This was the theme for the 4th annual Gilbane Conference held at the San Francisco Westin on June 18-20th. I was able to attend for one day, the 19th and mostly to hear the discussions run by Geoff Bock who is the Gilbane analyst on collaboration.

The first session Geoff ran was called “Case Studies: Collaboration in Action.” This consisted of a panel of three organizations that had implemented online communities (for various reasons).

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Earth Knowledge

Frank D’Agnese, Ph.D, was the first to speak and he is the co-founder and President of Earth Knowledge, Inc. which he describes as a geographically distributed community of earth sciences, client services and web services. The community is mostly composed of subject matter experts (in 4 areas: Water, Land, Climate and Biodiversity) and decision makers. Frank believes that in 2005 the Green market was estimated at $209B. There is a lot of stakeholder involvement, and often Earth Knowledge works for one client or a coalition of clients.

The communities use complex geospatial data, GIS as a background engine and Google Maps and Google Earth as the front end. Earth Knowledge is a Google partner, but they also use NewsGator (RSS aggregation), Blogger, Movable Type, Bloglines, Upcoming and Technorati as tools for the community also. They are currently using a number of widgets for the community, like a news aggregating widget, where each post is categoriezed, and then sorted on the 4 major area (water, land, etc.) and then posted on the appropriate point on a map (the post does not register until you provide your geographic location). The post can have comments and discussion attached to it.

Theirs is a moderated community (meaning that someone looks at and can edit or delete posts) but it is open to the public. In the future they are looking to add rating and ranking, a document library, a tool to support larger maps, integration with Google Apps, more widgets, and possibly Google Gears to support offline working. In addition they have had a lot of requests for mobile support so that should also be implemented soon.

SAP Communities

Mark Yolton, a Senior VP at SAP was next to discuss SAP communities which they estimate have 1.2 M people. They look at a community as “a network of brains and experts connecting with each other, which makes them more self sufficient, a collective intelligence and a new way to work differently.”

He discussed Community 2.0 as including asynchronous and synchronous as well as formal and informal interactions. He feels that a successful community for any organization requires a change of attitude on how a company operates, and that moving from the old idea of an ecosystem to a much more 3D and viral idea of community is important. SAP has 4 types of trusted partners they allow into their communities (as well as customers): Service providers, ISVs, Technology partners (i.e. Cisco, Intel) and channel partners. He also felt that you can’t manage a community, but rather you can “orchestrate” it with incentives and disincentives to encourage and discourage behaviors.

Their communities support Blogs, wikis and discussion forums. They even provide a Word template for technical white papers. They currently have 1200 bloggers with 60% of them non-SAP employees. A blog is published immediately (non moderated), and they have about 6000 forum posts a day. Although they are a German-based company, they have offices in about 200 countries and most of the community discussions are in English.

Mark gave an example of someone posting to the BDN (Business Development Network) who got a response within 17 minutes, and got 3-4 good answers to his question. One person even got over 200 responses to his question in one hour. In surveying the community they got a 4.32 out of 5 on satisfaction. They do offer a reputation management system, and give points for answers, and people compete on points to be top contributors for a specific category or subject area. The goal is to get to 250 points, which makes you a top contributor. You can get 3, 6, or 12 points for answering a question. A blog post is 40 points, and presenting at one of the SAP conferences is 130 points, so getting to 250 points is a big deal. They also have a mentor program.

As for the tools they use, they use their own middleware system called NetWeaver, Jive discussion forums, Atlassian Confluence for wikis, some other SAP tools and an old O’Rielly Blogging tool.

They clearly post the rules of engagement for the community as well as terms of use, and to post to a blog you have to be a registered community member. The community manager has the ability to remind bloggers about appropriate community behaviors. They have had very few legal issues, some to deal with copyright violations. However, in each community, the members set the tone and also do most of the policing. An example he gave was one person who put up a self promoting blog. The reaction to it from most members was “Huh.” The second time this happened, there was more confusion and some anger. But the third time the blogger posted a self promoting blog, he was attacked by the community and was never heard from again. Public humiliation is a strong behavior modifier, so SAP lets the communities police themselves.

SAP also believes that a thriving community not only has virtual components but physical components, and SAP sponsors 2 series of events: Community days (which helps with civility online when you actually have met the person), and then a larger conference where 35,000 SAP users and partners get together every year. They also support a number of large events (4-6K people) around the world to support each different geography.

In terms of benefits SAP has seen, there has been a large reduction in support calls (not bugs, but “how to” questions). In terms of starting the community, there was a lot of pent up demand, but Mark and others had to do some arm twisting to get people to work together and also to attract people from outside of SAP. The big struggle was to get Product Management on board since they were the product experts. Then they went after field sales and now are trying to get the enterprise sales people online. They also did a conscious marketing communications effort both within SAP and with their partners.

In one community they have 4600 highly active members and believe that constitutes about 1% of community members. There are 9% that are sometime contributors, and 90% that are passive consumers. This number of 10% active members in a community also fits with much of the research CS has done on online communities. If you have 10% active members you have a very active community, most communities we see (if they are not all internal to the company) have around a 5% activity rate, with a few percent occasional posters and the rest (90%) as lurkers.

When asked about community metrics, SAP declined to answer most of my questions, but did say that they had 700,000 unique monthly visitors and that 75% of the community users they surveyed were online in the community on a daily basis.

Sales Edge

Kim Harrington, the CEO of a small company called Sales Edge, which helps to automate proposal teams, was the last speaker on this panel. They had a list serve until 1998, which was e-mail based and had over 1000 users. However, many of their users were struggling with the Sales Edge product, so rather than do more training they decided that an online community was needed.
They started with the Ektron Technology Starter site, which had social networking, blogs, forums and a knowledge base. They were able to get the community up and running within 3 months, and it was a pretty easy transition from a list serve to forums and topic based discussions. Once that was going they began to expose other social networking tools like profiles, the ability to add colleagues and to share documents. Now users have the ability to set up public or private workspaces, and their power users regularly give them feedback on new products.

They also found that the online knowledge base helped to reduce the number of support calls (much like SAP) and that this knowledge base is both created for and by customers. It allows customers to get answers faster (3-6 clicks on average) , they can do enterprise search as well as finding and building relationships with colleagues.

Sales Edge does not require you to be a customer to be part of the community (which differentiates them from their competition), the goal of the community was to make sure that people are successful and to increase stickiness as well as brand awareness and generate leads.

Next Blog

I will talk about some of the other sessions Geoff ran at the Gilbane conference