Well, my suggestion yesterday that I replace Blurring Boundaries as the working title for my new book, with Customer-Centered Communities was greeted with a universal gaping yawn.

That's okay. I use this blog and Twitter to get feedback and the feedback was valuable and certainly candid. Better here and now than when there's a book on a store shelf being ignored for it's lame title.

In response I came up with a title that got me excited--the first such title that is not already in use and had a URL open.

The new working title is [drum role and envelope please]:

USERVILLE

How Big Software uses Online Communities  to get closer to customers.

There are many reasons I like this title. The book is essentially about how IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and SAP are using online communities to get closer with partners and customers. In so doing they are achieving a new sustainable and scalable business value for all parties concerned.

Each of these big software companies discovered these communities work best when they put their customers at at the center of these communities. This may seem to go against conventional wisdom. After all, these four enterprises have invested human resources plus the cost of developing,  hosting and managing these communities.

Why shouldn't the enterprise  who foots the bill be at the center? Well, it turns out that there is much greater business value for all parties when the customer is at the center. Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, estimates that SAP's ecosystem and partner group has a market value of about $90 billion, for SAP and it's corporate customers. He emphasized that SAP's network of communities is the heart of the ecosystem.

Enterprise communities are about the users. When users are put at the center, then they make sense. They answer the tough and nagging Jerry Maguire challenge to social media: "show me the money!" For large and medium-size communities the money is in the social network and it is sustainable and scalable.

Userville, also continues explaining the concept of lethal generosity, which I introduced in my last book, Twitterville. It's the argument that the companies who are the most generous to their customers will prevail over competitors; that loyalty is strengthened by serving the customers interests and ultimately so is enterprise revenue.

Of course, I like the title because there is continuity to it, with my previous book.

But there is yet another, more subtle reason that I like the title. Dave Winer, is the pioneer who gave us blogging as we know it and RSS subscriptions that catapulted the popularity of blogs. At the time he was head of an innovative software development company called Userland.

It was there that one of his employees learned about blogging and would have a great influence on my thinking of the subject. His name is Robert Scoble.

For me that final reference ties a few pieces together very nicely.

I am hoping my new book's strongest contribution will demonstrate business value to doubting enterprise decision makers. I call this the "Jerry Maguire challenge, which I explained in my previous post.

So far, the only  hard-nosed challenger of using social media in the enterprise to step forward has been Steve Walker, a UK-based Oracle VP communications. I interviewed him yesterday and will probably post my full notes in a few days.

I had a great time talking with Steve. He's bright and thoughtful. His key points are that the groundswell excitement on social media in the enterprise creates a lot of time-wasting "rubbish," whose value is vastly overrated. In short, the sizzle vastly exceeds the steak.

In fact, I agree with him, which in this particular case is unfortunate.

Steve actually believes in social media as it is being used at Oracle in general terms. In fact you can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in and many of the usual places. He would object if social media were banned and believes that over time, it will all work out and social media will become more useful and the results will become more easily measured.

Again, I violently agree with him. So while I'll use what he gave me, he hardly becomes my poster child for the Jerry Maguire challenge.

In the last three years, the toughest and most nagging question has been: what's the business value in social media? If I can answer that, I can also answer the second toughest question: "How do I convince my boss that all these activities are worthwhile?"

But I need more examples of what has been said in the workplace. I'd like to hear what kind of conversations you've had in this area? I'd like to hear about  the most obstructionist comments and actions you have heard as a social media proponent. What have been the toughest questions?

I'm looking for examples. I'd like to use them with company and human names, but I can mask them to ensure you don't get fired helping me.

You can email me if you choose, or leave a comment here. If I use them, I will acknowledge your contribution in the book.

[Tower of Babel. From Logoi.com]

A while back, my friend  David Feng tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting while riding under Beijing in a subway car.

I used Google Translate to see if I could figure out what he said. It came out something like "I'm using my digits on myself with a bird in the Beijing belly," and he and I had a good laugh

I remembered that this morning I saw a few tweets with my name in them. Two were in Chinese and one in Arabic. I used Google Translate to try to read in English what was written in these two languages that I don't speak.

The results were downright goofy and I have not a clue what had been written about me. I complained about it on Twitter and immediately a few people jumped to the defense of Google Translate and the Tweetdeck translation plug in. Mike Chelan,  argued that these plug ins are "a decent start."

He's right. They are a decent start. In some cases, particularly the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as German, the reults are pretty good. You can almost always get the gist of what was said, even if you often lose certain nuances, such as irony, sarcasm and humor.

But in other cases, Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the translations make very often make no sense whatsoever.

In fact, the problem is that computers don't have any common sense. They have no feel for emotional or poetic flourishes. They trample on slang and metaphors and it is extremely difficult, it would seem to me, to be able to break these barriers, without having humans intervene in translation.

And humans are just not a very economic solution to the shortcomings of machine translation. I think it will remain a major challenge to get beyond the "decent start" we have made.

To me, this is an extremely important issue in social media. Translation is one of the great unresolved barriers.

Ultimately, my dream is for me to be able to post words in my own natural language, with the slang I use and the humor I sometimes try to infuse. Then you can read it in whatever your language is. You can respond using your language and I will then see it in my own.

This universal translation could allow people everywhere to talk with people everywhere. That direct human-to-human mode of conversation would not only be good for business and education, it wouyld also be good for world peace, or so it seems to me.

My hope is that somehow we can get beyond a "decent start," as Mike called it.

[NOTE: BlurNotes are interview notes for my new book Blurring Boundaries which reports on Enterprise Online Communities. Your feedback helps me decide what to use in the book.]

Adam Christensen is part of IBM's corporate communications team, based in Armonk, NY. His job is overwhelmingly focused on the company's considerable social media activities. I interviewed him for Twitterville, where I learned IBM has more employees tweeting than any other company. I also learned back then, that much of IBM's social media focus is to tighten communications between it's 400,000 employees in over 200 countries as well as with existing  partners and customers.

IBM's online communities continues along those lines as well, I've learned. I turned to Adam mostly to get a sense of how its numerous communities got started.

In 1993, Lou Gerstner, career executive took over at IBM, then the world’s largest technology company. The place was a mess.  IBM had made mistakes that backfired including an attempt to slow the migration of large businesses from mainframes to personal computers.  When IBM got serious about the new, smaller PCs, they tried to make them behave like little mainframes. This opened a huge window of opportunity for smaller, more agile competitors such as Microsoft on the software side  and Dell Computer on the hardware side.

This was during an era of corporate takeovers. Investors and analysts both expected--almost demanded-- that Gerstner downsize: Sell off huge chunks of the the company, slash employees and every possible cost and make amputated-consolidated nee entity profitable above all things.

Gerstner listened to the conventional wisdom. Then he ignored it. He made minor cutbacks but kept most of IBM's diverse components intact. He worked to keep the most talented people. He declared the IBM's whole had greater value than the sum of it's parts.

IBM has still had a stormy road.And over the last 17 years it has sold or shut down many of its diverse components as it has moved more into consulting services and out of software applications and hardware.

Had Gerstner listened to conventional wisdom, it would have wound up being a mainframe company, and about as relevant as Honeywell, DEC and other companies that clung to big iron strategies.

By 1997, it was clear he had called the right shot. But IBM remained a lumbering giant. It had cut down to from 400,000 to 200,000 employees but they were strewn all over the world. Some employees had never met their bosses face-to-face.  These employees were serving partners and customers in over 200 countries with combined employees of over 10 million people.

Gerstner mandated the company, "Go to the edge," Christensen told me. Decision making, information and collaboration stop flowing into a bottle neck at corporate headquarters.

This mandate drove the company out of manufacturing and application software and into services where it is now the world leader. It also made IBM, the first company to build a social media- based enterprise online community back in 1999.

Called DeveloperWorks, as the name implies it is for IBM's software developer community. IBM is among the leading enterprise platform providers. Any third-party developers wishing to build on the platform belongs to DeveloperWorks. Every company seems to have started with a focus on developers and like others, it was an outgrowth of online forums which went all the way back to the middle 1980s.

There are about 187,000 members to DeveloperWorks, about two-thirds are from outside the company. It's growing evenly at the rate of about 10,000 more developers every calendar quarter.

IBM has an extensive community of networks, some for partners, other for customers, university affiliates and a few just for employees. They've all learned from the success of DeveloperWorks.

Among the key lessons: self management, make it easy to find the experts and make it easy for members to identify and communicate with the individual that they find most important, Adam told me.

I asked Adam about the business value. He noted that IBM stopped building software applications for its own platform in 2002. "We are more dependent than our competitors on independent developers and DeveloperWorks is at the very center of its strategy.

Another issue is community connection with IBM's ecosystem. I'm learning that this loosely defined term to described the interaction between companies, customers and partners are inextricably connected with communities.

[Note--BlurNotes is a series of excerpts from research and interviews I'm conducting for my next book, Blurring Boundaries, covering online enterprise communities.]

There's something that feels like social media in Intuit's story, although it begins long before there was such a term or even the concept. In 1981, Scott Cook, then a marketing executive for Proctor & Gamble, the world's largest consumer products company is sitting in his kitchen watching his wife pay the bills. He notices all the hassle of writing the checks by hand, then entering the info in a register. Every month she is entering the same data all over again.

That gives him an idea for an electronic checkbook, that will reside on a computer desktop and store personal financial information. It becomes Quicken and Quicken becomes Intuit, the world's leading small business and personal finance company. Last year sales reached $3.1 billion.

Kira Wampler, thinks that the incident that became the company has something to do with why Intuit is so good at social media and online communities. "We began by watching a user and figuring out how to make it easier." Kira is group marketing manager for online engagements for Intuit's small business division in Menlo Park, CA. She heads up a team of 19, all of them engaged in social media as a core part of their jobs.

Intuit, like just about every software company did just easily transform from a company that sold boxes off a retailer shelf to a company whose transactions mostly take place online and whose core focus has shifted from moving SKUs to being host and leader to more online small business communities than any other company.

Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, an online strategies consulting group says that because of the communities, "Intuit owns the small business customer," a feat that conventional wisdom insists is impossible because the category is too fragmented, decision makers are too busy running their own businesses, they are slow to adopt technology and they spend as little money on it as they possibly can.

But Intuit hits them right in their checkbooks and in their tax reporting, a common denominator for all small businesses. And from their it has expanded into other areas, with a couple of strategic acquisitions. First, it acquired StepUp, a service that makes it easier for small business inventories to show up in a Google search and then Homestead,Inc. a roll-your-own website service.

What Kira demonstrated during a three-hour dinner interview is that Intuit's strategy has evolved through online communities and social  media. It has totally immersed itself in understanding and serving small business users.

“Small businesses are Intuit’s oxygen," she told me, " If they’re not healthy, we’re not breathing. It isn’t either the customer or the shareholder. The two are intricately linked. There’s a direct correlation between the customer’s happiness and our revenue," and she said the customer has extensive data to prove it.

We covered numerous issues. I'm very much interested in showing how boundaries between customers and companies are blurring in numerous areas, product being the most important.

Like all the companies, I'm profiling Intuit is public. That means the SEC restricts what companies say about products not yet introduced. So how do you get customers to tell you what they want in your next introduction?

Kira explained how you can dance without stepping on regulatory toes. "There is no regulation that makes it unlawful to have conversations with customers and to ask them how you can do better,: she told me.  What they cannot do is recognize in public that a customer has suggested a feature, design element or function and announce it will be incorporated. That recognition, however, can be made after the product is announced.

They also can fix mistakes with unprecedented speed because of customer comments.  When Quickbooks 2010 [QB10] came out there were complaints about a feature that popped up ads for other products when you booted up QB10.

Customers hated it. Word first broke in Amazon community conversations. Intuit got the message. They deleted the unwanted feature in exactly 45 days, which might be a record for a large enterprise software company changing a product, particularly based on user response.

She said that most companies focus on listening which has its limits. Like most large companies involved in social media, Intuit use Radian 6 to monitor product and company mentions. But the objective is not to just show you're listening it to "demonstrate that the customer is actually being heard." For example, when a customer complains, someone from the company needs to come back and say,  “'Sounds like a crappy experience. Tell me more about it.'”

Intuit got the shift from packaged software to online fairly early, offering their first online product in 2001. But it wasn't all that fast to understand social media or realize the business value in placing the customer at the center of online community efforts. Until 2006 you had a chance of getting fired at Intuit by blogging about your job or even talking to a blogger.

Intuit also was slow to understand the business benefit of superior support. When they first offered online customer communities they tried charging customers for the support, which went over about as well as you can imagine.

A watershed change came when Kira met Anita Campbell  whose Small Business Trends is among the the best known and most respected small business blogs. She invited Anita to hang out for a day at Intuit and just talk about how the blogosphere worked. It changed Intuit’s vie.  Overnight, blogger outreach changed from taboo to desirable.

Perhaps because she reports to a traditional marketer, Kira see less division between social media and traditional marketing. To her they are stitched together seamlessly. When a product ad runs on TV, Kira told me, she sees an immediate uptick on Twitter where people started asking about the advertised product.

Once they dipped their toes into the social media ocean Intuit got immersed quickly. It is active on all the public platforms and has its own network of password protected communities.

According to Kira,  the relatively rapid company-changing conversion was because "feedback is essential to company culture and DNA. She said the company use NetPromoter surveys and is essentially interested in the answer to a single customer question, that begins with the words, "Are you likely to recommend..."

But, she observed, there are two kinds of feedback: answers to question you ask and answers to the questions you don't ask. Net Promoter helps them with the former and that is useful, but "social is what we get when we don't ask," and those answers are more candid and often delivered with greater passion.

"When you put the two answer sets together, you get something that is transformative, something that starts telling you why a customer will or will not recommend your products and that is obviously game changing," she said.

I asked her about the Jerry Maguire challenge, from the 1996 movie: "Show me the money!" This is the ROI, question that has been posed by social media for business doubters.

Kira said there is unquestionable evidence that social media is having positive financial impact on impact, but perhaps the questioners should be looking more at the top line where revenue is counted, rather than the bottom line where profits are the consideration.

In short, social media at Intuit is driving growth which is measured in sales. "We make more money in revenues than we spend on programs. Our marketing ratio is positive."

I tried to get her to share as much as a public company representative could share She told me the amount was not yet huge but it was "much more than lunch money."

I was relieved to hear that. n the interest of transparency, Kira picked up the dinner check.

I have created a self-imposed deadline of this Friday to finish my Blurring Boundaries book proposal and send off to my agent, Danielle Svetcoff who will undoubtedly ask some tough and challenging questions. That's how she helps me write better books.

Meanwhile, I've developed four tough questions of my own that the book will try to answer. It may take all 80,000 words to address them:

1. Where’s the ROI in social media?

Social media in business is about ten years old. Any business advocate of a social media program has heard this question, and chance are likely, was frustrated in trying to answer it.

But at the end of the day, all business is about financial issues. The question, as toug as it is to be answered, needs to be answered. I am not absolutely certain that I will show a direct corellation between social media and the bottom line.

But I have a decent amount of evidence that shows big companies like IBM, Intuit and SAP are making money because of social media. If there is no clear bottom line equation, there is a great deal of evidence that big businesses are making money at the top line through the conversational technologies.

The business value case has become irrefutable, or so it seems to me.

2. If businesses are supposed to relinquish command and control  what is it's new role?

Social media champions have spent a decade telling managers, lawyers and marketing departments to let go of presumed command and control. Fine, but if companies are to host and manage social media, including large online communities, just what is their new role?

Surely they are not supposed to just sit on the sidelines or go fetch the coffee. Blurring Boundaries will report on how several companies have replaced themselves from the center of social media programs with their customers.

They have not done so, out of a sense of altruism. It has proven to be a smart and financially rewarding business tactic.

3. Where does social media go on the org chart?

Most enterprise social media programs began a skunkworks--little experiments--that were allowed to take hold outside labyrinthine enterprise bureaucracies.

Now they are reaching critical mass. Some online enterprise communities have millions of users. It has become time for social media workgroups to get  integrated back into the enterprise organization, where it will have to conform to enterprise practices and systems , just like HR, ot IT or marketing.

Inside many companies today, there is heated debate as to where social media belongs in the organization. Whoever runs SM will shape SM. If it is marketing, than marketing social media may flourish at the expense of recruiting, or IT.

Blurring Boundaries will argue the case for a social media department--not answering to marketing or any other department--but equal to it, with it's own budget and measurable quarterly goals to attain.

4. If social media gets braided into the enterprise, who does it change the enterprise and how does that enterprise change social media?

Predictions are always a little dangerous because guesswork is involved, but I see the use of social media in business as becoming an everyday practice, as about unique or newsworthy as using a telephone.

Social media is at the end of a disruptive period and just now entering an Era of Normalization, where people will stop talking about the new conversational tools and just start using them to do their jobs with the same diversity as they use email.

A good chunk of this book will examine five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. But I am looking for stories from companies of over 1000 employees that will help me answer these questions for readers of my book.

If you have a suggestion, please email me.

Peter Horrocks, the BBC Global News Director has told his staff to make better use of social media  and to become more collaborative in producing stories.

The Guardian quotes him as saying, "This isn't just a kind of fad.... I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary", he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

According to the Guardian, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools for news reporters.

It's funny. This morning, I was writing a piece for my new book that social media, now about a decade old, is at the end of it's beginning phase, a phase that has caused great disruption to just about all institutions.

We are now at the beginning of a new phase, a phase of normalization, one in which the tools of social media  start being adapted by people just to do their jobs. We will stop using the tools to talk about the tools themselves, and just use them like we use telephones and computers, to do our work and communicate with others.

A decade ago, traditional media disdained social media, occasionally ridiculing it. They are laughing no more. In major events, where fast-breaking news has occurred social media has played an increasingly vital role: Haiti, Iran, Gaza, US Air 1549 on the Hudson, cops shooting a New Year's Eve reveller, the Sczhwan Earthquake.

At a time when the media is hobbled by 20 years of budget cuts that have fragmented their networks of stringers, correspondents and affiliates, citizen journalists with mobile devices have become the feet on the street of the world's news. We have, for the most part, been fast and accurate, in our reporting.

Yet we cannot replace traditional news institutions. They remain the professionals. We don't get invited to White House News Conferences. We don't get attached to infantry units in war zones. We do not have time nor inclination to dig into databases and record logs to uncover acts of corruption.

The BBC is moving toward what I call Braided Journalism, the convergence of traditional and citizen journalism into something new and potentially superior for news coverage than anything that has preceded it.

[Sean O'Driscoll [l] with unidentifiable beer-drinking blogger. Photo by Jim Storer]

[NOTE: I am interviewing people for my new book Blurring Boundaries, about enterprise online communities. While I hope to report on many communities. I plan to go into particular depth with  five companies: IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.]

Sean O’Driscoll is co-founder and of Ant’s Eye View, a Seattle-based consulting firm that helps large companies with the strategic and planning aspects of social customer engagement. He was at Microsoft for 15 years, where he is best-remembered for developing MVP [Most Valuable Professionals] a small, highly active network comprised of Microsoft's most passionate product users.

MVP goes back to 1992, predating both Sean and social media. It was started by people in Microsoft's support organization to reward product champions. They used the conversational technologies of the time, CompuServe and Usenet newsgroups.

When Sean took the reigns in 2002, Microsoft was facing an unprecedented  challenge, not from a competing software company, but from a groundswell movement in the developer community. It was called open source and it would soon permanently disrupt the packaged software industry.

Sean was a member of the Microsoft strategic team designated to explore solutions.

He spent a month studying Linux online communities.Like Microsoft's they were mostly centered around technology and support issues. Like Microsoft, question got answered usually promptly and well.

But he noticed a "radical disparity in customer return rates." In Microsoft spaces, people came,  got what they wanted and left. In open sources spaces, people kept coming back. They stuck around and shared information, ideas and anecdotes.

In Sean's view, return rates were indicative of community health. "On the whole Linux communities were substantially healthier than on Microsoft spaces,:" when measured by return rate, Sean concluded.

This led him to his Ugly Baby Principal.

If you happen to be an American Idol TV show fan, you probably already know that from time-to-time, the show features, as Sean put it, " a whole lot of singers who really suck. Some of them know they really suck, but don't care." They love to sing. But, a significant percent of these bad singers don't  know they really suck."

If you ask them, many would say that their parents had always told them they could sing.

That, Sean observed, is because parents will overlook dramatic faults in their kids.

He felt this was what Microsoft was on product functionality and engineering was missing about the Linux groundswell.

"We simply didn't understand that the Linux community was fired up not on product aspects but on emotions. They didn't care if their kid was ugly, it was their baby and everything it did was beautiful," he said. "We were trying  to compete on functionality, not realizing open source popularity was emotional."

This was not something that Microsoft could easily combat. "We couldn’t change our culture. We were a mind company not a heart company," he told me, and the Linux movement was heart-based

The best Microsoft could do was to tap into fans of Microsoft technology. Sean sought out and recruited 300 of the company's most passionate users. It's important to note that their passion--and loyalty was not for the Microsoft. They are not company evangelists and at times they have actually been among Redmond's harshest critics.

Their loyalty is to the technology and to the people who use it. The are users themselves and it seems to be their nature to want to help other users. They are motivated by recognition, not rewards such as points or tee shirts.

"The fact that MVPs are extremely helpful to Microsoft as a company is just a lucky side effect," Sean said. Not only do MVPs provide superior tech support to other users, they provide an extremely high-quality of feedback on design, features and functions and they do it dynamically all the time.

The MVP social network is not a replacement for phone-based support, which is live, has one-on-one dynamics and hold the hands of the most frustrated end users.

But web-based MVP support has a very special asset. It is public. Other see the support being given.  They see people helping people. In phone support the only time you seem to hear about incidents are the disasters, not the successes.

The fact remains, however, that at the end of the day cultures are more difficult to change than products and market strategies. Microsoft is a culture built on engineering. It makes products designed by committees.

It simply cannot replicate the emotions and passions that lovers of ugly babies generate.

MVP, at least, has allowed Microsoft at least to understand the value of passionate users and community sharing . Not only that but MVPs have probably helped Microsoft refine and improve the products they bring to market.

Since Sean left, MVP has grown to 4000 users worldwide. What remains to be seen is if the community can scale to 50,000 to 60,000 users and if it does, will Microsoft  turn itself inside out so that communities of passionate users will change the companies process of making products, policies and programs that least will get more people to love their ugly babies.

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.