Accidentally on Purpose Blog

This past week was a great event on a number of fronts.  Most important was that a diverse group of bloggers came to Atlanta and we all learned a lot from each other!  They didn’t get all the answers they were looking for but I do think they got a lot of answers to the many questions they were asking.

SAP has always conversed with the market, it just wasn’t always so visible.  The use of Social Media simply allows us to open yet another door to the market, it just so happens that this new conversation is very visible. Jerry Bowles had this to say about it.  

Now, before we get to proud of ourselves, we well better stated as I made some mistakes too.  Dennis Howlett had this to say.  I take full responsibility as this was my fault entirely!   It was an honest mistake but a mistake nonetheless.  In trying to plan an event like SAPPHIRE there are a lot of moving parts. I thought I had done a good job in getting all of the necessary parts in the right order.   Well, I missed one (probably more).   I’ll work harder for SAPPHIRE Vienna to make this one right!  

The nice thing about having a conversation is that a conversation isn’t sedentary.  Its bi-directional and it travels over time and space.  This conversation isn’t over, it will continue next week, next month (in Vienna) and even beyond.   A single blog post (question or answer / praise or complaint) isn’t the end in fact, its just the beginning.

I’ve wanted to post more frequently about the events going on here at SAPPHIRE but, to be quite candid, I haven’t had the time.   Finally, I seem to have found a moment to take a look at the bigger picture. 

So, day one is history and overall I think it went pretty well.  We started Sunday night at an informal dinner meetup at The Sweet Lowdown.  Nothing formal just everyone getting to know one another in a casual environment.  Dan Farber had this to say on his Between the Lines Blog.

We had our fair share of travel and business issues that have kept a few of the bloggers from making the trip to Atlanta but, we have a great group on hand. 

As far as the bloggers go, there was a mix the Enterprise Irregulars and the Social Media Collective , Mike Masnick of Techdirt, Michael Cote of Redmonk, we even have on hand a few SAP bloggers Thomas Otter and Craig Cmehil.   

We had a number of meetings yesterday with various executives but at the end of the day a few of us Jason Busch, Jason Wood, Dan Farber, Brian Sommer, Dennis Howlett and I got backstage after Hasso Plattner’s keynote and sat down with Hasso for about 30 minutes. Dennis had this to say about the keynote and the subsequent discussion. 

You’ll notice that the posts so far are mix of positve, neutral and even negative.  What you don’t get to see in the posts is the back-n-forth between the bloggers and our executives.   It’s unfortunate that that part doesn’t come through because that’s where (IMHO) the value is; relationship building, the sharing of ideas and best of all, the learnings ocurring on both sides of the conversation.

More to come

I just arrived in Atlanta and will spend tonight and tomorrow getting ready for next week’s event.  From April 22 - 25 we’re at the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) for SAPPHIRE.  If you can’t attend in person, you can still get in on some of the action; watch the live keynote presentations here.

We have 25 bloggers in attendance and I’m going to do my best to cover them covering SAP.  My goal is to give you a peek into what its like when 25 bloggers show up at your biggest user conference of the year.  Its going to be a busy week to say the least.   

Stay tuned more to come!

I’d like to examine the word peer as it relates to the concept of social media. Not unlike the words “social media” or “community”, the use of the word “peer” has both good and bad connotations and may or may not be over used to describe the many incarnations of what the Web 2.0 world is all about.

The Good: Peer Production captures the key reason some of the more visible corporate projects appear to be working – namely, that businesses are benefiting because they are enabling the many rather than the few to participate in projects. It’s the wisdom and industry of the “crowd” that appear to be benefiting businesses because with large numbers of people – staff, customers and partners – working as participants, businesses are simply getting more than they were when only a few people were participating.

The Bad: The use of the word peer is obviously not original - therefore, there exists the potential to broaden its application. I am of course referring to the phrase peer production, which continues to gain in popularity among proponents who themselves need a simple way to describe the businesses benefits conferred by the crowd. But, there’s a lot more that peers can do than just produce.  (I guess this really isn’t so bad)

The Ugly: Peer also captures one of the darker, less attractive aspects of social media; the fact that the adoption of social media, to some extent, has been driven by the desire to conform. This topic has been explored in a lot of places, perhaps most provocatively last spring in the popular post by Jaron Lanier in The Edge entitled “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism and even more recently in this follow-up Politics Central podcast with Jaron about Second Life and Digital Maoism. 

The conformity problem is still posing challenges to organizations that are asking: “How can we get onboard this ship yet remain captain?” 

Your thoughts?

In my post from April 9, Ed Herrmann commented and asked two questions that I have been remiss in responding to.   Ed, my apologies!  My kids are on spring break this week and we went away to the Poconos on a family vacation.  

If you have young kids and you want to get away for a couple of days; head to a Great Wolf Lodge near you.  You won’t regret it!

Now back to Ed’s questions. 

Q. How do we measure the benefits of social media in a way where we can put concrete numbers against it? In a world of management by objectives, people like to be safe and put conservative, measurable results on everything. The problem is that you can’t put on your objectives to “create 25 meaningful relationships and increase quality knowledge by 25% by Q3.” The qualities that emergent collaboration foster are not easily measured.

Agreed!  You have to really look at what your goals are and decide what it is you can actually do and then what is actually worth measuring.  We are in the early stages of this phenomenon which is why these metrics may not be so concrete. So think elastomers instead.  I am counting posts, I am counting the number of blogs covering a topic and I am trying to create meaningful relationships.   But, I’m not measuring against those items as objectives. 

The benefits of social media are many and varied from productivity gains, to knowledge transfer and even reputation management; but, I have only two primary objectives:  First, to make sure that those “talking” about SAP in  blogs understand what it is SAP is trying to accomplish and second, to listen to the bloggosphere and incorporate those learnings into what we are doing to improve wherever possible!

Sounds pretty basic but, basic works. 

Ed, your post from the 12th, SAP & Colgate - All Aboard the Cluetrain was rather timely — as Dennis  stated, ”Now if SAP could find 100 folk with stories like C-P, I might think about changing my tune.”  I look at part of my role as finding the other 99 stories and telling as many people as possible!  That’s a metric I’d be happy to be measured against.

Dennis, I’ll pretend I didn’t read the line about sacking most of the PR dept!

Q. How do we put incentives on participation? Again, traditional views cannot understand that things like meaningful relationships, quality information, and volunteer participation are not only the means, but they are the ends as well. When everything is about lowering costs and increasing savings, it’s hard to see a world where social content is king.

Ed, would you consider the “Imagineering Fellowship” as an incentive to participate?  And thanks, now I only have 98 stories to go!

The short answer is: I don’t know how to specifically put incentives on participation in such a generic context.  It depends on your objectives and the dynamics of the group or community. I also think deep down people do understand that meaningful relationships and quality information are important and does inspire participation; its the degree to which you consider what participation is that tends to make a mess of it.  I’ve lurked in the blogs longer than I’ve been an active participant and while that may seem a more passive pursuit, I can assure you that I was very active (just not visible).

Regarding your last point regarding a world where social content is king — I think the very fact that SDN/BPX has over 700,000 participants, that there are over 70 million blogs and that you and I are having this conversation is ample evidence that social content while maybe not the king today, has the bloodline necessary to one day, be the king.

I’d like to introduce the idea of Peer Pressure and how it sets the stage for what I believe are the five main patterns of social media’s use in communications. These patterns represent the shift in approach to managing information in communications at each stage of the information life cycle: Production (the creation of knowledge), Adjudication (assessment of knowledge), Communication (knowledge dissemination – think a “community of communicators”), Storage & Retrieval (institutional memory) and Aggregation (making information available and helping people find it).

In speaking to senior executives both at SAP and elsewhere, I’ve found they often ask for evidence that social media projects return clear and measurable benefits to the business. That’s a difficult question to answer – not because the benefits are unknown (there are a growing number of case studies in the public record: Socialtext and ATLASSIAN) – but because there really isn’t an easy way to frame the benefits in a way that communicates the urgency with which businesses must respond if they are going to meaningfully participate, or sit idly on the sidelines.

The real problem is deciding on the proper lens to view and understand the larger effects.  Andy McAfee’s take on Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration is a particularly interesting viewpoint that provides you with a few perspectives to consider.

My point is this - you need to make social media work in your environment.  Look to what others have done not only for inspiration but as a way of exerting the necessary “peer pressure” to apply that inspiration toward your specific objectives.

In the pre-blogging world, communications was about broadcasting one-to-many messages and employing command-and-control around those messages. Today, the new paradigm is about open and transparent conversations and influence in networks. Employing social media concepts and tools through an external communications program for knowledge transfer and reputation enhancement and internally for business productivity gains is all about transparency and authenticity of voice.

This is not to suggest in any way that as a profession we stop doing what we currently do very well via our traditional communications programs. Many social media purists may disagree with this statement; however, they would be wrong to assume that the culture of the past 50+ years will end so abruptly. And as Robin Fray Carey stated to me during a recent conversation; their free speech isn’t burdened by legal departments or regulatory agencies. What I am advocating is beginning innovative social media communication programs that prepare us for an innevitable future where authenticity is the rule rather than the exception.

As you may or may not have noticed, my blogroll is a combination of bloggers that cover the space of Business software (the industry that I am in), the topic of social media (the focus of my role at SAP) and some of the biggest names in the PR world (my chosen profession).  My intent is to bring them together along with you, the communications practitioner, so a conversation may begin from which we may mutually benefit. My hope is that the end result will be a more formal acceptance and use of the concepts and tools of social media in the corporate communications profession.

I’ve asked myself that question for a long time now. There are many things I’ve been wanting to write about. But when you get down to it, I wanted to blog about what I wasn’t already reading — not it the blogosphere, not anywhere: the who, what, when, where and why of social media from a corporate communications perspective.

So much gets written and discussed about why you should care about social media, the number of large and small companies not employing social media, and what social media may or may not mean to the future of how we engage with one another in our personal and business lives. While I will leave the personal aspect alone, I will try to address the business side, at least from the corporate communications perspective.

Few conversations address how to overcome the inertia of change-management inside an organization to allow the concepts and tools of social media to flourish.

So, what needs to happen to get more companies – big and small – engaged? Does PR have a role in the social/new media world? I think so! It may not look like traditional PR but its role is as important. Is the topic bigger than just PR? It sure is: Blogger Relations anyone? Should social media concepts and tools be present across your entire communications strategy? It should if you want to succeed. Which is more important: internal or external communications? Well, that depends on how you want to get started, but both are equally important!

From what I observe (and there are exceptions) the communications profession (including PR) today is basically doing the same old things in the same old ways. The current “new” thinking is largely about doing old things in new ways (that’s the inertia that has to be overcome). Where we’re headed needs entirely new communications business models.

Have any thoughts? Have any questions? Interested? Let me know what you’re thinking. I’m making this my mission.