[UPDATE: Here's a link to the recorded panel session of Social+Products=Better Products on Wednesday, February 15th, from 3pm to  4.30pm PST, as part of Social Media Day at SAP Palo Alto. See this post on  Products+Social=Better Products for more details of the topics discussed. ]

Panel Session Outline

Here’s the outline of the panel session:

• 3:00-3:15 Key themes and Introductions:
• 3:15-3:35 Improving products through social techniques:
• 3:35-3:55 Creating social-enabled products:
• 3:55-4:15 Creating new products on top of social networks:
• 4:15-4:30 Wrap-up and final thoughts

These times are just a guideline – we’ll go where the conversation takes us. We will be encouraging the audience (both local and online) to tweet questions and comments, and I will pass them on to the panelists.

Here are some more details about the panelists and the show:

Meet the Panelists

In alphabetic order, here are the participants of the panel – click on their name to see their profile on twitter.

	David Brockington is a solution manager responsible for SAP’s new collaboration solution, SAP StreamWork. He has been an evangelist and thought leader within SAP on social business topics. Previously, he spent 10 years in various product management roles helping grow SAP Business Objects Enterprise from its very first iteration to the number one market leading business intelligence solution.
	Timo Elliott is a 20-year veteran of SAP BusinessObjects, and has spent the last quarter-century working with customers around the world on information strategy. He works closely with SAP research and innovation centers around the world to evangelize new technology prototypes.His popular Business Analyticsblog tracks innovation in analytics and social media, including topics such as augmented corporate reality, collaborative decision-making, and social network analysis.His PowerPoint Twitter Tools lets presenters see and react to tweets in real time, embedded directly within their slides. Elliott presents regularly to IT and business audiences at international conferences, on subjects such as why BI projects fail and what to do about it, and the intersection of BI and enterprise 2.0
	Ross Mayfield is the Vice President of Business Development at SlideShare, developing strategic partnerships and helping organizations engage with the world’s largest professional sharing community.He is also currently Chairman & Co-founder of Socialtext, the Enterprise Social Software pioneer, and was the founding CEO. Previously, Mayfield Co-founded and served as President of RateXchange, a publicly traded B2B commodity exchange for telecommunications.Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business
	Kuhan Milroy is Director of Social Business Innovation, SAP Community Network at SAP. By bringing the social element to innovation at SAP, Kuhan is responsible for transforming the way SAP and customers, partners, and consumers innovate together to help shape the future of SAP’s products and solutions and more importantly the businesses, industries and markets the products serve. He manages initiatives surrounding the community and bringing a social approach to how SAP innovates, and researches how SAP can expand beyond small group to mass users for ideas and innovation.
	Lisa Joy Rosner is the Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase, where she works with the largest brands in the world—including Coca-Cola, Kraft and HP—as they change their approach to understanding consumers’ desires.Ms. Rosner is a tenured marketing executive in Silicon Valley, who is known for her creative and educational marketing approach. Before joining NetBase, she was an e-commerce expert, having served as vice president of Worldwide Marketing at BroadVision Inc. and vice president of Marketing at MyBuys, where she worked with such companies as Sears, Wal-Mart and Circuit City.Prior to that, Ms. Rosner worked in the data warehouse market at Brio, DecisionPoint and Oracle. Lisa Joy has served on the marketing advisory board for the Silicon Valley Red Cross and the Content Committee of Shop.org, the AMA and Benchmark.She was named the Gold winner of the Great Minds Award by the ARF in 2011. Ms. Rosner received a bachelor’s degree (sum cum laude) in English literature from the University of Maryland. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa
	Nicholas Webb is one of the countries top thought leaders in the area of innovation. His books include The Innovation Playbook, The Digital Innovation Playbook, and The Innovation Superstar Workbook.As a Senior Partner at Lassen Innovation he helps some of the best companies in the world drive innovation through improved customer insights and true innovation best practice.

Update: as part of this year’s Social Media Week, I hosted  one of the sessions at a free one-day event held at SAP Palo Alto on February 15th. Accompanied by a star-studded lineup of guests (meet the panelists) we discussed how companies can make better products using social media — here’s a link to the recorded panel session: Social+Products=Better Products. 

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.

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.

SAP Social Intelligence, born as the social network analytics prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center (now SAP Research Prototypes), is now fully launched and available as an integral part of the SAP StreamWork collaborative decision solution.

With so much going on with various launches including BusinessObjects version 4.0 and HANA, you may have missed the launch of the Enterprise Edition of StreamWork, but it was a key step for integration with the rest of enterprise information infrastructure, and SAP has announced that StreamWork is a central part of the ongoing collaboration strategy — not just of business analytics, but also SAP’s core applications like CRM and PLM.

The project manager, Sharon Haver, has just posted a brand-new video that explains social intelligence using funky blue people (including the key employees that work on the StreamWork product) tied together with rope – it looks like they had a lot of fun making it…

Enjoy.

It’s now official: SAP has released its brand-new Web 2.0 product called StreamWork. The project was initially called “Constellation” within SAP, and was first exposed to beta customers on the web site 12sprints.com, as covered in earlier postings on this site.

Why the name? It’s a variant on “workstream”, which according to Wikipedia is:

“A flow of output, the activities and transactions, that a worker produces as they go about their daily work activities. Workstreams are flows of largely unstructured data that workstreaming technologies seek to capture, document and repackage in more intelligent ways benefiting individual workers, managers and corporations.”

And the article goes on to say:

“…tapping into and mining these workstreams presents tremendous opportunities to companies in terms of collaboration, agility and collective intelligence.”

Other research seems to back this up. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, 36% of company performance is determined by organizations’ “collaborative index”:

“This is more than twice the impact of a company’s strategic orientation (16%) and more than five times the impact of market and technological turbulence influences (7%). This is a key finding because it empirically demonstrates that increased high-quality collaboration can improve business performance.“

The Power of Collaborative Decisions

Every person in every organization makes many decisions every day. Many of these are so small that we don’t even recognize them as decisions. Every time a sales person calls a customer, she is “deciding” to prioritizing that activity over everything else she could be doing. Of course, a sub-optimal decision may not make much difference. But over time, and across a large organization, these small decisions pile up and have a huge influence to corporate performance.

Of course, computer systems have been promising Improved business decision-making since at least the 1950s, by providing more information about company operations. And they have largely delivered, enabling corporations of breath-taking complexity. But you can give everybody the same facts, and still end up with completely different views about what the data means, and what should be done about it (just look at any group of rival politicians!).

Decision-making is a core business function of every organization, and has been extensively studied by scientists and management theorists. But despite all the advances in theory, real-life decision-making is still dominated by people, personalities, and endless emails and meetings.

Decisions still tend to be made in messy, non-repeatable, “are-we-really-sure-about-this?” ways, relying heavily on “gut feel”. People often spend more time and effort making decisions as they do on actually trying to execute them, and reviewing / reversing decisions that have already been made (every new politician and executive feels honor-bound to reverse the decisions of their predecessors).

Collaboration or “Enterprise 2.0” platforms, including Jive and Cubetree and Google Wave have helped, by letting employees work together on projects, but they typically don’t directly support goal-oriented decision-making.

Introducing SAP StreamWork

StreamWork helps you bring together:

• All the right people needed to make a good decision (executives, influencers, experts), across different corporate functions and geographies
• All the information relevant to the decision, from inside or outside the organization, both qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective (and reformat it, if necessary). Integration with Evernote and Scribd makes it easy to upload and share documents.
• All the right methods that should be brought to bear in order to consider all the aspects of the decision (cost/benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Pro/Con charts, responsibility matrices, etc.)

See this link for a summary of StreamWork features and view the StreamWork YouTube Channel for an extensive set of how-to videos.

By putting all this in one environment, and letting people collaborate and comment and add data and add documents, and explain their reasoning, organizations get:

• More clarity about why decisions are being made
• More engagement from employees, who can see a direct link between their suggestions and the final result
• More commitment to decisions (research shows that we care more about fair process than we do with final decisions. If we feel our voice has been heard, we’re far more likely to comply with the final choice, even if we didn’t agree with it)
• Better results. Measurement and tracking of the decision-making process, allowing you to optimize the process over time (faster decision cycles, better outcomes)

On-Demand, Extensible Architecture

StreamWork uses an on-demand architecture, so you can be productive immediately without any software installs, and you can easily invite people from inside or outside the organization without having to worry about access problems. And it provides an open REST API, making it easy to extend StreamWork functionality and integrate with other systems.

Here’s a look at some of the add-ons that have already been built, including integration with InfoView, Text-to-query, Android, YouTube, and others.

Here’s a great example of the integration possibilities from OffiSync:

And SAP is busy integrating other prototypes such as Gravity, covered in an earlier post, with StreamWork.

Pricing

The basic edition is free, with up to five activities, 250Mb of storage, and the unlimited ability to collaborate in others’ activities. The Professional Edition costs $9/month for up to 100 activities, 5Gb of storage, and more control over user security. An Enterprise Edition is in the works, with more details to be announced later this year.

Sign up Now!

Signing up for StreamWork is easy and free — click here.

Other Coverage and Links

• Alex Williams, ReadWriteWeb: Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP’s Future?
• Bob Thompson, Customer Think: Will StreamWork get SAP out of its Innovation Funk?
• Chris Kanaracus, IDG News: SAP’s ‘Virtual War Room’ Tool Gets a Name: StreamWork
• Jon Brodkin, Network World: SAP Targets Online Collaboration Market with StreamWork
• Larry Barrett, Datamation: SAP Debuts Cloud-Based Collaboration Apps
• Xavier Lanier, GottaBeMobile.com: Evernote’s Incorporated in SAP Collaboration Tool
• B-Eye-Network: Formerly Known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork is now Generally Available
• Rich Hoeg: 12Sprints Tutorial

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.

The sessions featured interaction with Twitter very heavily, using the #sapsummit hashtag. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of tweets, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

You can read more about the Summit, and how it compared to “Le Web” here.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

Some new research has been published on the EngagementDB web site on how social media engagement correlates with revenue and profit for the 100 Best Global Brands as measured by BusinessWeek and Interbrand.

The report, The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?, attempts to measure the financial worth of social media activities of top brands, including SAP.

The study summarizes brand engagement into four categories:

1. Mavens, such as SAP, with dedicated teams and high engagement across multiple channels
2. Butterflies, present in many channels, but not highly engaged
3. Selectives, with high engagement in a few channels
4. Wallflowers, who are just dipping their toes into social media

The report then looked at the correlation between these categories and financial performance. Interestingly, revenue seems to be correlated with the number of channels (so butterflies do better than selectives), but profits are correlated with engagement (so selectives do better than butterflies).

Of course, correlation is not causation, so while the relationships were statistically significant, the data may just be showing us what we’d already expect: that larger companies simply tend to engage in more media channels, that successful, profitable companies tend to have better engagement with their customers, and that companies have integrated social media into their existing strategies.

The report give case studies of the activities of various top brands, including a report on SAP’s successful social media communities for technical and business customers, SDN and BPX:

The researchers conclude:

While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.

There’s also a blog posting that summarizes the results and gives some tips for greater engagement, and shows the top ten companies for engagement. SAP comes in at #9:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.

SAP Social Media Participation Guidelines 2009

SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing
June 2009

This document reflects the current guidelines as determined by SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing and SAP Legal in collaboration with employees. This document is subject to modifications and amendments from time to time as required.

SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION GUIDELINES
The following guidelines describe private, individual participation in social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. for SAP employees. If your job requires you to be an SAP evangelist in social media channels and you have questions, or you want to establish social media channels on behalf of SAP or an SAP group, contact the SAP Social Media Group by sending a mail to [redacted]. For any other questions about social media at SAP, please visit the SAP-internal SAP 2.0 Community.

These guidelines are intended to assist you in your use of social media tools as an individual. Please be aware that nothing in the use of these tools changes your responsibilities and obligations as an employee of SAP. SAP and its employees are required to act ethically, and it is every employee’s obligation to review and understand SAP’s Code of Business Conduct, our communications policy, and their confidentiality obligations in other policies, such as the Security Policy.

Social media channels such as (micro) blogging, video and photo sharing, forums, virtual worlds, opinion markets and collaboration environments represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all of our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it. SAP provides these social media guidelines to help employees participate within social media channels safely, and with minimum personal liability.

The SAP employee community collaborated in writing these guidelines. Specifically, a draft set of guidelines was posted on an internal SAP Wiki and SAP employees from divisions throughout the organization were invited to make comments and suggestions aimed at developing an appropriate set of guidelines.

These guidelines reflect the principles that SAP employees should follow when engaging in online communication. They are intended to provide you with an understanding of both the proper and improper uses of social computing in an effort to make your conversations and interactions as rich as possible. At all times, SAP employees must obey their local laws and adhere to local legal and ethical regulations. Nevertheless, as online communication is global in nature, other laws and regulations may also be applicable to your communication.

Please note that any direct communication to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through SAP Global Communications. The following set of guidelines only pertains to your personal statements in any online media. Please be aware that, although SAP is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.

Setting up personal spaces in social media channels – You are free to set up any blog, space or other area within the given framework of the terms provided by the host of such spaces (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc). Please contact the SAP Social Media Group whenever you intend to use “SAP” as any part of the name or URL to avoid confusion with official SAP communication. Any personal space should have a clear disclaimer that it is not an official space of SAP. The following template may be used for this purpose:

“This [Choose. Blog, Space ...] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute any official communication of SAP.”

Managers and executives take note: This standard disclaimer does not by itself exempt SAP managers and executives from a special responsibility when blogging or otherwise communicating online. By virtue of their position, managers and executives must consider whether personal thoughts they publish may be misunderstood as expressing SAP positions, and a manager should assume that his or her team will read what is written. A public blog is not the appropriate medium for many types of communications, including, but not limited to: communicating SAP policies to SAP employees; negotiating with third parties; making disparaging remarks about any third party; or other communications, etc.

Write in the first person – When you contribute commentary about SAP or SAP-related matters to an external audience, it is vital that you make it clear that you are speaking only for yourself (i.e. use the first-person singular, such as “I believe…” and not “We at SAP believe…”). There are different ways to do this. A simple and accepted approach is to include a disclaimer at the very beginning of your blog. If the blog is lengthy or long-standing, you should consider repeating the disclaimer inside the message. The disclaimer should state at a minimum that your point of view is personal, and it is not an official SAP point of view. Make it simple. Make it clear.

Identify yourself – The value of social computing is diminished when people hide behind a pseudonym or an anonymous post. Trust is hard enough to establish and maintain over the Internet, and if you do not identify yourself, then do not be surprised if your well-considered contributions are brushed aside. Therefore, please identify yourself to provide additional authenticity to your online contributions.

Be Honest – Tell the truth and if you find you have made a mistake, issue a clarification or a withdrawal or whatever may suit the circumstance and make it abundantly clear that you have done so. Social computing is a tolerant neighborhood – mistakes and errors will not make you a social outcast if you take responsibility. Rather than editing your content once it has been published, find ways to make your corrections transparent.

Be Respectful – simply carry the professionalism norms and standards of any SAP office onto the social computing platforms.

Separate Opinions from Facts – and make sure your audience can see the difference.

Add Value – be informative and interesting. Contribute your thoughts, experiences, observations, and opinions regarding issues you know and care about, but make sure to check your facts and figures – if you don’t, someone else probably will.

Be Engaged and Be Informed – Read the contributions of others. Know what the current conversations are and what people are saying in order to see if, and how, you may be able to contribute a new perspective. Participation is the fuel of social computing. And remember…

Aim for Quality, not Quantity – Offer your contribution with context whenever you can. Provide links to other blogs, media articles or whatever sources you think are necessary. Make your content rich and interesting for others to read. Consider attaching documents when necessary (but not SAP internal documents, confidential or not, of course!). And in every case, keep the language simple and flowing. If you start a blog, encourage feedback and conversation – make sure your readers can add feedback to your blog and respond in a timely manner. A two-way communication exchange allows for a more meaningful conversation.

Don’t Pick Fights – When you see misrepresentations or patently false statements about SAP by bloggers, the media, analysts or anyone else for that matter, you may certainly address these misrepresentations, even by joining someone else’s conversation. But stick to the facts and make sure the facts you rely on are publicly available.

Protect Your Privacy – Never disclose personal information.

Remember that you are still an SAP employee – do not make false, misleading or detrimental statements about SAP or SAP products. Consider that, although you are writing a personal blog, your statements will be considered an indication of the internal proceedings in SAP and how the company and our products are seen internally.

How to Handle Media Inquiries – Your contributions to social computing and the online conversations around SAP products, solutions, and practices will help advance dialogue, maybe solve some problems, create awareness and possibly attract attention of all kinds, including the media. If a member of the media contacts you, simply notify the Media Relations team in Global Communications via press@sap.com. They will determine the best way to handle the inquiry.

Legal Considerations – Yes, you have legal responsibilities and they need to be considered. You must respect copyrights and other intellectual property, fair use and financial disclosure laws, and SAP deals in general. Remember the following – do NOT talk about: perceived product defects or deficits; revenue projections; future product launch details; acquisition targets yet to be defined, or disclose corporate topics, product roadmaps, customer wins, our relationship to customers or partners or any other material SAP internal information. Do not post materials from SAP partners or customers in your communication (whether marked as confidential or not) or otherwise make information public that you have received through interaction with customers or partners. Use your common sense, and when in doubt contact the SAP Social Media Group.

Social Computing and Your Primary Role – Active contribution to social computing in its many forms can be time-consuming, so it is important that this does not interfere with your role at SAP. If you find that your social computing activity interferes with your role at SAP, please speak with your manager to determine if your personal contributions can become official SAP communications in alignment with SAP Global Communications as part of your job. If your manager and SAP Global Communication determines that it is not possible to incorporate your social computing activity into your role at SAP, you should reduce your involvement in social computing and consider posting a statement that explains why you are reducing your online activity.