It’s a cold day in hell pretty rare when a large company invites bloggers to sit in on (and actively participate in) a real working marketing strategy session but SAP, the once reclusive software giant that has embraced social media in a huge way, did just that Tuesday by inviting Jeff Nolan, Jason Wood and myself to join the SAP Social Media Summit in downtown Manhattan. 

The meeting was convened by Steve Mann, head of SAP’s Total Customer Experience, Competitive Marketing and Services Marketing functions, who looked amazingly alert for a man who recently became the father of triplets.  The goal was to come up with a strategy to build on the success of SAP’s Blogger Relations program, run by Mike Prosceno, which has garnered all kinds of positive support in the enterprise software corners of the blogosphere and for the SAP Developer Network (SDN)  and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities, headed by Mark Yolton. 

The SDN has doubled in size over the past year to 850,000 members and become a popular community for global geeks who get points (and maybe even a free t-shirt or luggage tag) for participating in forums, answering technical questions, and blogging.  The site now has 2,800 active contributors, draws 5,000 forum posts a day, and the average time between post/question to first response is 20 minutes.   The BPX community, which had 10,000 early adopters, has now passed 150,000 members.  

Although SAP’s social media efforts are among the most advanced I’ve seen among enterprises, they are still young and much of the day-long discussion focused on such basic questions as how far the next phase of social media development within the company should go and how fast, when to look for senior level executive sponsorship, and what existing internal and external initiatives might be best candidates for “socialization.”  

I wasn’t able to attend day two but at the end of the first day a consensus seemed to be building toward trying not to make rules that might discourage innovation, accelerating the social media adoption process by trying several test projects to see what works best, and deferring the pursuit of top level “sponsorship” until the program matures a bit more.  Having spent a number of years working in big company communications, I found all these ideas to be extremely sensible. 

My meager contribution to the proceedings was to suggest that because social media can’t be controlled or directed through traditonal marketing and public relations methods, there will almost certainly come a time when something unexpected happens and the program will need ”air cover” from a top executive who has been willing to adopt it as his or her own.  Most midlevel large company grassroots initiatives I know about are not there yet, but at the “keep informed, but don’t make responsible for” stage.

I also stressed the importance of living the values that embracing social media implies, which are such rare corporate habits as transparency, honesty, accessibility, and trust.  The blogosphere is unforgiving of perceived hypocrascy and reputations can be damaged by social media as quickly as they can be bolstered if there is a gap between what corporations say and what they do.

But, the simple fact that Jeff, Jason and I were in the room (and not asked to sign NDAs) tells me that this is a lesson that SAP’s social media leaders and innovators already understand. 

Jimmy Breslin’s famous query about the hapless 1962 New York Mets seems apropos of many PR “professionals” these days as they scramble to turn those inviting “Comments” sections of blogs into promotional nuggets for their clients.   Many of these nuggets are so blatantly obvious and written in such PR mush that they have the undesired effect of making the companies mentioned (even the innocent bystanders) look silly and manipulative

Here’s an example from Zoli’s Blog yesterday: 

Sam writes:  Either way you go…without an efficient software infrastructure, we could not have coped with the expansion of the past years. Previously, financial accounting and retail were accommodated by stand-alone applications. A custom interface supported communication between the two applications, which meant that data had to be captured twice or imported a second time.

We realized that at some point in the near future, this type of data handling and storage would no longer support our expanding business and would render the system too inflexible to support the expanding number of product variants. This led to the decision to implement a new solution that could handle everything – now and in the future.

We are in San Diego and were paired up with a company called Tryarc (www.tryarc.com) in Los Angeles. They are a premier SAP business partner. While our first impression was SAP is too much for what we need, Tryarc turned us onto the SAP solution for small and midsize enterprises; it’s called SAP Business One. A subsequent presentation of the product had us convinced. SAP Business One was implemented in just a matter of weeks – in part because the standard functions of SAP Business One matched 95% of our business processes. We implemented an interface to our Web shop using SAP Business One Software Development Kit, enabling incoming Internet orders to flow automatically into the business software.

Now, all enterprise management functions are accommodated in one system. SAP Business One provides entirely new opportunities. The only alternative would have been to invest considerable sums in additional stand-alone solutions. Our infrastructure made this pointless. In addition to being the more economical solution, SAP Business One is more comprehensive. It plays its part in making the processes in the company much more transparent than before. Purchasing and sales processes used to be separate, manual transactions supported by paper forms that were stored in file cabinets and forwarded by hand when required. Today, when an order is created and confirmed, a delivery note and invoice are generated, giving the warehouse the go-ahead for delivery. In parallel, the transaction is shown as an open item in accounting.

If the merchandise is in stock, customers can receive their order immediately.

Finally, each department can access this system and exchange data with the other divisions. The result is a significant improvement in the internal information flow. This is particularly important for an enterprise like ours that covers all of the manufacturing steps – from development and production to sales and technical support. Today, the time between placing an order and delivery averages less than 24 hours. The improvements delivered by SAP Business One lay the groundwork for the continuing growth of our company. For example, we are planning to exchange price and delivery data with its customers via an electronic data interchange interface in the near future.

The enterprise wide system is an investment worth it’s weight in gold. We could not be happier with SAP and the people at Tryarc who helped us get up and running. 

The link on Sam’s name goes back to Tryarc so this is likely a clumsy attempt to plant a fake testimonial as a legitimate comment.  It’s embarrassing for Tryarc and for SAP, who had nothing to do with it and wouldn’t have because they’re one of the smartest companies out there on the social media front.

Zoli, who has a lot more patience than most, offered some sound advice in response:

Sam, or whoever you are. I will not delete this comment, because you do make a point about the value of integrated systems, which, as a former SAP-er I appreciate. But generally speaking, this would be considered spam since:

- It’s a canned long sales pitch not directly relevant to the subject (OK, a tiny bit relevant, very remotely).

- You misrepresent yourself. Next time, if you pretend to be a customer, you might want to drop some detail of “your” business, that would actually support your long pitch.

Last but not least, I used to run businesses like Tryarc, and I don’t think spam is the best way to market yourselves.

One more example (hat tip to Jeff Nolan).  This is how Ben Popken, an editor at The Consumerist reacted to a planted comment yesterday:

Death to Sockpuppets
Stay Out Of Our Comments, PR Douchebags

 

Regarding this morning’s “Bank Of America Wins, Buys Chicago’s LaSalle Bank,” commenter “Stankwell,” whose first and only comment was up today, wrote:

LaSalle customers should be happy. Among other things, they’re gaining access to world-class online banking and a coast-to-coast branch and ATM network.

As to charitable giving: BofA is a monster — the good kind! Evidence shows that local donations go up considerably under the new regime. Ask any informed person in Boston or San Francisco.

Talking points much? Nice try. Seriously. You almost sound like a human. But no. BANNED.

Considerably less charitable than Zoli, for sure, but Popken does offer a piece of advice later that PR people should have stenciled on their wrists:    “Slogans and marketing-speak glow like ugly neon because they are phony. This is an anti-phony web site for consumers. It wasn’t so much what was said, but how it was said.”

There is absolutely no reason why PR people can’t be part of the conversation but, they have to to to learn toplay by the new rules.  Be transparent, lose the jargon, and add something of real value.

The rapid ascension of social media as a force in marketing and public relations has produced a nasty culture shock among communications professionals.  For those of us who came of age in a time when controlling the message through strategic positioning (sometimes called lying, by commission or omission), the reality that customers now have talk-back tools and access to a global platform with which to alter the desired perception of even the most carefully plotted campaign is something of a re-education experience. 

The simple fact is that the web has made it no longer possible for a company, or a government, to completely control the message or create a phony reputation in the marketplace.  On balance, this is a good thing because it means those in power must learn to deal with their constituents in a more open, transparent way.  (Except, of course, for Dick Cheney.)   Social media-based initiatives are effective PR and marketing when they respect their intended readers’ intelligence and attempt to engage them in honest conversation.  They are doomed when they do not.

Many companies still don’t get it.  To them, social media represent just one more set of marketing tools to sell more stuff.  They believe they can have it both ways–control the message AND build relationships of trust with potential customers.   They are wrong and, when engaged to provide advice, communications professionals who understand the new realities have a obligation to tell them so.

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that  the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.   You can’t have a successful conversation when personal anecdotes and negative comments are banned and the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.  Deb stirred up a storm yesterday when she cajoled the readers of her inexplicably popular “real blog” to run over to the scene of the crime and make her client think she was worth the bundle they must have paid her.  Her real mistake, though, was taking such a stupid gig in the first place.       

What is really most sad about this is that Deb got there first with a book on corporate blogging so now she’s become the  go-to source for mainstream media although she represents everything that is likely to destroy the positive aspects of social media.  She is quoted again this morning in both the LA Times and in a WSJ feature misleadingly called Executives Get the Blogging Bug (five Fortune 500 CEOs with blogs, at least three of them ghostwritten, proves the opposite:  most CEOs are sensibly avoiding blogs like the plague, but hey it’s a slow news day)

The social media revolution has given many of us aging hucksters a chance to regain a bit of our virture by finally having a strong business case for direct, honest, communication, but Weil doesn’t seem to want that opportunity.  Maybe she truly believes that companies can use social media to fake transparency and control the conversation just like they did in the good old days a couple of years ago.  

Now we know why Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has starting updating his blog again after a long hiatus between posts:  he’s been gearing up to defend himself from the revelation that on several occasions he tried to drive down the stock price of his smaller rival Wild Oats by leaving unflattering pseudononymous comments on online investor forums.  Whole Foods has since acquired Wild Oats. 

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have the (you should pardon the pun) whole sordid story today. 

Mackey’s postings on Internet financial forums, made under the name ‘’rahodeb,'’ said Wild Oats Markets Inc. stock was overpriced and predicted the company would fall into bankruptcy and then be sold after its stock fell below $5 per share.

In February of this year, Whole Foods announced it would buy Wild Oats for about $565 million, or $18.50 per share.  Posting under the name ‘’rahodeb,'’ Mackey said the Wild Oats stock was overpriced and predicted the company would fall into bankruptcy and then be sold after its stock fell below $5 per share.  (He obviously didn’t believe that because Whole Foods wound up paying about $18.50 a share for Wild Oats.

Mackey’s unfortunate brain farts were made public this week as part of a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission to block Whole Foods from buying Wild Oats on the grounds that the sale would combine the two largest organic and natural foods retailers and raise prices for consumers by concentrating too much power in one company.

The revelation is obviously a PR disaster for Whole Foods and its squeaky-clean, healthy-living image, as well as for Mackey’s who has always sold himself as a straight and narrow small businessman who hit it big through hard work and integrity.   

You knew it was only a matter of time.  Techrigy Inc., a Rochester, New York startup, has launched a new “social media compliance product” called SM2 that scans through a company’s intranet servers to find social media, likes blogs, running internally, as well as the internet externally to find employees talking about the company from their blogs or wikis from home.  You heard right, it tracks what you say from your computer in your house. 

As a service, Techrigy ties into  search engines like Technorati, to look for potentially sensitive information published by a company’s employees. It then catalogues policy violations and provides notifications to the company’s enforcers in real time and indexes all the detected social media into a central repository for record retention purposes.  (Read, if we get sued or you say something nasty about the company or your boss, your ass is grass.)

What makes this service different from standard e-mail monitoring tools that are widely used in business organizations already is that SM2 also keeps track of what you’re doing away from the workplace.  Understandably, this makes people who still care about free speech and civil liberties (and I’m one of them) very unhappy.

Techrigy president Aaron Newman’s rationalization is that many companies are so paranoid that employee bloggers will create legal problems or reveal insider information that the alternative to SM2 is to ban social media altogether.  He points to a white paper that reads, in part:

We strongly believe in the freedom of expression and any company that would try to restrict that freedom would likely not retain talented employees very long. However, the freedom of expression does not apply to revealing trade secrets, sharing proprietary company intellectual property, sexual harassment, or breaking other company or organizational policies.

Organizations should not leave it to employees to decide if and how blogging is acceptable. Without a set of guidelines to clearly tell when someone steps too far over the line, the result is the Wild Wild West. The vast majority of employees will use common sense when blogging. However, best practices require an organization to not only “trust” but also “verify.”

As much as I would like to think otherwise, I suspect Techrigy is going to be a bit hit–as long as they promise to keep their customer list a secret.  This is the kind of thing that could easily boomerang into a public relations nightmare.  What company wants the world to know it doesn’t trust its employees?

The Enterprise Web 2.0 revolution has been a godsend to small and midsized companies.  Inexpensive, web-based tools and services mean the little guys now have access to professional office tools that rival those used by the Fortune 500–at a fraction of the cost.  Think Thinkfree, Zoho, Google Apps, and literally hundreds of other web office purveyors whose innovation and effort has made the web a more effective and friendly place for business transactions for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and their customers.

FreshBooks, provider of a popular online invoicing and time-tracking service now used by more than 180,000  business users, wants to make the web even friendlier.  The four-year-old Toronto-based firm today released its API and opened the door for application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate the FreshBooks’ billing platform into what it hopes will be an entirely new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.

Application/service integrators can incorporate FreshBooks APIs into existing and new products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets.  Services providers, such as ISPs, Web apps, wine, book or other product of the month clubs, with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a professional-quality billing component. Tech savvy customers can also integrate FreshBooks functionality into their current workflow.

“Over the last four years, we have learned a lot about what small businesses and their customers need in order to improve the workflow, customer service and billing process,” said Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks.  “By making our API available, we’re helping other businesses enhance the process for delivering professional invoices over email and ground mail, efficiently tracking accounts receivable, cordially managing disputes, recording payment histories to ensure peace of mind for customers, and collecting payments online from customers.”

I spoke with Sunir Shah in FreshBooks’ Market and Communtiy Development yesterday and he told me the release of the API has three primary targets:

• import/export from existing applications, like QuickBooks.
• improving the workflow of our existing customers, through things like desktop widgets
• and the big one, providing a 21st century, professional quality invoicing and accounts receivable system for SaaS and other subscription-based services.

FreshBooks is already widely used by legal professionals, PR/marketing firms, advertising agencies, nurses, project managers, contractors, freelancers, consultants, virtual assistants, journalists, technicians, developers, web designers, graphic designers, and others who, among other things, love the idea of being able to bill clients the same day a project is finished rather than having to wait until the end of the month to squeeze an invoice out of a complicated spreadsheet or software-based accounting program.

This looks like another very smart move by our friends from the Great White North.  The developers community is here.

Is Linkedin in play? 

Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users. 

The signs are there, beginning with a series of executive changes being announced this week.  Yesterday, the company named Steve Sordello, formerly of Tivo, as its new CFO.  Tomorrow, it will announce that Patrick Crane, formerly of the Yahoo! Inc. Network Division where he headed up several key products, including the launch of Yahoo! Answers, is its new Vice President of Marketing.  Crane’s mandate is to help head up LinkedIn’s first general marketing push with initiatives designed to build the  community beyond its current eleven-million users.  (Memo to PR people:  if you want me to keep a secret, write “embargoed until …”) on the release.

More significantly, some Wall Street types I know and generally trust tell me that there are discussions going on between LinkedIn and one of the oldest and most respected family-run business publishers.  (Okay, I’ll make it easy for you, McGraw-Hill.)  

I think it would be a great move for both parties.