The Anatomy of a Social Business Community

Most brands dream of having a vital user community that creates on-going dialog between the brand and its customers.  But few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network which is led by Chip Rodgers.  I interviewed Chip for an upcoming case study on FastCompany.com and in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit September 28/29 in Philadelphia.  The following is my Q&A with Chip. Admittedly, it is long one but well worth studying if you are thinking about creating your own community.

DN: Can you give some background on the SAP Community Network?
The SAP Community Network actually started about eight years ago, and so we’ve had a little bit of time to ramp up. We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.

DN: Tell me about the membership of the SAP Community Network.
It’s about 50% customers and then another probably 30% partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers— just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for and obviously unique email address.

DN: From a content standpoint, with all these members, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself or is it somewhat self-sustaining?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders that are SAP solution managers or folks from support or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise and are actually the ones that are building the content.  I’ve also got a group of six that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators that are in the community.

DN: You know the scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.

Drew: You started this in 2003, which predates Twitter and Facebook, and I’m curious how you brought [them] into your community. Are they adjuncts or are they truly integrated into this?
Having this background of engaging with the community, when Facebook and Twitter came along, they were natural extensions and ways of engaging with the community. We now have a group that is really focused just purely on social media. We work together to leverage the community and our social media activity. A little bit more specifically, we do a number of things like, if you post a blog in the community, we have an RSS feed to a Twitter account so it automatically tweets the title of the new blog that was published. We think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even YouTube, as kind of extensions— concentric circles around the community— to reach community members and try to get the word out.

DN: Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member that thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervous – saying, “why should we create a place just for people to complain?”  But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation?  And fortunately, our board defended it.

DN: Has the community ever defended the brand?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire.  We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, we have to answer that. And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.”  The whole group kind of comes together.

DN: What are the other ways that you report on the success, or what are the metrics that you guys look at to rationalize your existence?
We actually have a few metrics. One is just purely in terms of activity and contributions in the community, page views, member satisfaction, things like that. We do those transactional kinds of things with the community to makes sure that we’ve got good content that people find interesting, so that’s one level of measurement. One of our KPI’s is driving activity to those webinars that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars. It’s traceable back to activity in the community.

The third is a part of the community called SAP EcoHub (http://ecohub.sap.com). It started as an online store for our partners to set up storefronts and sell their products.  We’ve expanded it to include SAP products as well. It is connected to the community so that if there are conversations going on about certain product areas, we have links in those conversations going back to EcoHub. If you happen to be on a conversation you can see the product.  That is an increasing channel for us, for our partners and for SAP to drive revenue directly.

DN: You have a few people that are in the conversation, how do you make sure that they are all on brand?
We do have a social media corporate policy, guidelines, best practices case stories, and training courses.  We have an active internal social community, so there’s a lot of discussion and activity and assets [and] resources available to people when they start to put a toe in the water in social media.  A lot of those principles are similar to when anybody goes for media training, for example.  There are a few guiding principles like, “Don’t talk about things that you don’t know about.” And stay away from forward-looking statements like, “We’re going to do this,” or “We’re going to do that.”  But otherwise I think a lot of it is just common sense.

DN: You have this substantive, meaty community where people are actually participating, and you’ve already proven its worth and along comes Twitter and Facebook. Has there been conflict because [social media] is a separate group, and it’s not part of your group?
There is a social media group driving policies, best practices, training, reporting, and other aspects of social media for SAP, but we’re all part of marketing. It’s interesting because community and social media are somewhere in the middle of several traditional corporate groups.  It’s a little bit of marketing; it’s a little bit of communications; it’s a little bit of support, there’s an aspect of listening for product roll-in, and there’s an aspect of sales channel. So there are always discussions about where does it really belong. But community and social media are about people connecting – so if you’re doing it right, the entire organization is responsible for connecting with customers and partners in their respective areas.  So yes, we are separate groups, but we have a communities and social media council of leaders from each of those groups as well as social media ambassadors embedded throughout organizations and geographies at SAP.

DN: With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP might have on Facebook [or] Twitter. How as the marketing/social team dealt with this?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis.  But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about Communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done.   We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.”  It’s been a cultural change within the company.

DN: Have your content development efforts had a measurable impact on SEO?
We are very much SEO champions, and it’s been through experience. We had to figure out what to do on all those pages to do better with search engine: where things are laid out; how are we tagging pages; what are the titles in the pages, how are URLs formed. So many things factor into it. We had this three-month project just to go through everything and then get the word out to all the stakeholders and get everybody to update all their pages. I mean it was dramatic; We were bumping along at around 400,000 unique monthly visitors, and all of a sudden we shot up to like 900,000. It was unbelievable— just blew me away.

Dear Social Media Santa, Here’s My Wish List

Wrapping up 2010 with relief, if not joy, good little marketers are looking at the year ahead with both optimism and trepidation. Even the marketers that triumphed this year know Santa’s lump of coal awaits those who misjudge the rapidly evolving communications landscape as an aberration instead of a permanent shift in power from brand to consumer. To ensure good tidings in 2011, here is a social media shopping list worth checking once — if not twice — to slay your competition.

1. Social Media Strategy

Although more than half of all large companies have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, fewer than 25% have a clearly defined social strategy. Tactical experimentation pleased some, but left many CEOs wondering whether social media like the mythical Rudolph could really drive results. Since yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a social strategy complete with CEO-pleasing metrics, put this on top of your shopping list — finding the expertise internally and externally to make it happen.

2. Dedicated Social Chair

In 2010, social media was treated by many marketers as a part-time affair, assigned to the junior staffers who just happened to have the most friends on Facebook. Unable to dedicate the time required, they also lacked the experience to put social media into the context of broader customer engagement, thus relegating social to a sexy but modest marketing experiment. Fixing this means assigning at least one dedicated professional who can champion social strategy internally, while coordinating execution across all the departments it can and should touch.

3. A Metric System

Given all the roles social media can play, from customer service to product development and WOM to lead gen, putting precise metrics in place is challenging even for those with well-defined strategies. That said, new tools are emerging that should make measuring results easier and well within the budgets of even the most cash-strapped operations. Startup ArgyleSocial, for example, links social media activity with “real business value,” for under $300/month.

4. An Aggregation Plan

One of the unexpected yet joyous benefits of a strong social program is its potential to significantly improve organic search results. But in order to turn social content into the gift that keeps on giving, brands need to aggregate and archive the content on their own Web sites. HubSpot, a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform, makes this process relatively easy for small business. Larger companies will seek out more robust solutions, including a surprisingly strong social offering from IBM.

5. Customer Feedback Loop

While listening to the customer has long been an important business credo, it is only lately that marketers are turning to online tools like Get Satisfaction that truly enable and track instantaneous feedback. In 2011, offering customers the ability to engage with fellow customers right on the company website will become more the rule than the exception, especially as companies come to realize that a few negative comments increase credibility and ultimately increase online sales. These conversations also enhance search results by creating tag-able content.

6. Social Business Enlightenment

In the brave new world of social business enlightenment, all businesses are social and all social is business. Even large companies will want to present all their employees, not just those in customer service and marketing, with unfettered, yet guided, access to social media tools. These employees will begin to see what the fuss is all about, quickly realizing that social isn’t just something their kids do but rather a way that generates leads, captures sales, services customers, and advocates new product development well beyond this holiday season.

If you’d like to add to this social media shopping list, just send me an email, preferably not addressed to the North Pole.