As part of this year’s Social Media Week, I’ll be hosting one of the sessions at a free one-day event held at SAP Palo Alto on February 15th. It’s entitled “Social Business: Designing Social into Products”, and I will be accompanied by a star-studded lineup of guests: meet the panelists. Please join us by registering for the session or join via online streaming on the SAP Facebook page, and the hashtag for the event is #SMW12

In this post, I’d like to share some ideas about why I believe that there are now fantastic new opportunities to improve all kinds of products using social media techniques.

PLEASE GIVE YOUR FEEDBACK. This blog post and the session I’ll be hosting are also “products”, in a sense, and I’d like to use the techniques outlined below to make them as good as possible: please post your feedback and any answers you have to the questions below, or suggestions for great panelists, and I’ll use that feedback to improve the session above!

Introduction

I believe that we’re still in the era of a “horseless carriage” version of social media: we added a motor, but kept the rest of the carriage.

In other words, while we understand how the new technologies work, we’re still tending to bolt the new social techniques onto our existing processes, rather than fundamentally rethinking those processes in the light of the new opportunities.

This tends to be true of all new technologies, of course. But for some reason there seems to be a bigger gap than usual – perhaps it is because the “trees” are so obvious (social media analytics, enterprise collaboration, etc.) that they tend to obscure the “wood”: the opportunity to sweep away existing bottlenecks in our business processes.

Social media is too often a marginal activity that people are happy to leave up to a dedicated team elsewhere in the organization, rather than embedded in everything we do. This post looks in particular at how social media techniques can be applied to the process of product creation.

Social / Product Trends

Why introduce something new? Why can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing today? Let’s start with some of the background trends:

Transparency: Whether you have a great product or an awful one, prospective customers can get the information they need directly from unbiased peers. This means that traditional product sales and marketing is being marginalized, and that core product quality becomes even more fundamental.

A great product – one that customers are delighted to own and use, and talk about to other people – can now take off at lighting speed, with almost no promotional cost. And news about product problems or poor service can spread even faster. The good news is that product creators can communicate with their customers more cheaply than ever: we may be naked, but we have a megaphone. It has to be used wisely. Honesty and credibility are essential values when talking about your products to the market.

Direct Contact With Customers: In large product organizations, there’s often a big communications gap between the people creating products and the people using them. The creators and designers of software, for example, have typically had to rely on other people to research the needs of potential users. The researchers then pass on that information in the form of “consumer profiles”, “personas”, or “ethnographic research”, which is used as a basis for creation. Something often gets lost in the translation, but is often seen as the only feasible way to operate.

Software engineers (for example), frustrated by this limited visibility, complain how hard it is to get access to customers, who are often protectively fenced off by sales teams (perhaps worried that developers might let too much of the truth slip out about product bugs or delays).

The advances of social media means all this can now change: vast numbers of potential users are only a few mouse-clicks away, participating in industry forums, complaining about alternative products, or talking about their favorite features.

Network Leverage: There are now socially-enabled running shoes, socially-enabled cameras, socially-enabled toys, and socially-enabled enterprise software. Almost any product can now be “social”, and hence experience network effects that may outweigh the other product features.

Extended Ecosystems:By embedding more use of social techniques into product creation and selling, we’re inevitably creating more complex, interactive networks of ecosystems around our products, with customers, partners, suppliers of social networking, etc.

How do “Social” and “Product” Interact?

I believe there are three main ways in which we can create new or better products through social media techniques. It’s clear, however, that there is still a lot to learn before these techniques become commonplace — in each section, I’ve added some of the questions I believe need to be addressed: again, any feedback you have is more than welcome!

Social-improved products

First and most obviously we can use social media to improve the way we create existing products. New techniques include:

Social Research. It’s now easy to find data about new opportunities, such as customers complaining about business problems or competitor products. And it’s easy to get customer feedback on problems with our own products. Given the potential for better products, I believe we should be investing extensively in these new areas. Questions:

• What valuable data is available now that wasn’t before?
• What are the costs and opportunities associated with these new techniques?
• How much time should product creators spend communicating with communities vs. creating products?
• How do systems have to change to ensure that this type of research is consistently integrated into the product creation process?
• What are the real-life limitations of such research? i.e. what kinds of important data can we not get with these processes?
• What social research tools can we build into the product experience? (e.g. making it easy to invite others when using the product, and tracking success, or an online game maker tracking the price of different virtual weapons)

Ideation. One of the most painful parts of any product creation process is prioritization – we can never make a “perfect” product. There will always be some compromise in terms of functionality or cost. New ideation platforms, such as SAP’s Idea Place offer an opportunity to ask customers and potential customers to give their feedback directly on possible new features and what compromises to make.

These opportunities are not limited to software or technical products – consumer goods companies can run surveys on online forums, authors can ask online discussion boards for plot ideas for their next book, etc. This gets us closer to “crowdsourcing” the creation and improvement of products. Questions:

• When is ideation not appropriate?
• What types of products and features work best for ideation?
• How can we motivate our customers and prospects to participate?
• What level of transparency is appropriate?
• How do we handle rejection of non-chosen products and features?
• What are the dangers of competitors seeing the data, or gaming the results?

Social Prototyping. Basic ideation isn’t enough. I’m sure we can all think of an experience where we didn’t realize we wanted or needed a particular product until we tried it out. Product designers, after all, can have great ideas of their own, based on their deep market knowledge. One key problem today is that somebody in a company may what they believe is a fantastic idea for a new and different product. But in order to pursue the product, they need resources and permission of several layers of management.

Those managers may not have any real frame of reference to determine if the new product is a real opportunity or not, and may not be incented to take any risks. This can result in some combination of dissatisfied product creators (if the idea is rejected), wasted time (slow decision-making at each level ), or wasted money (if the idea is accepted, but the product fails). But using social media, it’s now much easier to create fast prototypes (mockups, concept version, wireframes, etc.), and then make them available to customers for testing and feedback.

The benefit is that it’s much clearer whether a product really does appeal to customers or not, helping the prioritization process. The car industry has long done this with “concept cars”, and SAP has tested these techniques with through its SAP Research Prototyping group. Ideas such as integration with Google Maps were shown to be extremely popular (and so were rushed into production) while some ideas weren’t interesting (and the person proposing the new feature had a learning experience). Questions:

• How can we introduce more extensive prototyping and social feedback into our product creation processes?
• How do we decide if a prototype is successful enough to productize?
• Are there any other benefits to this type of process? (marketing, thought leadership, etc.?)
• Does this approach cost more or less than existing methods?

Social-Enabled Products

We can integrate social media into products to improve their usefulness or effectiveness. Games you can play with other people in your social network are more interesting that games you play on your own. Our devices are increasingly wired to be able to share information – you can buy applications and shoes that share information socially on platforms such as RunKeeper. Runners can use the social-enabled devices to share data with a coach, boast of their achievements, embarrass themselves into improving their times, or let relatives track where they are during a marathon. And if you’re logged into Facebook when you visit the site, it will tell you which of your friends are already using the products.

Hybrid cars can keep track of your fuel consumption, so you can compete with your friends about who is the most sustainable driver. Restaurant guides can give us information based on the ratings given by our friends and other restaurants we’ve visited on foursquare or “liked” on Facebook. Enterprise software vendors can build collaboration into existing business applications, letting people apply social media techniques to supply chain collaboration or track the progress of sales deals. Even Lego is becoming social.

• What are your favorite examples of social-enabled products?
• How important is social enablement compared to other features of a product?
• Do product creators have to be aware of new power-players in the social eco-system?
• What other products should include social but don’t today?
• What about the limits of social privacy when using such products?

New Products On Top of Social

There are opportunities to create new products “on top of” social networks, or as by-products of them. Companies such as LinkedIn have been able to create new “products” based on the data gathered in their networks, such as “Talent Match” or “Jobs You May Be Interested In”. New tools could help improve the success or failure of a big merger by analyzing the different social networks within the two organizations over time. Companies could develop more sophisticated “friends and family” offers for their products. Car-sharing services could leverage social networks to improve usage rates.

• What are some other good examples of leveraging social networks to create new products and services?
• Is this something that the rest of us even need to think about?

Conclusion

We’re a long way from “build it and they will come”, but we’re not yet at “come build it with us”. I look forward to your feedback!

Interested in Social Media? (and everybody should be, because these techniques are changing EVERY business process, not just marketing). Come and join us!

As part of this year’s Social Media Week, SAP Palo Alto will be hosting a free, day-long non-SAP-focused event on Wednesday, February 15th with a glittering array of industry experts discussing a variety of key social topics:

Just some of the participants: Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group | Ray Wang, CEO of Constellations Research|Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer of SAP | Barbara Holzapfel, SVP & Managing Director of SAP | Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable | Srini Tanikella, SCN community member |Kimarie Mathews of Wells Fargo | Deirdre Walsh of Jive Software | Brian Ellefritz, SAP Social Media Strategic Services | Lisa Joy Rosner, Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase |Dave Brockington, Product Marketing & Strategy, StreamWork | Me!

You are invited to attend on-site if you’re in Silicon Valley, but the sessions will also be available through online streaming on the SAP Facebook page.

I’ll be hosting the last session of the day, on Social Media and Products – more details about that session in a separate blog post: Social+Product=Better Products.

Please join us! Click on the links below to find out more and to sign up to attend one or more of the sessions (sorry, to attend the whole day, you have to sign up four times…)

SAP Social Media Day, Wednesday, February 15th

Location: 3410 Hillview Avenue, Building 1 Café, Palo Alto

Hashtags #SMW12 #SAP, and find event-related blogs on the SAP Community Network and SocialMediaWeek.org.

Thanks to InformationWeek, here’s a quick demonstration by Jive Software’s Director of Analytics, Dan Short, that shows how Jive is using SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand to give their customers easy insight into social community growth.

SAP has been a long-time user of Jive Software’s forum and workspace technology (formerly called ClearSpace, now SBS for “Social Business Software”), and there are close commercial ties between the two companies. Notably, Jive’s platform is used to power the SAP Collaboration Workspace area that is used for both external collaboration with customers as well as internal collaboration – including the main internal “SAP 2.0” forum for discussing SAP’s own adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

But as discussed in a previous post, Social Networking @ SAP, and like most large organizations, a variety of other platforms are also used inside the organization including Atlassian’s Confluence and an internal development, Harmony.

In addition to these existing deployments, late last year, a small workgroup of SAP BusinessObjects employees based in Palo Alto, California, began beta-testing a new, on-demand enterprise collaboration suite called CubeTree.

The initial installation was focused mainly on twitter-like status feeds, functionality that wasn’t easily available from the other platforms. It rapidly went viral within the company, with employees able to invite other employees. I personally started using the site in November last year.

During the initial beta phase, CubeTree was used widely across different SAP departments, and I personally found it very useful to get insights into the activities of other teams working on related projects – especially SAP’s own web 2.0 technology plans.

One of the key advantages of the CubeTree on-demand architecture is the ability to rapidly add new features as they are demanded by users. There’s a weekly software update, and new features are explained on the company’s blog. To help encourage a variety of opinions and focus feedback, CubeTree uses functionality from User Voice. Participants are given “votes” they can use when making requests and comments to developers.

CubeTree launched their production platform in May of this year, and it now provides the full suite of typical features offered on today’s consumer social networking sites: user profiles, follow/follower news feeds, micro-blogging, along with enterprise collaboration tools including wikis, file sharing, and polls.

Here’s a list of features, and the feature tour video from the CubeTree web site, below.

David Meyer, VP Product Management for Emerging Technologies for SAP BusinessObjects was the main sponsor of the CubeTree project, and participated in the CubeTree launch video below, talking about the promise of the social enterprise and how CubeTree helps him achieve his goals.

Transcript of the video:

Voice-over: SAP BusinessObjects has employees and offices around the world, designing and developing the world’s leading business intelligence solutions. Managing product lifecycles throughout multiple offices and time zones has its challenges, so they turned to CubeTree to facilitate collaboration and to open up channels of communication between stakeholders.

David Meyer: CubeTree helps ideas flow like water and I think that everybody in the enterprise is incredibly thirsty these days, because they’re captured in these silos and stuck in meetings and we need to bring back that human element. And people often don’t equate technology, the social technology, with the human element, and they think it’s de-humanizing. I think that people that are immersed in these systems see it as the exact opposite. They re-humanize within the confines and the constraints of how we’re forced to live our enterprise days.

Voice-over: Casual conversations and impromptu meetings are commonplace. But collaboration within the enterprise can be limited to one office or one team. By using CubeTree, development is more agile and collaboration is made easier.

David: CubeTree meets some of the needs — the very real needs — we have in the enterprise by making us simply move faster. Somebody says something in CubeTree. Somebody else says something from a different walk of life. A few minutes later, and by the end of the day, there’s a brand-new idea. It didn’t exist in the morning. It’s the composite idea, the best, the 1+1+1=8 within these dialogs with people from diverse viewpoints. And those are the things that are very exciting, that I think everybody is starting to feel the acceleration that these tools can provide.

Voice-over: CubeTree has already impacted the way people work at SAP BusinessObjects.

David: The other day I was remarking on a little company that TechCrunch covered. Within three hours, somebody from the ecosystem team saw that I had a point of view on it, looked at it themselves, realized where it fit in into our product strategy, and that same day had signed an NDA with that company, and was talking to them the next day. That’s remarkable!

David also explained his motivations for using CubeTree in the launch press release:

“The market looks to SAP as an innovator and thought leader in driving business transformation through technology. Social networks are transforming how people communicate in their personal lives. We adopted CubeTree’s enterp
rise social software to bring the same network effect into the enterprise, connecting people and ideas across the company to accelerate our business.”

The internal deployment has not been without its wrinkles, however. Legal and IT security objections to the use of a hosted environment (rather than the in-house deployment of the Jive platform) had to be overcome, and deployment had to be briefly interrupted for non-US employees while European data confidentiality concerns were addressed. In some countries such as Germany, the employee worker council had to be consulted, and has not yet given its go-ahead, barring that country from the deployment. And, of course, the functionality overlaps with existing platforms were examined, and a business case required for the costs and overhead of a new solution.

Unlike the Jive collaboration platform that is available to all SAP staff, CubeTree deployment is currently only available for employees of one of the product divisions of SAP Business Objects, but the deployment may be (re)extended in the future.

Links

• TechCrunch: CubeTree Launches As A Facebook + FriendFeed + Twitter For Enterprise
• Bill Ives: CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform
• “Buzz” Area of CubeTree web site: http://www.cubetree.com/site/buzz
• Official CubeTree Twitter Channel: http://twitter.com/cubetree
• Ross Fubini, CTO and Co-founder of CubeTree on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fubini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links and Other Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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