Groundswell co-Author Josh Bernoff talks Social Technographics in Austin

I attended a luncheon today sponsored by the Internet Strategy Forum. The invited guest was Forrester‘s Josh Bernoff. Josh’s topic was “Winning in a world transformed by social media.” He cautioned the audience to not focus on technologies, but rather relationships and the prevailing deeper social trends creating the “groundswell.” Bernoff describes the groundswell as a “social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions.”

His presentation was chock full of popular social media/community examples, many of which I’d seen before, but always interesting to see in aggregate. He also outlined how to approach the exercise in leveraging the groundswell with tips on setting objectives, understanding roles, measuring success with metrics, building a business case, etc. The high point of the presentation for me was his discussion related to what Forrester calls, “Social Technographics.” It’s basically a graphic representation of where customers are on the social media activity ladder. Additionally, Forrester claims to have analytical data that will profile your target customers’ social computing patterns by age, country, and gender (that map to the activity ladder). Check out the profile tool. Would be interested to know how they built this tool, but have to admit, it’s kinda fun.

Slides explaining the Social Technographics ladder:

All of this and more is explained in the Groundswell book. You can get more resources at the Groundswell site.

The Rise of Enterprise 2.0: Andrew McAfee Keynote, Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo

Nice high-quality video interview here with Andy in Tokyo.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by grl with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

FREE ITSinsider Pass to Enterprise 2.0 Conference

TechWeb is offering a free conference pass (at a $2200 value) for a lucky ITSinsider reader. All you need to do is post in the comments why you subscribe to/read the ITSinsider blog and why you want to go to the conference. Special preference will be given to an ITSinsider reader who adds me to your blogroll. 🙂

Of course, most readers are already going, so I’m not sure if I’ll get any takers here. If you’ve not signed up yet, and you didn’t win the ITSinsider free pass, you can still register and get $100 off by registering with this code: CMBMEB14 CMBMEB33. The pass is unlimited, so everyone can use it.  The demo pass gets you into see the keynotes and general sessions, launch pad, Enterprise20pen and various networking events.

Very happy to meet you in “carbon” as they say.

photo credit: Alex Dunne on flickr.

Splommenters– please “no comment”

Correction: Spammenters*

Shame, shame, shame. I realize Social Media is the new black in the art of PR, but how irritating is this? Tammy Erickson, our in-house workforce guru, published a post today on women’s progress in the workplace on her Harvard Business School discussion leader blog. Her first comment was from Ms. Kimberly Rosenberg who lavishes her with praise then notso deftly segues into how she is using Microsoft Office Live for Small Business (no hyperlinks intended) to increase her productivity.

I sleuthed around online on Ms. Rosenberg, and it appears she has left virtually the same comment on at least 4 other blogs in the past few weeks. Ewwww.

http://www.blissfullydomestic.com/2008/04/an-organized-ho.html

http://experts.internetbasedmoms.com/aurelia/finding-balance-as-a-wahm

http://www.entrepremusings.com/index.php/2008/04/24/why-arent-there-more-rich-women-entrepreneurs/

http://empowerwomennow.com/news-women-entrepreneurs/index.php/how-to-get-your-partner-from-zero-to-hero-in-your-business/

Microsoft Office Live for Small Business product management– what are you thinking? So blatant an attempt to hawk your wares? Buy an ad. There are right ways and wrong ways to engage the blogosphere. Please start feeding any number of the excellent social media blogs that will instruct you on how to do this right. If Ms. Rosenberg works for a PR agency, send her to social media school. Or send her to start doing some homework here (Chris Brogan) and here (Brian Solis).

The smoking gun:

*Update: Thanks to Lara Kretler, the best term to describe this practice is “spammenting.”

Boston in June… Enterprise 2.0 on the Waterfront

It’s that time again, the hallowed Enterprise 2.0 conference is revving up for early June. I was pleased to work on the agenda this year with Steve Wylie, the conference organizer, along with other members of the advisory board. The conference is in its second year and promises to reflect the maturation that occurred in the space over the past 12 months. Although many first-time attendees to the conference will be new to Enterprise 2.0, the concepts and themes have evolved and been refined over the past 12 months. Three out of the four largest enterprise vendors are big sponsors this year (IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.) I’m personally hoping we see relevant, interesting developments from these large vendors this year.

We are introducing two new ideas to the conference this year which I’m particularly excited about. The first is Stowe Boyd’s Launch Pad where four (whittled down from a larger number by votes) audience-chosen startups will have an opportunity to demo their products and compete for a winning spot for the best launch pad product/service. As there is such a torrent of new products coming onto the scene, this is a great attempt to filter out the most useful based on collective crowd selection. We are considering doing something very similar regarding sessions for September’s Office 2.0 conference based on the SXSW’s panel-picker software.

The second event, or maybe unevent I should say, is called Enterprise2Open. Modeled after “barcamps and unconferences,” this will be a half-day’s worth of unstructured Q&A and sharing hosted by Ross Mayfield. The unstructured, open-type of event has been popular for some time in the development community, but we thought we’d attempt to try it out this year with a non-technical audience. The format provides a no-hassle, informative forum to ask any and all of your burning questions related to Enterprise 2.0 and get answers from peers and folks in the community who may have experienced the same issues. You may want to consider getting your questions and topics suggested in advance by posting them to the Enterprise2Open wiki. You can actually be a presenter yourself, if you bring your own soap box. Just get yourself on the self-organized agenda. The entire session will run in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 11 from 1-4pm. nGenera is sponsoring the event, so I’ll be there with a few of my colleagues and customers.

Speaking of customers, Rob Carter, CIO of Federal Express is giving the opening keynote. A group of us were in Memphis at Fedex’s central distribution facility in March where we heard Rob talk on 2.0 adoption. Rob sees himself as an evangelist himself for 2.0 in the enterprise. I’m really pleased he accepted the offer to keynote on Tuesday morning. One of the conference themes this year is accelerating user adoption. Having notable icons from the F500 executive board room will go far to lower the barriers of trial and experimentation with 2.0 alternatives.

I’ll be at the conference from Sunday to Wednesday. I hope to see many of you there. Please drop me a note or a comment here to let me know if you’re attending. Many thanks to all the folks on the panels I helped arrange.

Photo credits: Jeckman on flickr and Alex Dunne on flickr.

What I-know-I-don’t-know about E2.0 and SAP from Sapphire ’08

My bad. Sapphire ’08 was an enormous field of opportunity to mine SAP intelligence on what the company is doing regarding Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. Somehow, I missed that opportunity and find myself with a lot of follow-up todos. A group of us had back-to-back meetings with SAP execs both Monday and Tuesday. To be perfectly frank, I learned more about what SAP is doing in Enterprise 2.0 from a product manager on the show floor in a half-hour (thank you Peter!) than I did from any of the executives. This was partly my fault and no-one’s fault, as well. My fault because I could have done a better job of trolling the show floor and no-one’s fault because in the meetings we had, we had a limited amount of time to speak to the executives individually. My EI colleagues had pressing issues on understanding why SAP’s mid-market SaaS solution Business-by-Design is going to be delayed, as well as other issues involving Business Objects, NetWeaver, TCO, cloud-computing, etc. To interject questions on blogs, wikis, RSS and mash-ups just seemed silly and inconsequential to me, so I mostly kept quiet.

Enterprise 2.0 is just not a burning issue on the minds of top SAP execs (with the notable exception of the CMO, Marty Homlish). SAP execs mirror the same sentiment as our executive clients: they have serious businesses to run– not a lot of time for the giddy consumery stuff. SAP software fuels the nitty gritty of hard-core business processes for most of the largest enterprises in the world. Where blogging (for example) fits into getting a raw material through the factory floor to a finished product, booked in inventory and ready to move through a supply chain is just not obvious to me right now. So the likelihood of an Enterprise 2.0 bolt-on to SAP is just as slim as it is naive.

I’m trying to choose my words carefully here because I don’t want to “open my mouth and remove all doubt” regarding my ignorance of SAP’s legacy business or its product roadmap. If you want thorough, interesting, and thoughtful commentary on SAP, please consult with my Enterprise Irregular colleagues who shine in this arena.

What I did uncover about SAP & Enterprise 2.0, however, was pretty interesting and demonstrates that 2.0 technology is working its way into mainstream SAP software, as well as delivering benefits for SAP customers. I, unfortunately, missed a terrific presentation by Andrew Cabanski-Dunning, Director of Product Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. In Cabanski-Dunning’s presentation, “Empowering the User: Enterprise 2.0 Solutions from SAP”, he talks about engaging the user, community virtual workspaces for collaboration, networks connecting peers and experts, searching all business objects, integrating 3rd-party tools and data with open APIs, wikis and web content publishing, mash-ups, flex and ajax, mobile interfaces, and user adoption. All the buzzwords and key concepts are there. I’m going to follow up with Cabanski-Dunning and see if I can get a personal briefing of this presentation and publish what I learn.

On the collaboration front, a number of gems surfaced. The community efforts are truly paying off for SAP. Through communities such as its one-million member strong SDN (software developer network) and BPX (business process expert exchange), SAP is reaping the benefits of an active and engaged co-collaborative community where collective intelligence delivers benefits for all parties. Where ten years ago, customers had to accept SAP’s view of the world, today customers, ISVs, solutions integrators, and partners jointly weigh in on enhancements and features. I heard one statistic that claimed over 50% of SAP’s enterprise services are now developed in tandem with the community. Other communities include its Industry Value Network, the Enterprise Services Community, as well as the many Industry Standards communities where SAP participates.

The most interesting discussion on the use of next-gen technology for me was a show-and-tell with CMO Marty Homlish. Homlish experimented with a virtual marketing community meeting that included 1800 people over 3 days spanning 15 time zones. Using Unisfair (which is like a Second Life for business) and a collaborative workspace called Plexus, SAP marketing employees contributed over 3,000 user-generated content items over the 3-day period. At one point during the trial, 75% of SAP’s global marketing operation were participating in the live event. Incidentally, the Plexus collaboration workspace is itself an example of a co-innovation built for the community by the community as one of the projects in SAP’s Co-innovation Lab. It is a co-development project between Jive Software, Intelligroup, Wipro, Enthiosys and Adobe.

Finally, I did get the chance to ask co-CEO Henning Kagermann about SAP’s internal social networking product, Harmony. He indicated it wasn’t clear yet what they were going to do with it. Harmony is in use by about 2,500 SAP employees including the company’s “high potentials” and select members of its U.S. community. He viewed it largely as an HR offering and indicated it was “not built on SAP technology.” He mentioned it could be a side-by-side offering in the future, but did not commit to a date for commercializing the product. He hinted that collaborative supplier management could be part of the suite, but didn’t go further.

It was clear to me that SAP was not going to be launching a killer app in Enterprise 2.0, but would rather incorporate social networking and collaborative features into its product suites where it made sense and delivered value to customers. So where IBM has Lotus Connections, Microsoft has SharePoint, SAP will be content to patch 2.0 functionality into its core business offerings, but may not uniquely focus in the discrete social software arena.

Oracle, on the other hand, is making a noisy “me-too” in this space. In the past two days, I’ve seen a lot of interesting developments highlighting Oracle’s interest in positioning itself as a player in Enterprise 2.0. To Oracle’s credit, they’ve done an excellent job in communicating the benefits and logical integration opportunities for 2.0 technologies in its core business applications. See Dennis Howlett’s interview with Charles Phillips and this post from JavaOne at the CNET blog which includes a video. I’m working on a briefing demo with Oracle and will keep you updated with what we discover.

I was complaining last week on Twitter about SAP being late to the party in Enterprise 2.0. Having been around the technology business for a thousand years, a(nother) little bird reminded me of something similar years ago in the outsourcing market. It was 1994 and IBM was seeking relief from the Justice Department about lifting its 1956 Consent Decree so it could compete more effectively for large IT outsourcing contracts. At the time, giants EDS and CSC were leading the market. My prediction was that IBM would dominate over time and the reason could be summed up in two words: installed base. IBM proceeded to trounce its competitors and is today the largest services player in the world. Over a decade later, the fundamentals still prove true. SAP may surprise us all.

SAPPHIRE: the Jewel of Enterprise Conferences

I’m headed out to SAP’s SAPPHIRE ’08 U.S. conference, this year held in Orlando. The conference is an annual pilgrimage for most of my Enterprise Irregular brethren. Over two dozen of us are going to the U.S. gig and will be given access to SAP’s executive leadership to get all our questions answered.

This will be my first SAPPHIRE. My interest in going is to ascertain if, how, and when SAP is going to incorporate 2.0 functionality into its massive ERP offerings. Of all the leading enterprise vendors, SAP has been conspicuously absent with real offerings in the space. Although SAP talked a good game and demoed a solid internal product, Harmony, at last year’s SAPPHIRE, we haven’t heard anything all year on the commercial possibilities for Harmony or how 2.0 collaborative features will be integrated into SAP’s legacy products. At least I am not aware of any. Of course, there will be a swat-team of SAPers in Orlando who will swarm me and set me straight if I am wrong. 🙂

What I find so odd, ironic about SAP in this space is that the company is, by far, the most progressive in reaching out to the blogger community– does the very best job at this and sets the standard, in fact. It has hired two leading social media experts, Shel Israel and Maggie Fox to help SAP with its marketing efforts, and many senior execs make heavy use of social media tools i.e., Twitter, blogging. The SAP developer network which makes use of a wiki for collaboration is over 750,000 people strong. In this ITSinsider post from last year, you’ll see in the comments how SAPers noted they make use of several wiki vendors and have certified Jive software forums for its NetWeaver product. Clearly, SAP “gets it.”

So, why so far ahead in using the tools and so behind in offering them simultaneously? This is the single question on my mind as I arrive in Orlando. I’ll be flanked with smart guys, so I feel pretty safe.

Most of us will be twittering from the conference. I will be respectful of the conference-spam factor and will only post items I think are uniquely important. If you have a question, you’d like asked of any SAP executive including Leo Apotheker and Henning Kagermann, just send me a DM to @ITSinsider on Twitter. I’ll do my best to get it answered.