Following Social Media Wherever It Leads

This is my third try with this new book. That’s not nearly as bad as it may sound.

Scoble and I tried seven names before we came up with Naked Conversations. I don’t even have a proposal yet, never mind a publisher or publishing date, so there is still lots of time.

But having a working title, even one that may change a few times, makes it easier to talk about my book. And the process of name requires me to focus thoughts on what this book is about in the simplest, clearest possible terms.

So let me try again:

Blurring  Boundaries
How Online Enterprise Communities improve  products, markets & profits

This is a book about large enterprises and how their dedicated social networks are lowering the borders between them and their customers and partners. It is an attempt to address the lingering questions of social medias business value as well as where and how social media teams and programs fit into existing business practices.

In my prior two books, I’ve championed the tools of social media. I have argued that their business use was early and disruptive; that measurement was early and primitive. Over time, I argued, the early disruption would come to an end and that standards for measuring value would become more refined and easier.

My overwhelming focus in writing more than one million words about social media has looked at public venues such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest. So have the traditional media and most of the burgeoning social media community. It’s where so much action has been. There’s conflict, adventure, celebrity walk-thrus, natural disasters and occasional sexuality.

It makes good copy, and yes, it also makes good business.

But where most of us have not looked is behind the firewalls of some of the world’s largest organizations; companies with tens of thousands of corporate customers and partners; companies whose products are in the hands of hundreds of millions of end users who depend upon those products to conduct a majority of the world’s business.

It turns out that there is a great deal of downright exciting social media action going on in the bellies of some of the biggest–and perhaps most boring–of technology enterprises.

The result are networks of online communities, built by huge enterprises for developers, customers, partners and employees to come together and share information and ideas. These private and semi-private social networks rarely have discussion of lunch menus and in my research I didn’t find a single flirtation.

But I do see real business going on. I see new marketplaces that independent analysts say have values in the tens of billions of dollars. I see ideas and information being shared at high speed and with great accuracy in communities that are usually under a half-dozen years old but have attracted tens of millions of users.

This book will explore online enterprise communities. Much more than my previous books, the primary focus will be on business-to-business, which it turns out, has developed pretty much in the same way as business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer communities.

Blurring  Boundaries will examine in depth six enterprises:  IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and possibly SAS. I will report on the history, structure and issues of their online social networks. I will look at how these communities are changing or have changed business models and strategy for the better during a period of great economic pressure.

The title is inspired by a conversation I recently had with Mark Finnern who runs the community-championing mentor program at SAP. He talked about how customers, and partners had played extraordinary roles in improving products used by SAP customers, as well terms of use and standards. “The lines between companies and customers are blurring,” he told me. “Instead of exchanging goods and services for money, we now collaborate and everybody wins.”

A few days later Scott Gulbransen at Intuit, a company serving consumer and small business markets told me just about the same thing, despite clear differences between how Intuit and SAP’s communities are organized and who they serve.

This book will explain that online community collaboration is shortening product development and improving product functionality and design because the people who use them are talking directly with the people building them. They are likewise, reducing time-to-market and marketing costs.

Online enterprise communities are also bring sanity to Terms of Agreement, product standards, developer certification programs, appropriate community behavior by allowing those who must adhere to these governing factors contribute to the rulebooks as they are written.

Blurring Boundaries also examines the issues of where social media teams and online communities belong on an enterprise org chart. Almost invariably, social media in corporations, began as skunkworks projects, places where small teams of bright people were allowed to experiment. Allotted small budgets, they were protected from the sea anchors of labyrinthine enterprise processes so that they could move with greater agility than systems in place would allow.

But they have grown fast and that speed is accelerating with millions of community members participating and billions of dollars of value in the marketplaces being created, the managers who recently disdained social media projects as having no real business value are now struggling with the inevitable process of assimilation. Each of these companies has dealt with this issue in different ways. This book will examine each and compare the results.

Blurring Boundaries will not answers the ubiquitous question of where’s the ROI of social media. That question remains as daunting to answer as placing ROI on email or a telephone.

But it will show that there is real business value being generated because of  online enterprise communities. And that billions of dollars in products and services are being generated as a real result.

People will walk away understanding that social media in business is at the end of it’s early disruptive phases and is now entering the longer period in which use of the tools are normalizing, are becoming part of business practices and are valuable centers for the modern enterprise.

I’ve decided on a working title for my new book, unless of course, someone tells me why it’s a bad idea:

Blurry Lines
-How online communities help companies & customers mutually profit.

When I interviewed Mark Finnern, who runs SAP’s mentor program, he told me that the companies community networks were blurring the lines between the company and it’s customers. The same perception came up again when I interviewed Intuit’s Scott Gulbransen who talked about an ongoing collaborative process in communities that let the users say what they wanted in products in discussion with those who built it.

Then there’s the whole ROI issue, which I view with the same ambiguity as measuring the ROI in a telephone. You really can’t find the answer, but there must be a way to measure value. I will not be able to report that online communities are delivering directly to enterprise bottom lines. If they were, public companies would not be able to discuss specifically anyway. But my early research indicates that hundreds of millions of dollars are being realized by both companies and customers because of online communities.

I talked recently with Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group who covers enterprise ecosystems–a major component of the book. He estimated that the SAP ecosystem had created a marketplace for the company, it’s customers and partners of about $80 billion, with the lion’s share being enjoyed by the partners and customers.

I asked him how much of that was being delivered by online communities. He explained that while very little–if any– profit was being derived directly from the communities, a great deal was coming because of them. “The heart of the ecosystem is the community,” he told me. “You cannot take them away. The level of connection is what gives the ecosystems life.”

The novel concept is that companies and customers have historiacally seen themselves in a symbiotic tug of war. One makes and markets; the other buys and uses. One side’s expense is the other side’s profit. That perspective is starting t be seen through a new prism, one where both buyer and seller thrive or flounder together. This changes a great deal, I believe, and Blurry Lines will examine how this fluidity between company and customer change all marketplace dynamics.

The concept of the ecosystem coming to life because the communities are at their heart is yet another key point of this book. I was tempted to call this book “It’s Alive!,” until Lon Cohen who follows me on Twitter commented that the title sounds a bit like a cheesy horror movie.

So how does “Blurry Lines” sound to you for a book title? I may change it at some point down the line, but I really need a name right now. For me it’s like having a new baby, who I’m calling “the kid,” because I can’t come up with a name I like.

Tell me what you think.

Intuit is one of at least five companies that I plan to profile in depth for my new–still nameless–book. The others are essentially big business-to-big business players.

But Intuit is business-to-small business and consumer. My particular interest is the small business side an area generally considered to be too fragmented, limited in budget and late to adopt to be a profitable area to serve.

Yet, every small  business needs to manage its books and tax records and Intuit is the overwhelming supplier of automated products in this area.

Scott said Intuit has 50 million individual and small business users. It started its online communities about three years ago and today has 3.5 million active users. About 400,000 are small business users. Both numbers are growing.

Last week, I talked with Scott Gulbransen, a senior PR/Social media manager for Intuit’s TurboTax group. It was an overview, the first of what will be a series of talks with Intuit, its customers and third-party developers.

Like other companies, Intuit did not wake up one morning and devise a grand strategy for online communities. In fact, it was more an outgrowth of issues that would keep company officials awake at night: how to migrate from a company whose products sold off retail shelves to one whose products are downloaded from the internet.

Scott didn’t say it, but in the early-to-middle 2000s, Intuit lost luster as an innovator and some wondered if the company would remain as an independent entity. The company started to fumble with an online strategy and as it did, Scott told me,  ”a sense of community was woven into corporate DNA.”

Like SAP, the communities are part of a larger something that both companies call “ecosystems.” Both companies see the ecosystem as core to corporate strategy, but they’ve structured them differently.  SAP has folded its network of communities into an Ecosystem and Partners Group, Intuit’s communities are assigned to product groups and operated separately from each other.

Still, it assembles into an ecosystem strategy. At Intuit, developers collaborate at the back end, telling each other how to make applications succeed. And the strategy makes traditional command and control approaches obsolete.

“An ecosystem makes you get out of the way. You build a platform and enable. At the end of the day everybody benefits. Your marketplace becomes a living breathing thing,” he said.

Despite these different approaches, the outcome seems to be the same. The lines between company, customers and third-party vendors and partners get blurred as products, services, policies are developed, delivered and refined in transparent, collaborative style, somewhat ad hoc style. While marketing may be responsible for communities, these communities have diminished the importance of traditional marketing tactics of drum rolls announcing releases and updates. Stealth modes make no sense in collaborative environments where companies ask customers how to make the products better.

While the company built these communities, and they host them on company space,  Intuit does not presume to run these communities from what Scott told me.

The lines between customers and the company have became less clearly defined. Third-party vendors who might previously have been regarded as competitors or irrelevant, became partners. 

The key issue in the communities “is no longer what’s good for Intuit,” Scott said, but “what’s best for the customer.” Coincidentally, it turns out that what’s best for the customer is almost always best for Intuit in the long run.

To understand the core benefit to Intuit, Scott quoted Scott Cook, Intuit founder and chairman “In the moment feedback is a huge gift to companies. You want to do everything you can to foster more and more. This was not possible 30 years ago.”

The communities created a partnering process for product development and for helping each other, sometimes without an Intuit representative being involved at all.  The communities become a “connection platform,” one where ideas and information are shared and spread faster than was previously possible.

Scott feels that the social networks have a special value for small business practitioners. “Running a small business can be lonely. The biggest obstacle is to connect with others like yourself.”

Intuit can help proprietors find others like themselves and because its online, they do not need to take time away from their operations to attend a workshop or events.

The social networks also serve as development platforms, giving independent software developers unprecedented access to a community of millions of small business operators and you can affordably address them as property owners, or dry cleaners or coffee shop proprietors.

“If you can build for QuickBooks, then you have a massive market opportunity,” Scott told me.

One such example is Propertyware.com which helps smaller property owners and operators to manage cost and flow of rental properties. It lets small landlords better manage their properties, understand profits, cash flows. The company has no brick and mortar, but exists exclusively in the cloud.

Through a variety of services including Intuit Marketplace and old-fashioned email newsletter, Intuit has given this small virtual company the ability to speak to Intuit’s customer base.  When Propertyware acquires a new customer, that customer can go directly to Propertyware to purchase additional products. Intuit is fine with that. The customer benefits and Intuit’s value to that customer goes up.

One other place that SAP and Intuit seem to agree. Online communities do not reduce the need for face-to-face meetings between people who primarily know each other through online communities. They increase it.

Both companies host a series of social events for their most passionate community members. It seems there still is a business value to handshakes, smiles and occasional hugs.

[NOTE: Do you have a story about Intuit or any other enterprise social network? Please let me know. This book is in the early phases of development. And I can use the wisdom of this crowd. Leave a comment or send me an email.]

One of my exercises in starting a new book is to create two sentences. The first tells you what the book is about and the second tells you who it is for. The challenge is to constrain yourself to two sentences.

I’m not there yet. It would be nice, because once I get there, figuring out the Title/subtitle would not feel like such a daunting task.

As I’ve written before, I use this blog as a sandbox, for my books, a place to play and experiment. A place to see what does and does not work. Over half the books I planned to write have never gotten beyond this sandbox. Almost all writers go through similar exercises, the difference being that mine occupies a public space. And my hope is that you give me some feedback that will help guide me forward.

So, here are a few thoughts I have on what this book is about. I offer them randomly. It helps me just to put them down on virtual paper. It would help more if you chose to give me some feedback.

1. Almost every corporation today is dealing in some way with social media. Almost any department of any company can use social media tools and I’ve dealt with that issue previously. This new book looks only at online enterprise communities, built by a few, usually very large enterprises. I will spotlight at least five: IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit and use my blog and Twitter to actively search for additional enterprise community examples and anecdotes.
2. Enterprise communities are usually part of enterprise ecosystems, an historically vague term that predates social media. It refers to the global infrastructure of partners, customers and companies. Every large enterprise uses the term, but it is very often just a concept that looks like a lifeless org chart with lots of dotted lines. But when you insert online communities into the ecosystem it gives it a heart, one that pumps life into the ecosystem, making it more resemble the biological kind. This section will probably be called “The Tinman’s Heart,” in reference to the Wizard of Oz character.
3. Some online communities are huge. SAP has about two million active users as part of an ecosystem that Ray Wang at Altimeter Group says is a marketplace worth about $80 billion. Intuit’s series of very loosely joined social networks may be the most viable small business marketplace anywhere. I believe that these marketplaces simply could not exist without these online communities. My research for this book will either prove or disprove that opinion.
4. Online communities almost invariably have small cores of passionate champions coming from all sectors of the online community. They play key roles in all the online communities I’ve looked at so far, but these roles and styles vary greatly from, say Microsoft MVPs to SAP Mentors or the contributors that Intuit assembles periodically a few times each year. Founding companies give these community leaders recognition, but what seems to drive them is a passion to share what they know with other community members. [This section may be called, It's not the stoopid tee-shirt]
5. A key issue to address is the role of the founding company in the social networks they create. This section, tentatively called I lost my command & control. Just what do I do now?”
6. Another thread will be a look at the blurred line between companies, customers and partners. Both Intuit and SAP have given me countless examples of how online communities and ecosystems have changed traditional perspectives of buyer v seller v vendor into something more fluid and interactive. These days, there is an interdependence between companies, customers and partners. They count on each other for better products. They thrive or fail together and this changes the entire dynamics of the relationship and how products, support, design and policies develop.
7. Social media serves as an accelerant for the sharing of ideas and information. Even during these tough and formative times for enterprise communities, participants are getting smarter faster than has been previously possible. As the economy turns around, this will put social media closer to the center of the company and help businesses come back faster and at lower cost.
8. This book will deal with the issue of business value for social networks. This does not mean that there needs to be an ROI for communities, but this book will look long-and-hard at how social networks are being braided into the fabric of traditional business, which they so recently disrupted.

These ideas are neither sequential, nor are they organized. They are the beginning of my understanding the two sentences of what this book is about and who will want to read it. I am missing a good deal and I am sure that some of what I’ve just written needs greater clarification.

It’s a work in progress, so tell me what you think. Oh yeah, one more thing, got a good name for it?

Yesterday, I announced that I was dropping out of The Living Enterprise book project to write about enterprise communities from an independent perspective. Today I woke up and discovered that once again my toes are against the base of a mountain.

The mountain is a new book project. My toes are at the base, because I am starting anew and this post is the first baby step. At this moment, this new book has not title, no outline, no table of contents, or publishers proposal.

I have hundreds of interviews in front of me, dozens of chapter drafts, leads to pursue, dead ends to hit.

But, if I am at the beginning of a lengthy climb, I am better equipped than I was at the start of previous endeavors. First off, I have a satchel full of notes and ideas that come from dozens of conversations with SAP folk whose stories and insights will be helpful.

I’ve also started exploring elsewhere.

While writing this post, Intuit’s Scott Gulbransen, a TurboTax PR guy, has sent me some links and intros, so that I can start exploring what they have done with communities that embrace independent developers and small businesses.

Adam Christensen, an IBM communications officer who helped me with Twitterville has agreed to help me with this new effort, and IBM has done some remarkable work with enterprise communities.

Sean O’Driscoll, who started Microsoft”s pioneering MVP community has agreed to talk with me on how it all started and what it has succeeded–or not–in achieving for Microsoft.

It’s a start. I’m counting on you, dear crowd members, to be the source of more.

Let me tell you a few random thoughts that will be at the nexus of this book, whatever it will be called:

• This book will examine business-to-business social media efforts, mostly online social networks.
• It will explain through as many stories as possible how social media projects began as a skunkworks, but are now showing real business value. While social networks may not deliver many dollars directly to the bottom line, significant revenue is being realized because of social media.
• It will look at how large organizations are dealing with the difficult problem of where social media fits into a traditional organization’s structure. Should it be part of marketing? Should it be part of corporate communications or should it have it’s own box on the organizational chart?
• The blurring of lines between companies, partners and customers. Social media has made it clear that community members more often thrive or wane together, showing that success is shared and the health of your customers matters to your company’s bottom line.
• Stories, stories and stories. I am, by nature, a story teller. I don’t write books that look like white papers between hard covers. I tell about people in business who use technology to either achieve success or fail in trying to do so. I believe that if I tell you a lot of stories, about blogs or Twitter or, in this case, enterprise communities, then it will give you ideas on how you can use that information in your work.

This is as far as I’ve gotten on the project so far. But Hell, it’s only 10 am of Day 1. Please tell me what you think. Does this interest you? Do you have an idea that would make this a better book?

I have used crowd sourcing as much as any author I know and I have greatly appreciated the result in my two previous books. I hope once again, the people I meet in social media will help me write a better book.

Please start sending those cards and letters in. I’m eager to share my view with you from further up the mountain.

As you may know, I’ve been working on a new book called, “The Living Enterprise,” in collaboration with Mark Yolton, head of SAP’s community networks and Zia Yusuf, formerly EVP of SAP’s Ecosystem and Partner Group.

The original direction was to explore the SAP ecosystem and the role that its online communities play in making it work so well.  It’s a good story, but as I dug in I became increasingly aware that there are other good stories at other companies that I really want to cover as well. These include IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle as well as other companies and communities you may already know about that I want to learn about.

I have decided to write this new book independently of my co-authors. I continue to respect them and wish them well, but I am at my most comfortable as an independent writer and that is the course that I will pursue moving forward.

My new focus will be from an independent perspective, comparing and contrasting different communities and strategies; giving you ideas of options that may be useful to understand wherever it is that you work.

I will almost entirely talk about large companies and business-to-business strategies, perhaps as a contrast to Twitterville, which covered more small operations than large. Hopefully, it will give readers of the breadth and diversity of social media in business.

Mostly, as always, I will try to assemble some really useful and interesting stories. I remain convinced that the best way to tell business stories is not by putting a white paper between book covers, but by telling you about people; their struggles and dreams and how it impacts their work.

SAP will most certainly be part of my new book. It’s a great story that tells you how one of the world’s largest companies has figured out how to integrate social media into a modern enterprise to the benefit of its customers and partners as well as itself.

As always, I will crowd source as much of this book as I can. If you have a good story about an enterprise community, please share it with me. It can be favorable or unfavorable. What I am looking for is content that is will be useful or interesting to business readers.

If you have a good story lead, please leave a comment here or email me.

It seems to me that SAP’s 75 mentors are the fire starters for much of what happens in SAP’s two-million member community network and I told you a little about why in my previous post. And further, they have influence on programs, policies, product and ideas that often spread throughout SAP global infrastructure

For that reason, I’m giving a good deal of attention to the mentors while researching The Living Enterprise. My previous post told you a bit about the organization and today’s post looks at the program’s founder and leader.

Mark Finnern, is SAP’s chief community evangelist. He created, named and orchestrates the SAP Mentor group. It would not be accurate to say he runs the mentors, because they in fact, run themselves. He is more like a spiritual vortex for them. His role is not part of any company devised grand strategy. Rather, his job has sort of evolved as so many social media positions have done in the past few years. In some ways, social media professionals in established businesses are still making it up as they go along.

It started in 2003, when Mark became part of a small handful of SAP professionals assigned to develop a developer outreach program for NetWeaver, then a new software platform that needed to open the company up to a larger number of software developers that had been previously necessary.

This became the Software Developers Network [SDN] SAP’s first online social network. Sinc then there have been several new social networks created, all under the SAP Communities Network [SCN] umbrella. Like other enterprises, these communities are public in that anyone can visit them, but they are private in that only community members with a designated userID and password can post content. Free thought and speech is encouraged, but inappropriate content is promptly taken down and repeat offenders can be banned.

Mark was the non-technical member of the technical team that started SDN. “I brought the passion,” he told me. He also brought a series of new ideas and played a key role in stitching together a series of communities that meander seemlessly from online to off and from company representative to partner or customer and back again.

SDN’s first module was an old-fashioned forum, which pretty much looks and feels like any forum that you may have seen in the last 20 years or so. Mark’s first significant improvement was to add blogs to the forums. Blogs were still relatively new, outside of the development community. There were less than 50 of them among Fortune 100 companies in 2004, when these started.

Tim O’Reilly,  CEO of O’Reilly Media, an open source champion,publisher and event producer consulted SAP on how to get started and social media and provided the company with it’s first online community platform. [As the communities and users grew, with thousands of posts per day, the company would eventually migrate to Jive Software.]

Blogs move faster than forums and the comment structure is more conversational. After Mark and others injected them into SDN, the conversations became a lot more interesting.

But they also raised issues that have been a pain points for most businesses related to social media.  SDN, is an official SAP site. Companies are accustomed to being in command and control of what is said on their own turf. And when you think about it, why shouldn’t the company, have the power to review, revision, polishing and filtering.

Blogs just don’t work well that way. And on SDN customers were encouraged to post blogs side-by-side with those from SAP employees. This changed the perspective from company to community.

Company concerns probably reached a crescendo when an outside developer posted a blog calling a particular SAP product a failure. Mark’s phone started ringing a few minutes later, a higher up ordered Mark to take the post down.

Mark resisted. Deleting it would cost the company credibility. While the internal offline debate continued, something started happening at SDN itself. Other community members began chiming, posting defenses for the product and pointing to several mistruths in the original post.

The result strengthened the product’s position as well as SAP’s credibility in the developer community. When customers defend a company, it has greater influence than anything a company spokesperson could hope to accomplish.

But it was a two-way street. The community had revealed itself to be credible to the company. If some officials had feared that blogging would allow an unruly mob to light torches, it turned out that those torches would illuminate the truth about a company and its products. It meant that praise could protect SAP and the criticism that did come in would be mostly constructive, helping the company to adjust course when it was wise to do so.

The incident helped SAP to gain credibility with some of the hardest-to-impress people inside SAP. Senior technologists generally speaking tend to be viewed as hard nosed and cynical to any form of hype and SAP’s are no different. SAP’s Horst Keller, an internationally known German physicist and author was one such senior technologist. After the incident, he posted a blog describing what had happened as  very cool. Mark encouraged him to post more content and Horst complied, opening the door for some of SAP’s most respected technology voices to join the conversation.

Mark kept helping to evolve functionality. he encouraged the team to add wikis, which seem to keep better focus than others I’ve seen. he adapted a system from Reilly media that allowed the company to reward contributions with points based on frequency and quality of contribution.

Perhaps most significantly, was that Mark realized that while online communities may reduce barriers of time and geography, it misses one of the magic points of human interaction: the face-to-face meeting.

He started developing events in cooperation with the mentors. It began with  “unconferences,” where attendees set the agenda and schedule. These have evolved into what is now called SDN Meets Labs, day-long sessions, usually produced by SAP mentors held all over the world. He added Tee-shirts that often touted community boosting slogans.

When O’Reilly keynoted to 5000 SAP customers at  Tech Ed 2007, he walked onto the dais wearing a tee shirt he had received at a smaller, more intimate Community Day for 350 the day before.

Paraphrasing a famous Clint Eastwood line, it declared, “Go ahead. Make my community day. “O’Reilly looked down at his shirt and commented, Any company that puts this on their tee-shirts, gets it.”

Another face-to-face event produced by Mark and the mentors is the SDN Clubhouse. When attendees of Tech Ed or SAPphire, the huge annual conferences conference sessions get bored they can wander into the clubhouse for coffee and conversation. Mark makes having the best coffee at each event a major priority.

 Mark told me he doubts the mentors would not have emerged into either so tight-knit or as influential of a community without the face-to-face get togethers.

“The experience of being in a room with people who share the passion, to work together and to solve problems is what gives the mentors their magic,” he told me.

It seems to me that Mark’s personality, a mixture of passion, intensity and dry humor has much to do with the personality adopted by the mentor organization of 75 people and because of their collective position of influence over both SAP and its community this small group is contributing to the texture, personality, products and policies of a global community of millions of millions of people.

One aspect of the mentors is a common thread of music loving. Mark, for example plays several instruments including the accordion and harmonica. At an event in 2007, attendees were given harmonicas as they filed in. mark entered, playing one, and then the audience joined in which may be the only harmonica-fest in tech sector history. 

Keynote speakers for the main Tech Ed speak the day before at the smaller, more intimate Community Day. They are asked to play a musical instrument to precede the main event and set the tone for the gathering.

Over the coming days I will be speaking with additional members of the Mentor group and sharing notes here. They will certainly be included in the book that comes from this effort.

We* see SAP’s ecosystem as a living thing. To understand it, think of the biological kind rather than the org chart or PowerPoint slide that some companies use to represent their ecosystems. Think of people and places and how they interconnect and interdepend on each other.

In Earth’s ecosystem, there are land masses. Some are huge and divided into different sectors. While people in each share a great deal in common, they sometimes don’t speak the same language and have cultural differences. This sometimes leads to misunderstandings, which can be costly to all parties involved.

In the earth’s ecosystem, oceans and waterways connect all the land masses. Increasing the same can be said for SAP’s network of online communities. But there’s two million users of these networks. Some are occasional visitors some merely use it to get fast answers to tough technical questions.

But there are others who have for varying reasons, chosen to immerse themselves into the community. They have demonstrated expertise. They have helped others and contributed to the community by organizing events, writing white papers, advising newcomers, advising and sometimes pressuring SAP to adjust course.

They are also good communicators and you find their contributions are almost omnipresent wherever you look across the SAP Community Network [SCN]. They are  hand-holders, advocates and occasional antagonists; the defend the company against false accusations and tell the company when they think the company is making a mistake in product, service or policy.

They produce local face-to-face events and travel to regional and national ones sponsored by or related to SAP. A mentor gets an annual performance review. She or he can be fired for poor performance and in return for all this time and effort, they are rewarded with tee shirts, recognition and points.

A mentor is an unpaid volunteer who needs to keep his or her day job. There are 75 of them and they reside all over the world. Most work for SAP customers or partners. A few are employed by SAP.

Obviously, the recognition makes them influential in the overall enterprise technology communities, but from those I’ve talked to, that is not what makes them spend all this time and energy as mentors. They seem to me to be motivated by passion more than professional creds.

which are almost deeply technical. But they simply would not have been selected; nor would they have wanted to be, if each of them was not passionate about SAP and the issues impacting company, customers and partners.

Mentors are similar in many ways to Microsoft’s better-known Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program. But the significant difference in perspective is in the name. “MVP, is a sports term. It’s for the stars in the field. “Mentor,” refers to a wise and trusted counselor or teacher. It’s not about being a star. It’s about giving.

One other aspect that has impressed me and the reason for this post’s title. The mentors self organize into teams. The membership is determined by what needs to be accomplished, rather than who wants some glory. So far, despite some attempts to get them to behave otherwise, each of them speaks and acts in support of the other. It seems to be part of their culture.

Mark Finnern, who will be the subject of my next TLE-related post, runs the program. When I spoke with him, he emphasized that the group was called SAP Mentors, not community mentors. This was because they are influencing and changing all of SAP. Not just the social networks.

More on Mark in my next report.

*When I say “we” I mean my co-authors Mark Yolton, Zia Yusuf and me. I do not presume to speak for SAP and I often bring a different perspective to this story.

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark,

First, congrats on building Facebook into the world’s largest social network. You now have about as many users as the US has residents and China has people on the internet. That makes Facebook a very important platform and you a very influential decision-maker on how this new Conversational Age will unfold in the coming years.

I’m writing you now because of your recent remarks during a recent eight-minute interview where you said that you try to maintain "a beginner’s view" of Facebook and make decisions as if you were starting your company today. In that light you decided to open all Facebook user information in the interest of transparency and because you believes your 350 million users were now comfortable with it.

Mark, I have to say, I think you are wrong in so many ways.

We may be in transparent times. If we are I applaud a new age of transparency. But there is a big difference between transparency and privacy. Let me illustrate:

I may elect to blog about taking a work day off and using the time to take a romantic walk on the beach with my wife. I may post a picture of her and my dog on that beach. But their are elements that I keep private. Perhaps we share an intimate moment in the sand dunes. I elect not to tell you about that part.

So there are a few pieces to this. First, I disclosed personal stuff including some photos of loved ones and a confession that I was playing when I should have been working. I also elected to hold back certain parts of the day because they were private.

Transparency is important in business as well. Businesses, using venues such as Facebook are learning that it is safe and wise to be far more transparent today than they were at the beginning of the last decade. But that safety comes from the assurance that they can keep certain matters private and that they get to decide what information they should hold back.

Mark, I have no problem really with the data you just released to the world about me. I’m a pretty transparent person and all the stuff you released is pretty public already. But Mark, I have a huge problem with you deciding to release that stuff about me. I would greatly prefer to have been asked. I’m betting a good percentage of your other 349,999,999 users do as well.

You see, we agreed to other rules. We did not know that you would start every day as if Facebook were brand new and could then change the rules on us and many of us just don’t like it.

To be honest Mark, you are building up a compelling case that there is a command-and-control aspect to your customer approach that a few generals might envy. A couple of years back, you decided to use advertising to monetize Facebook without asking customers.

Some people shrieked and you shrugged implying that they should get a clue. More recently, you unilaterally changed your Terms of Use with 350 million people, declaring that you suddenly owned user-generated content and you could reuse it as you saw fit.

In response, your users started an "I hate Facebook" campaign, using Facebook itself as the group’s epicenter. I thought you were wise to have backed off. I had hoped that you would have learned a lesson. Apparently this was not the case.

Mark, as I stated Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. You can probably get away with this. But please think about the precedent you are setting. If you ca share my user name and email account, why can’t the next guy unilaterally share my phone number, and street address. How about pictures of my grandchildren along with the schools they attend and the routes they walk to get there?

Then there a great question about what banks, credit cards and governments might do down the line.

The term "slippery slope" is little bit overworked, but Mark, honestly, I feel you have just put 350 million of us at the top of a mountain on a toboggan that you remotely control and have gien us a swift push down a steep trajectory.

Please reconsider.

I had a great meeting with Mark Yolton, yesterday, one of my two co-authors on The Living Enterprise, a book about SAP’s ecosystem. We talked mostly about people in SAP communities who might have cool stories to share for the book.

But Mark also gave me a new example of lethal generosity, a term I’ve written about previously here and in Twitterville. The concept is based on the observation that the people and companies who are most generous in social media companies are also the most influential. And those who just promote their self-serving agenda very often fail. By being more generous to customers than your competitor, you essentially eclipse them in the eyes of people who would buy or recommend your products or services.

Yesterday, Mark mentioned the SAP Community Network (SCN) Job Board. At first this seemed pretty uninteresting, but as he explained, it got a lot better. Mark, who heads up SAP communities said the company spends a lot of time just observing its community conversations.

Not that long ago, his team noticed a lot of people saying they needed jobs. Simultaneously, others were saying they needed to hire. In fact some of those companies couldn’t buy more SAP software because they were short tech staff to install and deploy it.

So SCN created a community job board where friction is reduced and employment holes are filled, thus letting customers buy and use more software. A sweet touch is that SAP doesn’t post for jobs on its own job board. It refuses to compete for talent against its own customers and partners.

"If we make customers more prosperous," Mark told me, "we prosper."

But here’s the part that makes it lethal generosity, in my view. As far as SAP knows none of its competitors have job boards. If an Oracle customer wants a fast, free way to find quality developers to hire, it would have to switch to SAP. If one of SAP’s customer’s competitors wanted to access talent, it would have to become an SAP customer for the access.

It was interesting to learn about other plans SAP has to gain competitive advantage by monitoring its own communities to spot early trends. For example, it might notice that there’s suddenly a lot of conversation is taking place in and about Turkey or perhaps Brazil indicating that software sales in that country is heating up and it can inform its sales organization to adjust course accordingly.

I’ve heard very few cases of enterprises using communities to directly impact sales in such a way. It is part of the ecosystem approach that seems to me to integrate social media tools with the entire company’s needs.

I like that.

My friend, Beth Kanter* pointed recently to a Forbes.com piece by Laurie Burkitt about Threadless.com, the Chicago-based tee-shirt company. The author says that the dotcom, consumer retailer sprang to life from the idea that  “employees and customers don’t have to be two distinct groups.”

It’s a good thought, one that I think captures one of the fundamental changes being brought on by social media’s emerging role in business.

What surprises me is that the thought seems to have a lot to do with The Living Enterprise, the book I’m writing with Mark Yolton and Zia Yusuf about SAP’s ecosystem.

SAP is no consumer marketing company. It is big, technical and it’s customers are big and the people they talk with are most often technical.

Yet the thought that customers and companies and the third-party consultants that are involved are all part of the same community. If one party benefits, so do the others. If one becomes unhealthy so do the others.

Now the Threadless concept is about the customer doing the design work and being rewarded accordingly. That’s not how it works exactly at SAP. But SAP does let its customers mess around with SAP product source code to customize software to their respective needs.

It also has inserted a several online communities into its company infrastructure, where customers, partners and SAP share ideas and information. There are two million unique visits to these social networks each month; 6,000 posts-per-day. In the course of 2008, 70,000 individuals in over 200 countries contributed to more than a million topics.

Because these conversations are in blogs, forums and wikis, the answers to questions are easy and fast to find. A developer can usually get the answer to a question in less than 20 minutes. All sorts of SAP people, from its myriad locations, workgroups and perspectives participate

At the end of the day, it can be hard to determine whether an idea or suggestions, or useful tidbit was generated by a customer, a partner or SAP itself.

It is far more complex than Threadless. But the concept is the same. There is a shared interest and a common need.

In the Conversation Age, employees and customers are no longer two distinct groups. They have a common need. They swim in the same waters. They flourish or flounder together.

This has probably always been true for marketplaces. But it has become a lot more clear to a lot more businesses since social media opened up businesses, than it ever was before.

*Today is Beth’s 53rd birthday. You should go wish her the happiness she deserves.

Powered by Qumana

                       
My previous post announced The Living Enterprise, [TLE] a book I’m writing with Mark Yolton and Zia Yusuf about how SAP has created an ecosystem valued at about $80 billion and why what they’ve learned can help your business as well.

I talked mostly about SAP regards their enterprise ecosystem as a living, moving shapeless entity, more like a biologic ecosystem than the traditional customer networks that other companies call ecosystems.

Near the bottom of the piece, I briefly mentioned that SAP has adopted a new position for itself in its own ecosystem,  one modeled after a symphony orchestra conductor. This was intended to be a teaser, something that made readers hungry for this next installment.

It seemed to work.  Rebecca Krause-Hardie left a comment saying, “I’m looking forward to hearing more. But putting on my orchestral musician hat I can’t quite get the conductor metaphor.”

That comment turned out to be one of those Marshall McLuhan moments you may recall from the movie  Annie Hall. Rebecca it seems, know all about orchestra conductors.

A graduate of Juilliard, she played second horn in the Phoenix Symphony for a while then went on to serve as orchestra manager for the Detroit symphony. She has emerged as a pioneer in integrating new media into orchestras. Among her achievements was creating Playmusic.org, the first interactive music website for kids and an extremely interesting project.

While I was learning this, my co-author Zia Yusuf jumped in with a comment for Rebecca, which made sense. As head of the SAP’s Ecosystem group at the time, he was the guy who brought the orchestra metaphor into SAP to begin with.

I thought he gave a pretty good answer. In part this is what he said:

“The success of an orchestra rests on various
instruments working in harmony, under the direction of the conductor,
making beautiful music.

In a similar way the ecosystem consists of a variety of players: customers, software vendors, service providers,
individuals etc.” 

If you think about it, the symphony conductor is almost always the most prominent person in the hall and very often the lionshare recipient of recognition and revenue. But the conductor depends upon each of the 80 or so musicians as much as the musicians depend upon him–and if you think about it–each other.

A conductor by himself is some guy with a baton. He’s as capable of making memorable music as is a teenager with an air guitar. Conversely, if the talented, creative, passionate musicians assembled together on stage without a conductor, you’d end up with a jam session at best and a headache at worse.

The conductor and these individuals interdepend on each other. The musicians count on him to bring the group together, to set tempo and mood; to spotlight individuals when it makes sense, and entire sections when the moment calls for it. Everyone assembled gets to contribute and benefit.

This is a very far cry from so many of the military analogies that so many large companies use to describe their positions and strategies. And this is how SAP is approaching it’s ecosystems. You cannot make an ecosystem work by trying to organize it in battalions, divisions and squadrons. The best you can get is a marching band which lacks the elegance, diversity, subtlety and talent of most symphony orchestras.

I just noticed that Erin Liman,SAP’s director of social business innovation
has just added a comment in reply to Rebecca as well. Erin is playing a highly contributive role in this project. Among the most valuable was her indepth interview with Dorcas McCall, a career orchestra viola player who we will talk about in TLE. 

In my view, the Orchestra Conductor metaphor is worth all these words. I think the book will hinge, in part, on our explaining it properly. If I were to boil the entire 80,000 words down to three bullets on a PowerPoint slide, they would be:

• Think of an enterprise ecosystem as something that is really alive and not an org chart thingee with a bunch of dotted lines attached to various boxes.
• The role of the founding community is more like that of a conductor and a general.
• If you do the first two right, your enterprise is going to create a wealth-filled marketplace. Your company, customers and partners will all share the wealth.

I am very pleased to announce my next book project:

The Living Enterprise: How SAP built a multibillion dollar ecosystem; what it
learned and why your business should care.” This is a working title and may be tweaked, so let me know what you think.

I have two co-authors: Zia Yusuf who was EVP of SAP’s Global Ecosystem and Partner Group until November and Mark Yolton, SVP responsible for SAP’s online communities. I’m just the writer/researcher. This is really more their story and the story of the ecosystem group.

But much more than SAP itself, The Living Enterprise [TLE] is the story of how SAP’s 7000 partners and 86,000 corporate customers benefit from SAP’s integration of social networks with a traditional partner program into an enterprise ecosystem.

The result has been an answer to social media’s most persistent business question: “Where’s the money?”  SAP’s ecosystem according to independent analysts has a marketplace value of $70 billion to $90 billion for the companies represented by two million users of the company’s social networks.

There’s the money.

When I started talking with Mark and Zia last September, I was concerned with the term enterprise ecosystem. It sounded to me like the sort of “corpspeak” that Scoble and I admonished in Naked Conversations. At first it seemed to me, the term is a cliche designed by marketers to modernize an old-fashioned large company networks.

That may be true elsewhere, but not so at SAP I have learned. SAP looks at its enterprise ecosystem through the same prism as you would look at a biological ecosystem, where objects and living things interact and depend on each other to survive or thrive. Even a tiny change in an obscure part of an ecosystem can have the same impact on larger participants as a polar bear slipping off a sheet of melting ice has on eventual water level in New York City.

Except with the internet as the ocean, it all happens much, much faster when online social networks bloodlines dynamically circulation information and ideas throughout the enterprise ecosystem with great speed. 

Before all this happened, SAP felt many of the dilemmas that most modern companies are experiencing. If social media champions are shouting that the company should not be in command and control of it’s own ecosystem, just who should be. And for that matter, if SAP was not to dominate, just what was it’s new role?

It took a lot of time and effort to find its own series of answers. The first was replace itself at the center of its own ecosystem with its customers. This was not altruism, it was the realization that the health of SAP and its business partners depended on the health of its customers at least as much as the reverse.

As to the question of what role SAP should assume once it stepped out of the center, Zia Yusuf came up with a new metaphor, that of the symphony orchestra conductor.

But first, I am looking for your help. I like to think that my books are different from other business books because I take the story-teller’s perspective and because I use my blog and Twitter for a good deal of crowd sourcing.

Later, of course, I’ll use my social media tools to ask your help in promoting the book. But right now, I’m looking for juicy stories about SAP and for that matter other enterprise social networks and ecosystems.

If you are among SAP’s two million social network users, please share your experience with me–whether it was wonderful or awful. My books come alive with the user stories much more than the company stories that provide the framework.

If you have an experience in social nets at Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle or any other enterprise inside or out of the tech sector please let me know.

Because of my co-authors and SAP’s commitment to the project, TLE has a solid foundation, but it will be the stories that come from elsewhere that will make this book as special as we hope it will be.

Also, please keep in mind that I appreciate tough love. If you think this idea is brilliant, that inflates my ego. If you think we are on the wrong track, then we will be greatly appreciative of you setting us straight.

Please tell us what you think in the comments below or on Twitter or even good, old-fashioned, archivable email.