Chip Rodgers Archives - The Drew Blog

FAQ: Blabbing About Blabs

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Drew Neisser

Maybe its because my late mother had a talk show in the early 70’s on a local cable channel in Newport Beach, California. Her show, Broadly Speaking, a punny name coined by my father (so you know that apple didn’t fall far from the tree,) attracted a remarkable collection of celebrated figures including Henry Kissinger and Herb Klein, both in town because of Nixon’s Western White House. Well anyway, I share this background as an explanation for why I really enjoy a new video podcasting platform called Blab. The audience may be small, as was the case with my mom’s show, but that doesn’t mean the guests and the conversations need be limited. In fact, I suspect this platform is going to be huge and I offer the following FAQ (frequently asked questions) in order to prep you for this eventuality.

What is a Blab and how do you set one up?

Think Hollywood Squares meets Facetime. Essentially anyone with a web camera, internet access and a Twitter account can set up a Blab. You can also Blab from your iPhone or Droid with the app. That part is super easy. Just visit Blab.im and register. Then hit the purple “Start a new blab” button in the upper right hand corner of your screen and follow the instructions. You will need to come up with an 80-character or less name for your Blab, pick 3 topic tags and then schedule it. If you want to start right away you can or you can schedule it several weeks in advance. Important tech note—Blabs work best on Chrome.

Who is on Blab now?

From my experience thus far, it’s a rather eclectic crew ranging from social media influencers to random folks who simply stumble upon the conversation. In my recent Blab with Chip Rodgers, VP of Customer Experience at Ciena we had guests from as far a field as Manchester, England and Bangalore, India. Not surprisingly, a number of social media influencers like Brian Fanzo, Bryan Kramer, Joel Comm, Ted Rubin and Tamara McCleary are early adopters of Blab and have a habit of popping in and out of each other’s sessions.

Do I have to be on camera to participate?

One of the cool things about Blabs is that watchers can ask questions via a chat stream right next to the video stream. These live questions help enhance the overall conversation and allow the camera shy to still participate. Blab has its own social universe – by that I mean you have a Blab identity that you can use to follow other Blabbers and vice versa. Another way viewers participate is by virtually clapping — there are a couple of yellow hands on the lower right corner of each person on camera — and viewers show their appreciation by clicking on these hands.

How do you manage the Blabbers if you’re the host?

Just to be clear, up to four people can be on the video portion of Blab at once and the host/moderator is in complete control of the other three. When someone wants to be on-camera, they just click one of the empty Join boxes and the host can accept them or not. At any point in the conversation the host can kick someone off camera by clicking on the X.

Are there some technical hacks to improve sound and video quality?

Joel Comm, a Blab/podcasting vet, recommends using a Yeti microphone for sound quality but I had a bit of a problem with that my first time around. It turns out, I had to reset a sound setting on Skype to prevent the microphone from jumping to full volume and thus causing all sorts of mayhem. To simplify things, I just used a Bluetooth one-eared headset and this seemed to work pretty well. On the lighting front, definitely think about having extra light sources to brighten up your face. I actually have started using some pro lights that we already had in the office for in-house photography. And giving credit where credits due, I’m taking a cue from another master Bryan Kramer who I happened to notice uses pro lighting as well.

How do people find out about Blabs?

Once you sign up for a Blab, you will be notified about other Blabs as they are going live. Others will probably hear about it through social media. Blab is really well integrated into Twitter so during a Blab, viewers can share what they are watching on Twitter with ready made tweets that include the Twitter handles of those on camera. I suspect the audience will grow as word spreads and the quality of the content improves. [Some sessions are meatier than others!] Also, as you collect followers within Blab, I believe these folks are directly notified about your sessions.

What if I can’t watch it live–are their recorded versions?

Every host has the option of recording their Blab session. That it is also really easy although I missed this fact on my first Blab with Bob Kraut, the former CMO of Papa John’s. Fortunately about 10 minutes into it, a friend posted on the chat stream that I should be recording it! Doing so was just a matter of clicking the Record button on the left hand side of the screen. Another thing I really like about this platform is that they make it very easy to upload your Blabs to YouTube and then from there its easy to embed these videos anywhere. Here, for example, is my Blab with Chip Rodgers from yesterday.

When’s your next “Elements of Marketing” Blab?

You’re the best. Thanks for asking. I have Blabs scheduled every Monday and Friday at 2pm EST for the next couple of months with many of the folks featured in my book. Here are links to a few of these upcoming Blabs and by the way, you can register in advance for these and you will get a reminder right before it starts:

10/16: on Tiny Budgets with Julie Garlikov of Nuvesse

10/20: on Social Media Success with Scot Safon, former CMO of The Weather Channel

10/23: on Networking with Matt Sweetwood, former President of Unique Photo

11/05: on Organizing with Stephanie Anderson, CMO of Time Warner Cable Business Class

Who is behind Blab?

The two founders Shaan Puri and Furqan Rydhan are veteran developers having worked on Bebo before selling it to AOL for $800 million. Shaan is actively involved and was kind enough to jump into my conversation with Bob Kraut. These guys also have some big money VC backers and I suspect will come out of Beta with a splash any day now.

What Your User Community Should Look Like

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Drew Neisser

In the hype that is social media marketing, it is often hard to distinguish between the braggadocio and the brilliant. Communities are launched with great fanfare only to slink away quietly into the burial ground of false promise. So to stumble across a vibrant community— one that predates Facebook and supports a B2B brand— is not just surprising, it is downright awe-inspiring.

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

1. Adding members is no longer a key performance indicator
Because communities are still considered a luxury by some executives and a risk by many (rightly or wrongly) there is tremendous pressure in the early days to achieve scale. The SAP Community Network crossed this threshold in the last 24 months. Reports Rodgers, “Around the time we got close to 2 million, we stopped emphasizing the growth of the community.”

2. Community engagement is a daily activity
“If you build it, they will come,” is pure fiction when it comes to communities, which is why most wither away. Remarkably, the SCN gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month and 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day. “Our activity numbers are really strong,” Rodgers explains. “I think that’s something we pride ourselves on as there are other communities that may have more members but feel like ghost towns; we have vibrancy.”

3. The community jumps in to defend the brand
It is inevitable that a brand will come under criticism for one thing or another once it opens up a community. Offers Rodgers, “We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky.” But rather than rushing out a brand response, “what ends up happening is a lot of community members [jump in saying] ‘This is way over the line,’ or ‘Nah that’s not really true.’’”

4. You can drive your own circulation
Building and maintaining a healthy community on the scale of the SCN is expensive so there is unavoidable pressure to demonstrate value to management. Rodgers notes, “One of our KPI’s is driving activity to webinars and that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars traceable back to activity in the community.” In effect, the community acts like a media channel, supporting other marketing efforts and ultimately, top-line sales.

5. The community willingly embraces a direct sales channel
Purists worry that connecting a community with any kind of sales channel will dilute the value of the community. While there is a risk of being too “salesy,” an inevitable by-product of a healthy community are product discussions. Seeing these, SAP set up an online store called SAP EcoHub that started within the community and is now an increasing channel that drives real leads and revenue.

6. The community impacts product development
Customer-generated ideas have long been discussed as the holy grail of community activation, but getting there can be perilous. “The last thing we wanted to do was have a bunch of people contribute ideas and then have nobody listen or act on them,” Rodgers says. Working closely with the “proactive” product teams on selective topics, he has “gotten great feedback and contributions from the community that are already incorporated in the latest solutions.”

7. The marketing group wants in
Successful communities like the SCN are often started outside of marketing departments as a form of post-sale customer service. This orientation gives the community a head start since the emphasis is on creating content of genuine value and not pure product messaging. But with the heightened interest in having robust social media programs, it is not surprising that the SAP marketing department grabbed the reins of the SCN six months ago.

8. The community drives cultural change within marketing
Rodgers, who has run the SCN for five years, might have been apprehensive when marketing subsumed his group earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it now. “Last year, our CMO said, ‘Guys we need to learn from [the SCN] and we need to have conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and an offer.’”

9. The content developed on the community profoundly improves SEO
With a staff of 12 dedicated to developing formal content like white papers, articles and solutions briefs, Rodgers is able to keep up with his ravenous community, feeding it fresh content on a daily basis. And by optimizing this content for search, starting about 2 years ago, the SCN was able to more than double monthly site traffic. “I mean it was dramatic; it was unbelievable,” Rodgers observes with a sense of pride and awe.

Final note: It’s not often you hear about a huge B2B company operating with a B2C mentality for customer engagement. For my complete interview with Chip Rodgers, see my previous post here. You can visit the SAP Community Network at and hear Rodgers yourself at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philly on October 12th. This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

The Anatomy of a Social Business Community

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Drew Neisser

Most brands dream of having a vital user community that creates on-going dialog between the brand and its customers. But few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network which is led by Chip Rodgers. I interviewed Chip for an upcoming case study on FastCompany.com and in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit September 28/29 in Philadelphia. The following is my Q&A with Chip. Admittedly, it is long one but well worth studying if you are thinking about creating your own community.

DN: Can you give some background on the SAP Community Network?
The SAP Community Network actually started about eight years ago, and so we’ve had a little bit of time to ramp up. We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.

DN: Tell me about the membership of the SAP Community Network.
It’s about 50% customers and then another probably 30% partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers— just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for and obviously unique email address.

DN: From a content standpoint, with all these members, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself or is it somewhat self-sustaining?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders that are SAP solution managers or folks from support or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise and are actually the ones that are building the content. I’ve also got a group of six that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators that are in the community.

DN: You know the scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.

Drew: You started this in 2003, which predates Twitter and Facebook, and I’m curious how you brought [them] into your community. Are they adjuncts or are they truly integrated into this?
Having this background of engaging with the community, when Facebook and Twitter came along, they were natural extensions and ways of engaging with the community. We now have a group that is really focused just purely on social media. We work together to leverage the community and our social media activity. A little bit more specifically, we do a number of things like, if you post a blog in the community, we have an RSS feed to a Twitter account so it automatically tweets the title of the new blog that was published. We think of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even YouTube, as kind of extensions— concentric circles around the community— to reach community members and try to get the word out.

DN: Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member that thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervous – saying, “why should we create a place just for people to complain?” But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation? And fortunately, our board defended it.

DN: Has the community ever defended the brand?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire. We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, we have to answer that. And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.” The whole group kind of comes together.

DN: What are the other ways that you report on the success, or what are the metrics that you guys look at to rationalize your existence?
We actually have a few metrics. One is just purely in terms of activity and contributions in the community, page views, member satisfaction, things like that. We do those transactional kinds of things with the community to makes sure that we’ve got good content that people find interesting, so that’s one level of measurement. One of our KPI’s is driving activity to those webinars that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars. It’s traceable back to activity in the community.

The third is a part of the community called SAP EcoHub (http://ecohub.sap.com). It started as an online store for our partners to set up storefronts and sell their products. We’ve expanded it to include SAP products as well. It is connected to the community so that if there are conversations going on about certain product areas, we have links in those conversations going back to EcoHub. If you happen to be on a conversation you can see the product. That is an increasing channel for us, for our partners and for SAP to drive revenue directly.

DN: You have a few people that are in the conversation, how do you make sure that they are all on brand?
We do have a social media corporate policy, guidelines, best practices case stories, and training courses. We have an active internal social community, so there’s a lot of discussion and activity and assets [and] resources available to people when they start to put a toe in the water in social media. A lot of those principles are similar to when anybody goes for media training, for example. There are a few guiding principles like, “Don’t talk about things that you don’t know about.” And stay away from forward-looking statements like, “We’re going to do this,” or “We’re going to do that.” But otherwise I think a lot of it is just common sense.

DN: You have this substantive, meaty community where people are actually participating, and you’ve already proven its worth and along comes Twitter and Facebook. Has there been conflict because [social media] is a separate group, and it’s not part of your group?
There is a social media group driving policies, best practices, training, reporting, and other aspects of social media for SAP, but we’re all part of marketing. It’s interesting because community and social media are somewhere in the middle of several traditional corporate groups. It’s a little bit of marketing; it’s a little bit of communications; it’s a little bit of support, there’s an aspect of listening for product roll-in, and there’s an aspect of sales channel. So there are always discussions about where does it really belong. But community and social media are about people connecting – so if you’re doing it right, the entire organization is responsible for connecting with customers and partners in their respective areas. So yes, we are separate groups, but we have a communities and social media council of leaders from each of those groups as well as social media ambassadors embedded throughout organizations and geographies at SAP.

DN: With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP might have on Facebook [or] Twitter. How as the marketing/social team dealt with this?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis. But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about Communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done. We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.” It’s been a cultural change within the company.

DN: Have your content development efforts had a measurable impact on SEO?
We are very much SEO champions, and it’s been through experience. We had to figure out what to do on all those pages to do better with search engine: where things are laid out; how are we tagging pages; what are the titles in the pages, how are URLs formed. So many things factor into it. We had this three-month project just to go through everything and then get the word out to all the stakeholders and get everybody to update all their pages. I mean it was dramatic; We were bumping along at around 400,000 unique monthly visitors, and all of a sudden we shot up to like 900,000. It was unbelievable— just blew me away.