 Mark Yolton, who's the senior vice president of communities from SAP. He's a senior executive who I met a few years ago and saw his presentation, Accolades within SAP. Obviously SAP is a very big professional company and Mark heads up all the social media community initiatives now on SiliconANGLE TV, the worldwide leader in tech coverage, theCUBE, our flagship event product where we go out on the road, extract the knowledge, share it with you. Top senior executives from SAP. We just had the EVP of products, ex-business objects. Now we have Mark Yolton, senior vice president of communities. I mean, you're like a top dog of a lot of stuff. But what is the official title? Yeah, it is senior vice president, SAP community network. Community network, that's the whole Kitten Kaboodle. That's the whole Kitten Kaboodle. Essentially what we're saying is that we have a network of various communities, each community focusing on a different segment of our population or our ecosystem. SAP, we're hearing all from the top executives here. It's been fantastic, I've been sharing the knowledge out, extracting it out of their brains and they're probably tired all day long, but it's been great. The common theme is openness and sharing. Social, big part of the keynote from Bill McDermott and Jim Schnabe. He's got schools of fish. McDermott's talking about social media and the customer reaction. This is your wheelhouse. You've been doing it for years. So tell the folks specifically kind of what you work on and then we'll just jump into some conversations around how you're seeing the communities evolve. Okay, perfect. Well, let's start with how we got started down this path. Almost eight years ago, really seven and a half years ago, SAP started down the path of something called SAP Developer Network. And the developer network obviously focused on developers and IT professionals. The idea was we were moving out of being strictly a business application suite provider to also providing Netweaver as a middleware layer that would tie these business applications together and would also take some of the load off those applications and provide some common services and so forth. But in order to have a successful developer platform or development platform, you need developers. And in order to have developers, you need an online developer network. So that's where we started down the path in 2003. Developers like, I mean, they don't want the whole marketing stick, but they want some basic functionality to work well. Yeah, and actually they want as little marketing stick as possible. Yeah, they want some help. Yeah, they want some help. Make this practical, make this, I don't care about the marketing gloss. I don't care about the look and feel. Just give me some tools so I can do my job better and be successful. So that started in 2003 at an event we have in the fall called SAP TechEd, technical education is what this conference is all about. A couple years after that, we started to recognize some changes in our demographics of that audience. And they had some people in there, we had some people in there like functional consultants and solution consultants and project managers and people like that. And we actually looked within the company and said, you know what, people is pretty strategic to us. We have a competitor where if you say their three letter acronym, DBA, everybody thinks of this competitor, that's an awesome 1970s technology. We'll let them be recognized for their 1970s technology. Let's think about business processes and being recognized for being the best at that. So we started up a new community called BPX, business process expert. If you're at SAP, you have to have a three letter acronym. So the business process expert community was born where we're really focused on the consultants and the project managers with one foot in IT and one foot in the business. And they're really implementing the projects. A lot of times they're doing the translation back and forth. Then we acquired business objects and we opened another community, a third community. To be honest, business objects had a community of about 30,000 people. It was called Diamond Developer Community. We brought them on board. We called it business objects community. And since we've changed it to business analytics community, it's a broader focus. Then we were hearing from our customers who said, you know what SAP? I would love to buy your next upgrade. I would love to implement your next package, your next solution, but I can't find anybody to do it. I can't find the right people in the right place with the right skills who are ready to help me customize, optimize and run this thing and upgrade it. So we have a problem. So then we said, okay, this is strategic too. We reached back into the university community and we formed an alliance with a thousand universities around the world where we give professors the software free for teaching, both in their technology classes but also in their business classes. So that they're essentially teaching the next generation of our customers workforce and our partners workforce about SAP. Beautiful. And so now this conglomeration of these four major categories, developers and IT people, business process experts, business analysts and students and professors make up this network called the SAP Community Network. Wow, that's all under your watch? All under my watch. I don't get to take all the credit for it. I mean, it's nice. I get to be on your program representing the team but really the team is what does it? And it's very much an extended team. It's like Mach 100. It's a seven or eight year journey. It's an eight year journey almost. Yeah, I've been following your work since 2006 and it's been Mach 100. You've grown significantly. A lot of things going on. The business is huge obviously and you got to cobble together these communities, grow it, stitch it together, keep your eye on the prize which is the business, new communities. Exactly and every time SAP makes a move, we have to make a move, right? We've got a mobility community now because we now have CyBase, right? So now we have to really focus on what are we going to do around mobility? How are we going to get people gathered together? How can we attach a marketplace to this thing? Which we did about a year and a half, two years ago. We put together an online marketplace of partner solutions, partners from our ecosystem. So we call it the SAP Eco Hub and there's about 850 partner and SAP solutions in this marketplace. So we've extended this thing to also go into commerce, social commerce is what we call it. So we've got a marketplace that's attached. We've got events for the members of this community, physical events because the community doesn't just get together online but they want to get together physically, right? They want to get together in the physical world and be able to look each other in the eye and shake hands and get their fingers on the keyboard and touch the software and all that cool stuff and they want to be able to do that in real time as well. So we have all these components. Dave, the reason why I wanted to have Mark come on and he's got a great community but the social media energizes these communities and what I would like to talk about, I know the statistics are compelling and I'd like to hear some of the latest stats because I know they were impressive last time I checked but when you get the social media element you got a face-to-face presence at these events. People kind of know each other from online. The social energizes the communities. Can you, one, share some stats for us, for Dave and the folks out there on just general stats, how big, members, and the impressive ones. The feet. I'm not going to tell you the unimpressive ones. The flashy ones, the flashy ones. And then talk about your observation as not so much as the leader of the community but someone who's been in the trenches who knows the social game, how that's energized the communities. Yeah, sure. Well, the big numbers. So I'll give you some numbers. As of today, we have over 2.4 million individual members of our SAP Community Network. They hail from 200 countries and territories around the world, so we truly are global. And by the way, territories are things like Guam or Puerto Rico, not really a country. We get in the neighborhood of 3,000 to 4,000 discussion forum posts every single day, 365 days a year. And think of SAP as a very global company. It's the most global company I've ever worked for and I've worked for a lot of them. So really, every country and territory you could think of and it's around the clock. I mean, when Israel is off on Thursdays and Fridays, our time in the US, the rest of us are working and then Israel comes back online on Sundays. Follow the sun strategy. Follow the sun strategy, absolutely. So 24 seven, this community is alive and kicking. We have 8,000 bloggers. Two thirds or more of these people are not SAP employees. So essentially we've given the keys to the kingdom and the keys to the channel to our customers and our partners and bloggers and influencers and opinion leaders. And we've said, here's your password to your blog platform. Publish when you're ready. When you push that button, make sure it says what you want it to say because it's going live to 2.4 million people and more. So we have discussion forums. We have blogs. We have a Wiki. We have a library with tens of thousands of documents and white papers in it. Now some of this is technical documentation. Some of it is business process models and diagrams and best practices. Some of it is, we have a download center. So business analytics and our business objects suite really is dashboards and many other things. So we've got sample dashboards in there. We've got a code exchange. So the technologists can share code with each other in a free way. We've got something called idea place. A little bit like Dell IdeaStorm or other things where we're asking for outside in feedback from our customers and our partners about features and functionality that they want to see in future products. And then they get to vote on them. So they get to, you know, give us an idea, then build on each other's idea so the ideas get better and better over time and then vote so that we've got a prioritized list that our product managers can then take back and build into a roadmap. Yeah, you know, one of the things I wanted to, I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of people were saying, oh, you know, the social messaging coming from the company is kind of like a punch line trendy or a sizzle. And what you're really saying and for the folks out there, you guys are in it. This is not like amateur hour. Right. I mean, it's at scale. So developer communities, that's the bedrock. You've been getting all this social data. It's factory. Absolutely. It's a content factory. Yeah, one of the ways that I think about this, I call it social business. That's my big umbrella term. And then I say, okay, there's three things that SAP does as a company. Very simple. I mean, it's a big complicated global company with, you know, 120,000 customers or something in 20 something industries. But really we do three things. We build software, we sell software, and then we care for our customers after they've bought our software. That's it. That's all we do. I mean, it's pretty simple. And we use our social media, our social business presence to impact each one of those. So in the build software, we're asking our customers and our partners, what can we do to make this better? What features and functionality do you want? What about even down to the documentation, right? We have a wiki called Wikipedia. We put our documentation out there and we say, okay, customers, you're using it in the real world, help us write our documentation better so it better reflects the solutions in the business cases that you encounter in a real world. So social innovation is the first one of these, right? Outside in feedback. Second one is social commerce. How do you use social media for sales and marketing? And that's usually the first place that people go to is, I want to use social media for sales and marketing. Well, okay, but you've got to earn that right first. But we can use social media and social networking and communities for marketing and for sales. That's fine. We do that with the thing called SAP Eco Hub, where customers are recommending and writing reviews and rating products and so on with each other. And then the third one is social intelligence. And it's really just a fancy name for knowledge sharing. It's post sale. How can we get our customers to share more knowledge with each other? Not, so first off, share knowledge about solutions to common challenges. They might be technology challenges or business challenges, but share solutions to challenges, but then also share best practices so that the person coming behind you doesn't have to relearn by making the same mistakes you made, but they can learn from the best practices you've already learned. So those are the three things I think really, social innovation, social commerce, social intelligence, and then there's one bonus that we get. It's called social insight. And social insight is what can we as a company learn by observing the behavior of the 2.4 million people in our community? Couldn't we, if we were watching carefully, spot a trend before anybody else does? Couldn't we spot that something starting to die off is unimportant? Couldn't we have a strategic advantage if we acted on that trend a little bit faster than maybe the competition does? So that's the social insight piece and that's the bonus that we get. You know I've been doing a lot of social media research and Dave and I have kicked in the past two years and past years specifically a lot more research. And what really is interesting is that you guys have taken the platform and tools that SAP makes and all the stuff that you, software, you built it for yourselves, drink your own champagne as we've been corrected by your executives. It's not dog food. It's champagne. We tried beer. About beer. We're a vectoria. You own 70% of the beer market. Your customer based sells beer so we tried that one, they liked champagne. Anyway, so you get the platforms and the tools, you have a production system but what's interesting is that on the social theory side you're executing self-governance. You're giving an external non-SAP party the keys to your kingdom as you say and the trust. Absolutely. You have a self-governing, it's a society. Well one of the things that it is a culture. It has its own culture. This community has a culture different from probably the SAP culture. It's really an amalgamation of our customers and our partners and our influencers and SAP and the larger marketplace. Expectations that are formed by engaging on third party social media platforms but it has its own culture and they do sell police. So we have for a long time, we've given a lot of trust to the members of the community. Is there been some examples where you've seen it in action and you can point to that? Sure, we've had some people who were enthusiastic marketing folks, not necessarily from SAP but maybe from our partners, who wanted to use the blog platform to self promote or to promote their products and services and they were a little bit too broadcasting. They weren't conversational, right? They weren't really using a blog the way a blog is intended to be used. They were new, you know, we'll forgive them. So they did this once. The community sort of perked up its ears and went. Hey, new guy. Hey, new guy, what's going on? Anybody recognize this doesn't work for us? They gave him some feedback. Second time he did it. Hey, new guy, a little bit stronger language. Third time, new guy got, you know, black balled. Yeah, you're out. Well, he got scared away. We didn't even have to go after him and say, sorry, we're taking away your password and your user ID. The community essentially scared this guy away. So that's one self policing behavior. Another one is we have a button called flag for moderation. Now, we have 600 moderators of this massive community. Many of those moderators are SAP product managers who are watching their individual space, right? They're watching CRM or some module within CRM or they're watching master data management or they're watching the chemicals industry for best practices. So we've got product managers but we've also got customers and partners who are moderators who we trust and we say, here's the password. You're going to help us moderate. But when any member of the community sees something wrong, they push the button that says flag for moderation. It goes to that moderator, that moderator can then make a decision. So essentially what we've done is we've crowdsourced the governance, the quality, absolutely. Now, I was just meeting with a partner, I won't say who it was, but we have something called the partner pinnacle awards each year. This partner did a great job on the quantity of engagement in our community during 2010. However, they were fairly upset that they didn't win the award. And what I had to tell them was the quality's not so good. You've got some low level quality and frankly we've got some problems with the quality. For example, some plagiarism. Somebody's taking a user manual, cutting and pasting it into a blog and saying, this is my stuff. And we say, nope, it's not because the community told us. Or we've got two members of your company who are awarding each other points in order to rack up the points and make it look good on the scoreboard. But we know that the quality's not good. So in essence, the community is policing itself and it's letting us know and we're rewarding or taking away rewards and recognition from companies that do or don't exhibit quality. I think that's so groundbreaking and it's so impressive because you don't expect that from the big companies. I know the bigger they are, they have these big systems. IBM's been pretty good internally to from what I've been hearing and seeing. But man, it's impressive. For SAP to just let the brand know, HP is a completely different culture. They don't want people blogging. They want to control the message. So it's very open. You're putting the money where your mouth is there. How about the data? Well, the executive has proved it. The EVP of marketing was inside the QP. And he's like, hey, we are, we are, follow me on Twitter. He's Jonathan Beck, absolutely. And Jonathan has been a blogger on his own off of the SAP platforms for a long time. How about data sharing? I mean, you obviously have a lot of data. I mean, social innovation, commerce, intelligent insight. How much of the data do you share with the community? And how do you decide what to share and what not to share? We share a fair amount. So even within our community points, which is one of the ways we provide recognition and reputation, are public. So just to give you a little bit of background, when somebody asks a question in the community, they can award points to the person who answers it. And they can award small number or large number based on their own internal gauge, right? Whether it was a really hard question, whether my boss was breathing down my neck and I really needed an answer and this guy saved me, whatever it happens to be. But you get the award points if you've asked the question to people, multiple people who have answered it. Second is you get points for blogging. You get points for participating in the Wiki. You get points for presenting at conferences. Anytime when you're sharing information with other members of the community, it can be positive or negative, doesn't matter. But sharing information of your experience or your solutions or your innovations with other people in the community, we believe that's lifting, that's a rising tide lifting all boats. You get points. Points then, we have a gamification aspect, right? We've got bronze, silver, gold, platinum levels of points. You get recognition at different times. You can put this on your resume, which we know people do. People say I'm a gold member of the SAP Community Network. The hiring manager says this person is obviously an expert and obviously collaborative and sharing with others in their field. Awesome, all good stuff. So that's one of the softer things that we do beyond the platform. And now your question, Dave, really went to how are we sharing that data? That data, my points and everybody around me's points are all public information. So you can go into our community and you can say, okay, I'm a SAP customer. I'm about to upgrade the supply chain management application. Who are the experts in supply chain management? And I can find out across the world who are the top 100 or top 1000 or whatever I want to find who are the top supply chain management experts. Then I can say, okay, well, I'm in Brazil so it really doesn't matter that there's somebody great in Germany or Hungary or Japan. I want to find the best ones in Brazil so I can sort by that. And then I can say, well, it doesn't matter too if they were an expert two years ago or three years ago, I care about the last six months because I want them to know about the latest module so I can sort on date. So there, I've found who are the supply chain experts, supply chain management experts in my country in the right timeframe on the topic that I care about. So that's one piece of sharing. I can also aggregate by company so anybody can. Anybody who goes to scn.sap.com can aggregate and say, okay, IBM or Infosys or Intelli Group or Capgemini or whoever it happens to be really has a stable full of these experts and I want to hire them because it's obvious that they have a group of expertise. So those are some of the things that we do on sharing data. Now I'll tell you other things, we do twice annual satisfaction surveys. They're pretty in depth. It may take you 20 minutes to complete the survey, but typically we have 1,500 or 1,700 people who care enough about this community because they're so invested in it that they'll spend 20 minutes on completing a survey. We share the data back out with the community and so we say, okay, here's where we were good. Here's where we weren't so good. Here's how it rose or fell since the previous survey. Here's the things consequently that we're going to be working on because you told us that these things suck, right? Or these things are awesome so we're going to do more of them. So we share that back with the community. We get a lot of data about page views and what topics, even the words people use. So at SAP we use the word by design. We use the word cloud. Sort of virtualization is a little bit in that same category. We see a huge rise in the word cloud. Everybody's searching for the word cloud. So we say bingo. Okay, if you're going to tag a page to make it findable by people if you're going to talk about this topic use the word cloud. And we tell our by design people, we say use that phrase, use that word because that's the one that resonates with us. It's like an internal SEO organization. It's just the amount of information that we get is extraordinary. It's like an agency for yourselves. You're a media platform. I mean, you guys are great. I mean, so what's next? Obviously, you guys are growing. You've had some probably growing pains and love to sit down and talk more about those stories another time. But like, obviously, you're under a lot of pressure now because the keynote said, Mark Yolton, you need to be faster. I didn't hear my name in there. I heard it, it said Mark Yolton, you need to be faster with the communities because we want real-time analytics. So you're obviously built for some analytics. You're doing surveys, you've got the dashboards, you've got the massive numbers so you're collecting the data, you're ingesting the data, so you got to extract the data. Yep, we're going to do a lot more in that field. Yeah, we're going to do a lot more of extracting the data, presenting them in dashboards that are consumable by different people. Executives, salespeople, product managers, the outside community, the partners even. Who can we make this presentable to so that they can be acting on the data that we find? They're expecting an iPad app. Yeah, there you go. I mean, basically. Yeah, they are. I'm visualizing it now. An iPad app, iPhone companion app in the app store, full real-time, graphs and charts. How many blog posts do we have now? So there's a lot of data in dashboards that actually is on a roadmap for this year, most of them internal, so not external-facing, but internal data dashboards that will help our internal people to be better, more responsive to it. Can we buy your software because SiliconANGLE's growing and we get the TV operation? I would be happy to sell you something. Yeah. Take your back end, because we're constructing, seriously, we're buying. We're thinking about doing all these things because we're on WordPress, which is like the poor-made version of what you have. Well, the other thing that we're working on is we're working on a platform modernization. We've been building this for eight years. There has never, eight years ago, there was no such thing as a comprehensive social networking platform, right? So we have Frankenstein Monster as a platform to some extent. Fortunately, we've got Netweaver at the core because it's holding all these bits and pieces together, but we really do have bits and pieces. Is it scalable or is it needs a rewrite? Well, I think we're going to go onto an entirely new platform. He was basically saying, get it decoupled, make sure you have everything decoupled and... It's scalable. I mean, 2.4 million and the kind of traffic that we see. It's scalable. The problem is the rate of innovation, I don't think we can keep up with. I really want to find me a good vendor, which I found one, find me a good vendor and have this vendor provide the platform for me. And it'll be core to them. It'll be context to me, is building a community platform. Yeah, you can focus on moving the needle in the area because I'm sure there's going to be more groups who are just talking to mentor guys. They got their own little community growing. So you're going to have all these impromptu informal groups forming. And actually the mentors are part of our community. So the mentors themselves are like the one 100th of 1% of our community. So that's one of the levers that we use. One of the special forces of the social media because they get the badges. They're extraordinary. They call them Navy SEALs, they laugh. Yep, so the dashboard's a platform modernization. In that modernization comes mobility. Obviously that's an important topic for us these days. So we're going to make sure that the community is completely mobile by the end of this year. It's where you can read blogs, you can submit questions and to discussion forums, all the things that are difficult to do right now and a little bit kluge. So mobility is really important to us. We're going to move, as you mentioned, we started with the IT people and the developers as the core and we've been moving out from there. We're going to move into line of business. And the first line of business that I want to tackle is the finance line of business, office of the chief financial officer. So I really want to focus on line of business people, real true business people, to see if we can get them to engage the way that we have technologists and so forth engaging in our communities. So those are a couple. Another one I would mention is gamification or game mechanics. I want us to get more adept at gamification and game mechanics. Now we are in early, before they had the phrase we were doing it so we didn't know what to call it, we just did it. Because we have levels and we have points and we have different layers of access that you get for doing successively more difficult things or more engaged things. So we've got all that. We just didn't know the quality of gamification. You could have bought Skype, SAP could have bought Skype and had Skype as an entire gamut. It could have been. The audio component. I can just see people playing Call of Duty at their desk and going back into blogging mode. Yes. The headset stays on. Absolutely. So I think we're going to update our point system and our recognition system. We're obviously, we're asking our community for feedback on how best to do that. Those are some of the things that we're working on for this year. Mark Yolton with SAP, SAP, the community network, big organization, it's a company on its own. It's drinking their own champagne, cutting edge, very innovative. So when SAP talks about Dave, the social angle on their business, they definitely have it internally. So I can testify to that. So Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Thank you, John. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.