Which is more important to the SCN users: Blogs or Forums?

[agentry_src]

Somewhere, somehow, the focus of the SCN moved from tool based orientation to a social media orientation.  Not saying good or bad, although from my postings elsewhere and the data I post below, you can probably figure out where I stand on that change.  But I am interested in seeing people's thoughts, experience and background.

When responding, please provide how many years you have been using SCN/SDN, what percentage of time you spent in each of the various areas of the old SDN: blogs, wiki, forums, documents along with which you think is more important.

Thanks, Mike

"While the site still provides access to nine years’ worth of content (including more than 20,000 documents, 22,000 blogs, 389 topic spaces, and 377 discussion topics [former “forums” with 2 million threads and 9 million messages alone] and more), we're now also able to restructure the content according to topics rather than mode or platform, and to offer a far more robust set of community tools that enable our SCN members to interact and collaborate in ways not possible in our old environment.  In essence, we’re  enabling a truly modern and reorganized online community with much richer “social” engagement at the core of our social network."

     -     Mark Yocum, New SCN - Day 2 Update

"20,000 blogs" versus "2 million threads".  You do the math... - Mike (the forum dinosaur)

[TomVanDoo · Accepted solution]

aha interesting poll.

I've been on SCN since 2005 and only became active since about a year or so.

The reason for this is simple. In my opinion there is a certain trend in using such a community (any online tech community). Trend is maybe not even the right word. Maybe we should talk about a "career path".

When you start in SAP, you have a lot of questions about "basic" knowledge. So you will be looking a lot in the fora and will be asking a lot of questions. I was lucky enough to have some very experienced consultants next to me during the first two years, so I asked my questions to them instead of on the forum. Not everybody has that luxury, hence, a lot of "simple" questions end up in the fora. The first two/three years, you can get by searching the fora and asking a question now and then.

As your own knowledge grows, you will start helping others by answering their questions. So you're still spending a lot of time in the fora of the community, but now you are contributing much more than you are consuming.

Some more time passes and you start reading more blogs, because the content in the fora loses it's challenge to you. When you ask a question about a difficult situation yourself, you notice that you get little answers. At best, someone points you in the right direction and you manage to figure it out for yourself. You learn that not every question has a simple answer, and you have to put in the effort yourself to dig deeper than the surface.

This is the moment you start thinking about sharing your own experience in a more structured way. Hesitating, you release your first blog.

As you progress and broaden your perspective, you start feeling more comfortable to express your own ideas through blogs and you spend less time on the fora. Compare it to an evolution of a hands on expert to a conceptual thinker. A programmer to a Software Architect. A geek to a CEO. Detail to Overview.

At least that's my personal experience. I don't know if this floats for everyone.

I spent the first 4 years on SDN by occasionally searching for info and rarely asking questions. I answered a few, but on average, found them not challenging enough, or not detailed enough to provide a correct answer.

Then I spent a while reading blogs whilst exploring new technologies, before I finally started writing blogs myself. (and still reading _A LOT_)

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom,

I started posting to the SAP MII forum a little over four years ago while still working as an independent consultant.  Originally it was to build what I semi-seriously refer to as "street cred" in order to help pick up business.  I had already worked as an MII consultant for about 2.5 years, but figured name recognition would help increase business and perhaps my rates.  😉

I can't tell you whether it worked or not since I started at SAP shortly after that.  But in the RIG, we preferred to provide solutions in the Forum instead of through CSS tickets.  Better response time (averaged about an hour for the Forum versus "longer" in CSS).  It also was a very active board with many knowledgeable contributors and posts tended to be read by newcomers as well as old timers.  Our groups unwritten goal was to minimize CSS tickets which internally reflected poorly on the product plus were more frequently due to misapplication (or at least poor understanding of the functionality).  And, as is not uncommon, some of us had contribution point goals for PRM.  I doubt that will happen much going forward as it appears that there are too many ways to game the system.  But as a moderator, I am still interested in the sharing of technical solutions.  I find that I learn something new almost daily, but at a minimum on a weekly basis. 

Now that I moderate the TM Forum, Discussions, I find lots more good stuff since I do not know that content quite as well.

And while there are groups that prefer to direct the newbies to existing sources of information, I find that outlining details of specific processes good training for training others.  And I still think the search processes inefficient and ineffective.  I hope that they will turn back on some of the features which are currently off due to perfomance considerations (like text search) so we can evaluate if there have been any improvements over the old SDN search (which was really, really bad).

I have not blogged yet.  I have written several full documents which graced the pages of SDN/SCN.  I probably will start at some point so I can get others learning from some of my harsher experiences.  [Learning from your own mistakes is fine.  Learning from others is better and much less painful!]

Thanks for your detailed response and for the proper use of fora (Latin plural of forum).

Regards, Mike

[MaheshChandra]

in my opinion, forums is a place for contributing our knowledge in solving the problems, the approach may be different in different scenarios. But for writing a blog, you need to know a lot of information on the blog topic, so others can consume from your blog, there are less or no alternative scenarios on a blog.

Writing skills required for writing a blog (of any topic), not required in case of forum posts.

regards,

mahesh

[Lukas_Weigelt]

Concerning the old SDN platform for me it was about:

Contribution: 100% Forums 0% Blog.

'Consuming information': 80% Forums 20% Blogs/Wiki.

For me it's almost always about solving development-technical problems in short time in a very narrowed-down requirement, so blogs have been an overall good information source for getting an "idea of the whole" but actually never did the trick for helping me with my concrete work/technical problem. The discussion with others on a similar or higher expertise-wise-level is the most benefit I get from this community.

Cheers, Lukas

[former_member42743]

In the old SCN it was probably 95% forum discussion and 5% of reading blog while being on for quite a few years.  I only ever wrote three blogs in the final days of the old forum however.

In the new SCN it's more like 50/50.  But..... for one, the volume of questions in the QM forum has drastically dropped since the new SCN.  Maybe it will pick up.  And two, while I use to follow 3-5 forums on daily/weekly basis, I now just focus on QM as it is too hard to follow the new spaces in the same way I used to.

I do think the new SCN has lost a lot on the technical side.  Maybe it will get better as more people learn it and drift back.

One of the things I feel happenned is that the folks most influential internally with regards to SCN have more of an orientation towards the blogging, Wiki, and social aspects of the system and so drove the upgrade in that direction.  But the question maybe should have been; Should the system have been designed around the 10-20% of real community members that provide content and answers?  Or the 80-90% that come here looking for help and answers?  Because strictly from the numbers posted, that appears to be the balance.

I'm not sure which is the right answer.  I don't think there is a right or wrong answer.  The answer ultimately is what did SAP intend the site to be.  If it was to serve as a technical resource, personally, I think they have moved away from that quite a bit wiht this release.

Joe FF

[agentry_src]

Your question is probably the key.  What was SAP's intention with the new SCN?

Maybe a cold calculated decision was made to move away from the technical resource role?

Hopefully that does not mean the content maintained in the forums will end up residing in LinkedIn or some other internet forum/board going forward.  That would be a sad day and, I think, counter-productive in both the short and long term.  Just my not so HO.

Thanks, Mike

[ThomasZloch]

Very personal thing, for me (since 2003) it was 85% forums, 10% blogs (reading only) and 5% rest. If you take a master blogger like , he would probably state the opposite (maybe by referencing him here, he will see it in his "communications" tab and drop by, now this feature wasn't available before ).

So for me, even as a beta tester who was prepared to the new look ahead of time, getting used to the new discussions will be an ongoing process, and I can understand some of the irritation by formerly "forum-focussed" members. It will take some fixes and implementation of "idea place" feedback to smooth the waters.

Thomas

[agentry_src]

Hi Thomas,

I appreciate your detailed response.  I hope you took the time to vote on the poll.  My numbers probably would be 95% forums and 5% other stuff (mostly the wiki/documents).  I don't really have a problem with the change as such.  But change needs to lead to improvement.  So far that has not been the case for we "forum focussed" members.  I hope that does not remain so, but am starting to get worried about the slow pace of fixes. 

It has been more than a week since reporting the issue that two of the forums I monitored on a regular basis are still MIA (literally and completely missing).  And more than 6 days since any response from the SCN dev personnel.  Navigation is still rather convoluted.  Many features that should be in the discussions portions of the communities are still not working or are missing.  Performance is still slow, but has shown tremendous improvement over the first few days and dropped logins have been greatly reduced.

Thanks, Mike

[agentry_src]

Please use the poll if you just want to vote.

Thanks, Mike