I was in New York last week for the first ever Social Media Summit at SAP. It was a collection of several of the "players" in the SAP world around the topic of Social Media/Software and engaging with our employees, customers and partners. I count myself as quite lucky to have been included on the invitation list and had a great time while there.

It was my first time in New York outside of an airport and I honestly did not have much time to look around but what I saw I liked, I don't think I could live there but that's another story ;-)

The picture above was more or less my thought of the event meeting itself and the topic in general. It's a merging, classical, modern, high rise, low rise, high tech, low tech and a reaching out to grasp the unknown.

My first question before we started was whether or not this was bloggable and of course it was :-) we also were joined by a few external folks such as Jason Wood, Jeff Nolan and Jerry Bowles and a couple of folks from Ogilvy, Sung Chang and Spencer Osborne. From the Enterprise Irregulars side along with Jason, Jeff and Jerry were myself and Mark Crofton.

I attempted to keep a running commentary inside of Twitter as well as somewhat of a mind map.

Some of the major highlights I took out of the meeting were not really "social" themselves in the sense of how to do that or how to do this but it more the fact that SAP really does "get it" and they are not afraid to step up and talk about it and say ok "but now what" and that was what we did together on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. It really was "now what" and we got into some pretty hefty conversations about brand, rules (you'll never guess who actually asked for more rules) but also about people and how to encourage the right thing as well as discourage the wrong.

It was all about enabling the users, employees, customers and partners to work together in an open environment.

It really started to hit home for me when I read what James wrote the other day and I realized that my mind was already moving in this direction and I was just not "labeling" it the right way.

This morning it struck me - with open source every project, every component, every bug fix is a social object. Open source software is social media. It has rules and connection points, repositories and group norms.

Source: James Governor's Monkchips » Why Open Source Software is Social Media

Although I think James might be taking it a bit far to the extreme (but the more I think about the less extreme I think it is) I do think he's on to something. For me community started back in the late 80's when I ran my Telgard BBS system (The Underground) and over time things like Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL all started to push us little guys out (although a good search and you'll still find BBS's running via Telnet). Later even they had issues once the World Wide Web started to take root, they could not keep up less people wanted to call a single computer but rather they wanted to call a host that connected them to multiple computers. Even with developers cranking out code to connect these BBS systems via Telnet it just wasn't enough.

One thing though despite the medium (call Wiki, Blogs and Message forums the medium now if you will), one thing always remained the same the concept of sharing - be it code and code snippets or the neighbor effect, my neighbor has a lawn mower and mine is broke I borrow it based on a mutual connection. The idea of "Social" is nothing new but how we use it in the new digital world is and that's what SAP is striving hard to not only understand but to enable within our realm...

Link to Enterprise Web 2.0 » Living the Social Media Values at SAP

Link to James Governor's Monkchips » Why Open Source Software is Social Media

Link to Social Media Strategy : Venture Chronicles