Interview: John Summers on His Social Business Experience at NetApp

By Deirdre Walsh (@deirdrewalsh) Oct 3, 2011

Deirdre Walsh, Senior Social Media Marketing Manager of Jive Software, talked to John Summers, Social Media Architect at NetApp, about his Social Business experience. NetApp is a leading provider of enterprise storage and data management solutions. Summers will be a featured speaker at the JiveWorld11 conference in Las Vegas, Oct 4-6.

NetApp’s Social Business Vision and Beginnings

Deirdre Walsh: What does Social Business mean to you, and how does it apply to your company?

John Summers: I think Social Business is ultimately about enabling engagement where it didn’t happen before. Instead of a flat, one-way experience, where companies push content out to an audience, Social Business is an interaction where all parties have a voice. Employees can connect and collaborate. Prospects and customers can give feedback and share insights. Partners can coordinate their activities and exchange best practices. Ideally, it’s an integrated experience where knowledge is freed up and everyone gets what they’re looking for without confusion.

We’re really committed to that vision at NetApp, and consider ourselves a leader in applying social principles to our industry. We strive to give best, most thoughtful and complete user experience to our stakeholders, including customers, prospects, partners and employees. At this point, most everything we do has a social dimension. It’s the way we organize and execute projects, work out strategies, handle software delivery and beta programs, and launch and support products. It goes way beyond customer support and is part of the entire buyer’s journey.

DW: When did Social Business really begin? When did it begin for you personally (what was your aha moment?) When did it begin for your company?

JS: Consumer social networking has roots going back to the 90’s, with early online communities and bulletin board systems. Social Business is much more recent and really didn’t catch on until the last several years. That’s when I saw companies really beginning to get it. People were realizing that they could use social frameworks to accomplish all these things while doing much less work.

After we adopted Jive, users would come to me and say I used to spend 10 hours per week on email, and now it’s just one hour. We’re at the point now where we can’t imagine not using it. We’ve integrated social tools into every activity. On our product launch pages, for example, there’s a widget right there with live feeds from our public Jive community, our blogs and Twitter.

For me personally, the initial “aha” moments began a little earlier because I was coming from a background in customer support in the videogame industry. When I got my start in 2005, social channels like user forums and bulletin boards were an essential part of that business. Communities were an expectation, not an option. I plunged into Social Business in a bigger way when I joined NetApp to implement a large-scale social strategy in conjunction with our rebranding (see my answer to the last question, below).

Another big aha moment happened in 2009, about a year after we’d launched our social initiatives at NetApp using the Jive platform. I was meeting with some of my counterparts at SAP (another Jive customer), and they explained how they’d set up Jive-based collaborative workspaces for their various customers. They had one space for each customer. I realized how powerful approach that is, and that we should be doing the same thing.