Tag Archives for community

Media Share in the Social Intranet

Ich bin veröffentlicht (albeit in a small way!). Below you can read pages 274 and 275 of a book called Social Intranet: – Kommunikation fördern – Wissen teilen – Effizient zusammenarbeiten. (Cited by permission from Dirk Dobiey, one of the book’s chief authors.)

Social Intranet talks about the many aspects of SAP’s successful internal communications platform — our “social intranet” — which is managed by the organization called Knowledge Management Competency Center.

This chapter talks about Media Share, the project I am pleased to have shepherded into existence at SAP. In this project, we identified the need — and then set out to fulfill it — to help people easily share videos inside the company. While it’s easy to share media externally on countless social internet channels, internal sharing comes with its own challenges, which are both technological and business-related. We ended being part of a vibrant communications platform backed by an avid community and a company that demands new ways to be open and transparent internally. It has been a real privilege to be involved with this project.

Video sharing with Media Share is only one piece of the social intranet pie at SAP. Check out the whole book for more details on the vibrant platform inside SAP (if you read German since it’s only in German at this point).

Key excerpt auf English:
“Critical to our growth was listening to our community of users, seeing how they were using Media Share, and responding, as well as learning of the many bright ideas out there on valuable ways to use a video sharing platform,” Moya notes.

The Quiet Sport and the Social Web

Richard Carter -- Tiger Woods at the 2006 Open, Royal Liverpool, Hoylake, UK.

Richard Carter -- Tiger Woods at the 2006 Open, Royal Liverpool, Hoylake, UK.

Both the #WorldCup and the #USOpen merited their own hashtags on Twitter in the past few days, but whereas one trended wildly and loudly, one hugely popular event with celebrity starpower stayed relatively quiet — at least within my view of the social web.

I’m delighted my father took me with him on Saturday to watch in-person the US Open in Pebble Beach. I was born not miles from this truly gorgeous spot, and though I’ve not exactly been a fan of the sport, I love my dad and was honored to spend father’s day weekend with him, and so close to where I was brought into the world.

But that spot, while beautiful, is exclusive. You can’t get to the area without paying admission to the 17 Mile Drive, and I’m not even sure if you can get on the golf course without paying admission. Lodging anywhere nearby was up to 4x its usual rate.

Not coincidentally, we were asked to shed our cell phones – indeed, any connection to technology – before we entered the venerable Pebble Beach grounds. I think I can understand the need to concentrate while swinging in a relatively quiet individual sport, but I can’t help but think that the exclusivity of the spot, the spectators, the lodgings, and the culture coupled with the mainstream-only nature of the reporting and lack of explosion on the social web not only lead to collective social silence but perchance the eventual sunset-over-the-pacific of the sport itself.

Contrast the relative radio silence on Twitter and the social web of the US Open, which closed yesterday with Northern Ireland on top no doubt thanks to our family’s Northern Irish influence, versus the noisy exhuberance of the World Cup.

dmix06 - d world cup vuvuzela

dmix06 -- d world cup vuvuzela

Not only did the event itself trend, but the countries, the goals, the people and the noisemaker itself — the famed vuvuzela — have taken over Twitter trending for days.  I know this is a world-wide event (as much as we think there’s only one kind of “football” in the United States), wheras golf is rather provincial in nature — cause or an effect? I could also ask myself whether the huge lucrative US Open event would really care to be a worldwide Twitter trending topic.

I appreciate the gorgeous isolation of a rocky inaccessible beach as much as the next, but as a person existing in the world and more and more thanks to the social web, I feel it’s my duty, right, and necessity to share this world and the things I enjoy on it, and this is part of how I appreciate Twitter. And yet even I’m not beyond wondering if all this noise is always a good thing.

The real irony may be that collective access destroys and we can thank exclusive sporting events and multibillionaire mansions for keeping our coastlines pristine (no thanks to their — everyone’s — oil dependency) and maybe, just maybe, a little exclusion is not a bad thing in the right places. Though I’m hardpressed to think of many things these days not changed by the noisy social web, golf, Pebble Beach, and its people appear to be exactly that, and were certainly largely missing from the Twittersphere over the weekend. The man holds up the baton, says “hold please,” and the huge crowd is quiet, for the swing and beyond. Even the drunk medics are strangely obedient.

In the end, perhaps some sports join other battles of the more personal nature and are better played out on the private landscape.

Ode to Marilyn Pratt: Honoring the Advocate on Ada Lovelace Day

At the top of the city with @moyalynne and @marilynpratt on TwitpicOf course I’ve known Marilyn Pratt, self-described in her Twitter bio as “SAP Community Advocate working to be a sustainable citizen of the world,” for many years, and yet we only just met this week. I’d never even so much as exchanged email with her until this year, but we’ve had a hearty online relationship. She’s been a big advocate for me – for my blog content (both personal and on the SAP Community Network) and on Twitter. If you’ve been active on the SAP Community Network she’s probably been an advocate for you too. She has been omnipresent and synonymous with online community at SAP, and so it was both stunning and unsurprising when I met her in person to find just how much more she is. Did you know, for example, her first computer language was Assembler, or that she directed IT for a kibbutz? Have you heard about her husband and five children, who are obviously as dedicated to her as she is to them? Did you know she came to SAP, in a roundabout way, as an escape from a truly (literally) toxic situation?

The second I found out Marilyn was visiting Palo Alto from her hometown New Jersey during Ada Lovelace Day, my schedule turned upside-down. She arranged for me to participate in an awesome interview with Marge Breya. She set aside precious time to meet me — out of so many on her schedule — and, most profoundly, she let me show her my home.

I was honored to be able to drive down the road with her, introduce my family to her, take her to the top of my city San Francisco, dine with her, get a chance to sit and share with her, and follow her in her (tireless, and often sleepless) work dedicated to advocating for others — indeed, to “amplifying the voice of the disenfranchised.” She would find spotlighting herself the least worthy cause of all, and it was only under great collective pressure that she finally cracked and allowed me to allow her to — although she would not say so herself — let her tell it the best.

Ergo — in honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2010, I dedicate this to Marilyn Pratt, a true technology heroine who honors us all and makes advocating for the community her (dare I say our) core business. Without further ado: Marilyn Pratt

BONUS VIDEO! Marilyn at work on Ada Lovelace Day in Palo Alto:

“Amplifying the voice of the disenfranchised doesn’t mean a protest voice — it just means making sure that people who might demur have more focused ability to be visible and make themselves heard.”

— Marilyn Pratt, SAP Community Advocate