfaces, and showed an example of healthcare workflow using Adobe’s solutions.

Mark talks about how to create a feeling of community, how SAP leverages technology like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, and what his team does to measure the success of their initiatives.

SDN – SAP Developer Network – http://sdn.sap.com
BPX – Business Process Expert Community – http://bpx.sap.com
BOC – Business Objects Community – http://boc.sap.com
SAP EcoHub – http://ecohub.sap.com
UAC – University Alliances Community – http://uac.sap.com
SAP TechEd & SAP Tech Tour – http://sapteched.com
SCN – SAP Community Network – http://scn.sap.com

Some new research has been published on the EngagementDB web site on how social media engagement correlates with revenue and profit for the 100 Best Global Brands as measured by BusinessWeek and Interbrand.

The report, The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?, attempts to measure the financial worth of social media activities of top brands, including SAP.

The study summarizes brand engagement into four categories:

1. Mavens, such as SAP, with dedicated teams and high engagement across multiple channels
2. Butterflies, present in many channels, but not highly engaged
3. Selectives, with high engagement in a few channels
4. Wallflowers, who are just dipping their toes into social media

The report then looked at the correlation between these categories and financial performance. Interestingly, revenue seems to be correlated with the number of channels (so butterflies do better than selectives), but profits are correlated with engagement (so selectives do better than butterflies).

Of course, correlation is not causation, so while the relationships were statistically significant, the data may just be showing us what we’d already expect: that larger companies simply tend to engage in more media channels, that successful, profitable companies tend to have better engagement with their customers, and that companies have integrated social media into their existing strategies.

The report give case studies of the activities of various top brands, including a report on SAP’s successful social media communities for technical and business customers, SDN and BPX:

The researchers conclude:

While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.

There’s also a blog posting that summarizes the results and gives some tips for greater engagement, and shows the top ten companies for engagement. SAP comes in at #9:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.

SAP Social Media Participation Guidelines 2009

SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing
June 2009

This document reflects the current guidelines as determined by SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing and SAP Legal in collaboration with employees. This document is subject to modifications and amendments from time to time as required.

SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION GUIDELINES
The following guidelines describe private, individual participation in social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. for SAP employees. If your job requires you to be an SAP evangelist in social media channels and you have questions, or you want to establish social media channels on behalf of SAP or an SAP group, contact the SAP Social Media Group by sending a mail to [redacted]. For any other questions about social media at SAP, please visit the SAP-internal SAP 2.0 Community.

These guidelines are intended to assist you in your use of social media tools as an individual. Please be aware that nothing in the use of these tools changes your responsibilities and obligations as an employee of SAP. SAP and its employees are required to act ethically, and it is every employee’s obligation to review and understand SAP’s Code of Business Conduct, our communications policy, and their confidentiality obligations in other policies, such as the Security Policy.

Social media channels such as (micro) blogging, video and photo sharing, forums, virtual worlds, opinion markets and collaboration environments represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all of our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it. SAP provides these social media guidelines to help employees participate within social media channels safely, and with minimum personal liability.

The SAP employee community collaborated in writing these guidelines. Specifically, a draft set of guidelines was posted on an internal SAP Wiki and SAP employees from divisions throughout the organization were invited to make comments and suggestions aimed at developing an appropriate set of guidelines.

These guidelines reflect the principles that SAP employees should follow when engaging in online communication. They are intended to provide you with an understanding of both the proper and improper uses of social computing in an effort to make your conversations and interactions as rich as possible. At all times, SAP employees must obey their local laws and adhere to local legal and ethical regulations. Nevertheless, as online communication is global in nature, other laws and regulations may also be applicable to your communication.

Please note that any direct communication to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through SAP Global Communications. The following set of guidelines only pertains to your personal statements in any online media. Please be aware that, although SAP is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.

Setting up personal spaces in social media channels – You are free to set up any blog, space or other area within the given framework of the terms provided by the host of such spaces (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc). Please contact the SAP Social Media Group whenever you intend to use “SAP” as any part of the name or URL to avoid confusion with official SAP communication. Any personal space should have a clear disclaimer that it is not an official space of SAP. The following template may be used for this purpose:

“This [Choose. Blog, Space ...] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute any official communication of SAP.”

Managers and executives take note: This standard disclaimer does not by itself exempt SAP managers and executives from a special responsibility when blogging or otherwise communicating online. By virtue of their position, managers and executives must consider whether personal thoughts they publish may be misunderstood as expressing SAP positions, and a manager should assume that his or her team will read what is written. A public blog is not the appropriate medium for many types of communications, including, but not limited to: communicating SAP policies to SAP employees; negotiating with third parties; making disparaging remarks about any third party; or other communications, etc.

Write in the first person – When you contribute commentary about SAP or SAP-related matters to an external audience, it is vital that you make it clear that you are speaking only for yourself (i.e. use the first-person singular, such as “I believe…” and not “We at SAP believe…”). There are different ways to do this. A simple and accepted approach is to include a disclaimer at the very beginning of your blog. If the blog is lengthy or long-standing, you should consider repeating the disclaimer inside the message. The disclaimer should state at a minimum that your point of view is personal, and it is not an official SAP point of view. Make it simple. Make it clear.

Identify yourself – The value of social computing is diminished when people hide behind a pseudonym or an anonymous post. Trust is hard enough to establish and maintain over the Internet, and if you do not identify yourself, then do not be surprised if your well-considered contributions are brushed aside. Therefore, please identify yourself to provide additional authenticity to your online contributions.

Be Honest – Tell the truth and if you find you have made a mistake, issue a clarification or a withdrawal or whatever may suit the circumstance and make it abundantly clear that you have done so. Social computing is a tolerant neighborhood – mistakes and errors will not make you a social outcast if you take responsibility. Rather than editing your content once it has been published, find ways to make your corrections transparent.

Be Respectful – simply carry the professionalism norms and standards of any SAP office onto the social computing platforms.

Separate Opinions from Facts – and make sure your audience can see the difference.

Add Value – be informative and interesting. Contribute your thoughts, experiences, observations, and opinions regarding issues you know and care about, but make sure to check your facts and figures – if you don’t, someone else probably will.

Be Engaged and Be Informed – Read the contributions of others. Know what the current conversations are and what people are saying in order to see if, and how, you may be able to contribute a new perspective. Participation is the fuel of social computing. And remember…

Aim for Quality, not Quantity – Offer your contribution with context whenever you can. Provide links to other blogs, media articles or whatever sources you think are necessary. Make your content rich and interesting for others to read. Consider attaching documents when necessary (but not SAP internal documents, confidential or not, of course!). And in every case, keep the language simple and flowing. If you start a blog, encourage feedback and conversation – make sure your readers can add feedback to your blog and respond in a timely manner. A two-way communication exchange allows for a more meaningful conversation.

Don’t Pick Fights – When you see misrepresentations or patently false statements about SAP by bloggers, the media, analysts or anyone else for that matter, you may certainly address these misrepresentations, even by joining someone else’s conversation. But stick to the facts and make sure the facts you rely on are publicly available.

Protect Your Privacy – Never disclose personal information.

Remember that you are still an SAP employee – do not make false, misleading or detrimental statements about SAP or SAP products. Consider that, although you are writing a personal blog, your statements will be considered an indication of the internal proceedings in SAP and how the company and our products are seen internally.

How to Handle Media Inquiries – Your contributions to social computing and the online conversations around SAP products, solutions, and practices will help advance dialogue, maybe solve some problems, create awareness and possibly attract attention of all kinds, including the media. If a member of the media contacts you, simply notify the Media Relations team in Global Communications via press@sap.com. They will determine the best way to handle the inquiry.

Legal Considerations – Yes, you have legal responsibilities and they need to be considered. You must respect copyrights and other intellectual property, fair use and financial disclosure laws, and SAP deals in general. Remember the following – do NOT talk about: perceived product defects or deficits; revenue projections; future product launch details; acquisition targets yet to be defined, or disclose corporate topics, product roadmaps, customer wins, our relationship to customers or partners or any other material SAP internal information. Do not post materials from SAP partners or customers in your communication (whether marked as confidential or not) or otherwise make information public that you have received through interaction with customers or partners. Use your common sense, and when in doubt contact the SAP Social Media Group.

Social Computing and Your Primary Role – Active contribution to social computing in its many forms can be time-consuming, so it is important that this does not interfere with your role at SAP. If you find that your social computing activity interferes with your role at SAP, please speak with your manager to determine if your personal contributions can become official SAP communications in alignment with SAP Global Communications as part of your job. If your manager and SAP Global Communication determines that it is not possible to incorporate your social computing activity into your role at SAP, you should reduce your involvement in social computing and consider posting a statement that explains why you are reducing your online activity.

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.

At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.

SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.

This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.

First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.

SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.

Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.

These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:

“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”

I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:

Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:

• When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
• Who has access to the system but is not using it?
• Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
• Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?

Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.

• Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
• What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
• Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
• Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
• Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
• Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?

Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:

• Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
• Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
• Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
• Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
• Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.

Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

You can download Jive Software’s “Social Business Imperative Manifesto” here. And any organizations interested in trying out the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand solutions can click here to sign up for a Starter edition account.

Links and Other Analysis

Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service: Jive, SAP Partner on ‘social BI’

Alex Goldman, InternetNews.com, SAP BusinessObjects integrates into Jive

Barb Mosher, CMS Wire, Jive Integrates SAP’s onDemand Business Intelligence Offerings

Oliver Marks, ZDNet Blogs: Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Susan Scrupski,  ITSInsider: And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event

SAP is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston. Unfortunately, I’m not able to attend this year – here’s what I’ll be missing (least until the online versions are available):

Connect. Collaborate. Transform Your Business. Forward looking businesses are using web 2.0 and social tools to achieve new levels of productivity and efficiency in a tough economy. Attend the leading event for business and IT professionals challenging the status quo and leading the charge to Enterprise 2.0.

Over forty sessions across six conference tracks cover the latest trends in Enterprise 2.0 technology innovation and organization-wide change:

• Enterprise 2.0 in Action
• Social Tools for the Enterprise
• Foundations for Enterprise 2.0
• New Ways to Work: Organization 2.0
• Community Engagement Through Social Media
• Executive

There will be a host of Enterprise 2.0 experts from SAP attending the conference, including Beth Beld, Vice President Emerging Technology Strategy. They will be networking with customers, analysts, and partners, and the SAP booth in the Expo Pavillion will be open Tuesday and Wednesday, 11:30 am – 6 pm. Don’t forget to visit to get the latest on SAP’s cloud computing directions, on-demand strategy, and the latest Web 2.0 prototypes from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

Mani Gill, Vice President, OnDemand, SAP will be presenting in the panel on Privacy, Data Ownership and Identity in an Increasingly Social World, 3:30 pm–4:30 pm on Wednesday, June 24:

"It’s IM all over again!" as public services such as Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace increasingly cross from consumer into enterprise. As these tools become legitimate business services for marketing and collaboration, IT must determine how to move from blocking to supporting their use in a manner that’s consistent with requirements for data loss prevention, security, compliance, and management. During this session we’ll explore the challenges in bridging private and public worlds, as well as mitigation strategies to enable use of public services while minimizing potential threats.

We’re strong believers in collaboration, and your participation will make this event exceptional. Please share your passion, your latest project/discovery or pet peeve in or around the SAP (Eco)System.

Here’s a short list of some of the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 sessions planned:

• Adobe Flash and SAP- changing the user experience – Andre Salazar. ABSTRACT
• Envision the Future of the Business User Workplace — Matthias Zeller. ABSTRACT
• Cloud Computing at SAP — Frank Stienhans. ABSTRACT
• Spark – Enabling Grassroots Innovation inside of SAP– Rebecca Sowards-Emmerd, Will Gardella. ABSTRACT
• Assemble your Tribe. Enterprise Community Building in the 21st Century. Mark Patrick Finnern. ABSTRACT

And I’d particularly like to point out the BusinessObjects Community Session by Laurent Bride of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, who will be showing off the latest Web 2.0 prototypes:

Please come and join to learn about the latest trends in Business Intelligence and see live demos of the newest BusinessObjects Innovation Center prototypes including "Social Network Analyzer", "Business Objects Explorer on the iPhone" and more!

In addition, I’m told that many of the sessions will be recorded and made available via SAP Connect, so you’ll be able to “participate even if you can’t make it to the event.