About six months ago, my business partner Robin Carey and I approached Don Bulmer, head of Industry Influencer Relations at SAP, the major enterprise software firm, with an idea:  Let us help you increase your visibility and influence in the small business market by sponsoring an online business community that we are building around the needs and interests of business owners and managers of companies with fewer than 500 employees, and the professionals and experts who advise them.  

Our logic was that while SAP offers a full-range of software for the small and midsize company market and has thousands of customers in those categories, it is still perceived by many as a maker of software “for the big guys.”  We believed we could help alter that perception by applying some of the lessons of social media and conversational marketing we had learned over the past year or so from developing two prototype communities–Social Media Today and CleantechCollective.

To our delight, Don agreed and SocialMediaTodayLLC had its first paying customer.  MyVenturepad is the fruit of that engagement.

We’re “soft” launching today which is another way of saying we’re not quite sure yet whether the wheels are on right or that we’ve remembered to fill the tires.  In the software business, this kind of launch is called a “Beta” and what it means is that we want your help and feedback in making this a community that you’ll want to belong to and participate in on a daily basis.

You can do this by signing up for membership (upper right hand corner).  Once you get your confirmation e-mail you can click on the link and it will bring you back to this page, already logged in.  Click on “My Profile” (upper left) and fill out the information that you want to share and upload a photo of yourself which will appear on your comments and posts.  Most of the community features are explained in the How to Use MyVenturepad section.

We’ve assembled a great network of featured bloggers for MVP, including people like Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of Feedburner; Verne Harnish,  founder of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization and the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs;  Jeff Cornwall,  Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship; Barry J. Moltz, a member of the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame, and a growing list of other experts. 

We invite you to add your own voice, by commenting on posts, creating your own profile and personal network of connections or even starting your own blog here or adding your existing blog to the MVP content feed.

The site is owned by SocialMediaTodayLLC and we are soley responsible for any shortcomings or screwups that are certain to occur.  Our relationship with SAP, and other future possible sponsors, is third-party. 

About the name?  MyVenturepad is a madeup name based on a combination of the rather obvious “venture” and the less intuitive “pad,” which has multiple meanings–the place where you hang out, a notebook, and–most optimistically for you and for us–a place from which big things are launched.  

To help get us started, here’s a special inducement for new members to join MyVenturepad.  We’ve ordered a bunch of copies of Seth Godin’s new book Meatball Sundae, which is coming out on December 20.  We’ll give a free copy to the first 200 of you who sign up who own, manage or advise a company with fewer than 500 employees, AND fill out your profile page (including your mailing address so we’ll know where to send your book).  You’ll also need to check the box that gives us permission to send you stuff at the end of the registration form.    

The basic notion is that there is a tremendous amount of great information about environmental issues being generated on the web by people who are true experts in the field, but until now there has been no place where it all comes together in the form of one large conversation. By bringing all that great writing and thinking into Cleantech Collective, we hope to build a genuine community of concerned citizens, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers that will have have a real impact on the cleantech revolution. Drop by and join in if you’re so inclined.

“Developing and maintaining a web site like Red Herring can be very expensive,” says webmaster Chris Heimbuck. “Typically, you need a team of developers to build it and then you are pretty much dependent on the team to keep things up and running smoothly. That adds up.”

In addition to cutting costs, editor Scott Morrison wanted to add community-building functionality that would allow readers to engage RH and its writers and editors directly and to add content. He also wanted a solution that would support RedHerring.tv, a new channel of video interviews with leading venture capitalists and CEOs of hot technology startups.

The solution they chose was to move to the Blogtronix platform, which already had the desired social networking and video capabilities built in, and to work with Blogtronix’s development team in Bulgaria to create the more conventional content management system they needed for landing pages.

“The Blogtronix crew did a lot of custom work for us,” Heimbuck says. “They really went that extra mile. As a result, our new site is far more functional and attractive than our old site and it cost far less to develop and maintain.”

Morrison agrees and says he’s looking forward to building a committed and engaged Red Herring community.

“By adding social networking capabilities—like allowing readers to create profiles and blogs–we hope to enable users to engage our brand more deeply and essentially drive the content,” he says. “That’s when it really gets exciting for us.”

She and Nick Vitalardi had a conversation earlier this week about blogs, wikis and the rapid adoption of social media in enterprises during which Susan came up with the best list I’ve seen so far of how to be a successful blogger. Some are hers; others came from the collective wisdom of the web. If you’re a blogger, have these tatooed to your wrist immediately:

• My number one message is, “To thine own self be true.” Find your voice – be sincere. For corporate blogs specifically, number one on the list is never lie. From Robert Scoble to the Z-list blogger, all will agree.
• Two, write about your passion and write passionately. Whatever it is that you want to blog about, you have to really put your heart and soul into it or it won’t be credible.
• Three, you really need to participate in the community. Blogging is not a solo activity (though that is probably one of the greatest myths about blogging). Linking and commenting are key to the experience of blogging and really taking flight in the blogosphere. Encourage comments.
• Four, try to be humble, but if you do have a strong point of view on something, bring it on, get it out there, but be prepared to defend your arguments.
• Five, when you reference other bloggers, you should mention them by name as opposed to just linking to them. This is blogger etiquette.
• Six, check your links. Bloggers are very forgiving, but definitely check your links. Also check your spelling and your grammar and probably in that order.
• Seven, don’t ever edit or rewrite something that you wrote in the past. The common courtesy in blogging is to strike through and then rewrite on your blog post, if you have made an error.
• Eight, never delete posts. Never delete something that you’ve written. The rule of thumb in the blogosphere is that if you have committed something to digital ink, it’s there for perpetuity and you can’t go back.
• Nine, use a human voice, not PR speak.
• Ten, keep your posts regular and relatively short. The rule of thumb here is definitely less than 500 words and usually a lot less than that. 

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.

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 (http://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 to play by the new rules. Be transparent, lose the jargon, and add something of real value.

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?

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.

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.

That’s why there exists in all trustworthy print publications what is generally referred to as a separation of “church and state.’  And I can assure you that it is strictly enforced.   Over the past 25 years, I have written and/or produced maybe 150 advertorials–those ugly little hybrid mixes of text and advertising–for Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week.  Combined, I suspect they produced more than $100 million in ad revenue.  This would make me a success story in most companies but the truth is I have never met a Forbes or Business Week editor.  I know one editor at Fortune that I haven’t seen or spoken to for 10 years and although some of my most successful “sections” appeared when John Huey was editor there, I met him only a couple of years ago because he rents the apartment next to mine. I’m not sure he even knows I’m one of the mercenary trolls who made him look like a hero although he did admit to another rep I know that there was “a lot of money to made in picking up garbage.” 

In publications that care about editorial integrity and regard it as their most valuable asset, ad salesmen do not speak to editors and vice versa.  They don’t take meetings together; they don’t lunch together; their offices are deliberately separated.  No self-respecting reporter ever set foot in an ad agency unless it was to interview someone for a story.

In print publications, advertorials are required to be clearly labeled “Advertisement” and they are written, produced, and designed  separately from the magazine or newspaper itself.  There are also strict rules for informing advertisers that what they are buying is advertising and not editorial.

This is how it should be or else there is no point in pretending there is something called journalism that can be trusted to put the reader’s interests in truth, fairness and accuracy above all other considerations.  Over time, this becomes a reputation and even, if I may be naive enough to suggest, a positive contribution to society.  It’s why I trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, for example, although I wouldn’t have the opinion pages in my outhouse.  It’s why ad agencies don’t lean on great publications to do squirrely things.  It’s why Rupert Murdoch must never, ever be allowed to own the Journal, or the NYT or the Washington Post.

Michael Arrington has to decide whether he wants to be an editor or a publisher because no one can effectively be both.  And, I do know that if you produce a publication that a lot of people trust and want to read, advertisers will come–on your terms, not theirs. 

As for Batelle and his fine line of bullshit about making advertisers part of the conversation, most readers are sophisticated enough to realize that the Microsofts and Ciscos of the world don’t want to have a conversation; they want to sell them stuff,  and that ad agencies like FM are simply doing what marketers do–pimping for their clients and trying to turn trusted writers and sources into endorsement bitches.