I’m a start-ups kind of guy, so when Society for New Communications Research Fellow Giovanni Rodriguez asked me to conduct a social media research project for SAP, the world’s third largest software company, I doubted I was the right guy for the job.
My skepticism might have showed when I first met Mike Prosceno, SAP’s VP for Marketplace Communications who would oversee the project, but I started getting interested when Mike told me he wanted to fundamentally change corporate communications.
Did he mean it? I decided to test him.
Instead of treating this as a traditional research project, I suggested we go “bloggy.” We’d interview people from all over the world, from developed and developing cultures, executives and do-gooders and ask them about social media in their worlds. But instead of some data dense tome, I’d blog what I found, transparently in the same fashion that Robert Scoble and I wrote Naked Conversations.
If SAP wanted to be a social media thought leader as Mike was saying, then let them not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. Let’s have SAP join our little cult of generosity and share with everyone what they would learn from this project.
Mike looked as if he liked the idea, but how can you really tell with these corporate types? I figured he’d get back to me some time in the year 2392.
One week later, Mike emailed. His entire message: “It’s a go.”
So I went. It’s been amazing.
As I write this in mid-September, I’ve interviewed 40 people in 21 countries. I’ve posted more than 43,000 words. The trends I’ve found did not surprise me that much, but the survey and the process has, from time-to-time, been a shocker.
I began with the usual band of blog luminaries. The ones with only a single name like Doc, and Scoble and Loic. I got to Hugh MacLeod quite early, and he created this gaping void between how I wanted the survey to go and how it actually went.
I had this whole project down on a spreadsheet. I had a timeline and all sorts of nice project management systems in place. Just what had I been thinking?
Instead of sending the answers to my questions back to me, Hugh posted them to his own blog. Then some other guy, who I had never asked, scraped Hugh’s questions and answered them himself. Then someone else took the same set of questions and answered them herself, but she didn’t like a couple of them, so she rewrote the questions, then answered them.
I was out of control, which pretty much told me about the state of social media worldwide.
So, I posted a set of “roll-your-own questions,” telling people to post them or send them, keep them or change them whatever. SAP and me, we were cool with it. Just write where and when you want.
So Canadian SNCR member Joe Thornley posted a link up on Facebook.
Being comfortable with lost control is hard for anyone. It is harder for big companies, but Mike’s feedback was consistently that he loved what was happening.
And there is a great deal happening in a great many places. Of course it’s bigger and moving faster in developed and prosperous countries than the reverse. No surprise. But, people I spoke with in all these diverse cultures, with their varied adoptions of modern Internet technology, had more similarities in what they told me than differences.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
- Social networking is the most relevant and sustainable tool in our global workshed. Local, regional and global versions are growing and morphing even as they imitate each other.
- If you want to know what your business will look like in five years, go talk to you kids. Watch their habits. They will make more decisions based on friendship than marketing.
- At about the point when early adopters get bored, large organizations feel it is safe to adopt. Current example: blogs. They’re old news in the Silicon Valley and suddenly hot in the enterprise. Future example: online video. It’s hot in the Valley, but no yet ready for prime time in the enterprise.
- Where there is broadband, there is social networking.
- The company most mentioned in the SAP Global Survey was Facebook. Surprisingly little discussed: Google. Mentioned twice in 40 conversations: Microsoft.
I won’t have final observations for a couple of months. They will be released for the first time at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium in Boston on December 6th. See you there, I hope! The Society will also continue to be involved in this project by working with SAP to release an eBook on the survey findings in the coming months.
