Benedict: From a business perspective, I'm a mobile industry analyst and a consultant. Being active since 2008 on issues around enterprise mobility - which in some ways was before it was popular - in a way created an audience for enterprise mobility that has generated a lot of business for me personally. A lot of the work I'm doing I'm able to share as experiences and how-to articles, and that creates a lot of conversation with the SAP community.

Last year I was SAP's top contributor for mobility. This year, they invited me to be an SAP Mentor focused on enterprise mobility. That is the result of being active within the community on SDN and blogging regularly.

Reed: I'm glad you brought up this aspect of blogging and the conversations because a lot of people, I think, still think of blogging as a one-way outlet. What I notice, especially on SCN, is all the conversations that spring up as a result of the blogs. Kevin, have you seen that in your blogging work?

Benedict: Yes. Even this year at SAPPHIRE, a lot of the mentors were given these little flip video cameras to go around and interview various people we saw on the floor in the exhibition hall at SAPPHIRE. It made it very easy because people recognized me when I would come up and shake their hand and say, "I'm Kevin Benedict." The feedback was often that they've read my blog articles on SDN. They were familiar with me, so they were willing to do an interview.

Blogging opens a lot of doors because people are familiar with you. They've been sharing ideas back and forth online and when you meet them face-to-face it's not a cold introduction. They feel like they know you already.

Reed: John, what kinds of conversations have you gotten into? Anything interesting come out of them?

Appleby: Well, it was exactly the same experience for me in Orlando with Kevin: when people aren't running away from you, they're pretty pleased to come and talk. No, I'm just joking. That recognition as a mentor, and the kind of input that we've given to SCN as a precursor to becoming a mentor, means that people are really up for talking to you. They choose their words carefully when you interview them with the flip cam, and they know it's going to hit YouTube on the mentor channel, which has been great.

Reed: I think our listeners might be surprised to learn that most experienced bloggers on SCN had to be initially encouraged and brought out of their shells by someone. I want to ask you how you got started. Did you have a blogging mentor, so to speak, that pushed you into active blogging? What advice would you have for those who are early in their efforts and maybe looking for a little inspiration to get going?

Benedict: I started blogging on my own back in 2006 on issues related to enterprise mobility. Personally, I was warmed up to the experience because I had written several hundred blog articles. Let me just touch on that number of "several hundred." People think blogging is difficult, but it doesn't have to be more than a couple paragraphs, maybe two to five, of an experience, a discussion, or an observation that you've had in the mobility industry. It's not Shakespeare.

This can be something like: I got off a phone call today, a company had these kinds of problems which caused these kinds of issues internally, they're looking for a mobile solution, and they're looking for these kinds of ROIs. Just a generic discussion like that is important information for the community to know. People will hear that and say, "That's me, too. I have those same kinds of issues. I have those same kinds of problems. I would like those same kinds of results."

It's that kind of information that you hear on the phone every day or in discussions with somebody that really make good blog articles. It doesn't have to be big; it can just be personal experiences from the day on the phone.

Many times with companies I've worked with, the company would decide they want a corporate blog. They would assign eight different people to publish articles to that blog. No one would write. Because their expectations of what they need to write are so huge, they think it would take them weeks to generate one article. It really doesn't have to be that. It's sharing with the community the knowledge you've gained today from discussions you had. It's a lot easier once people realize what's interesting material to read.

Reed: Good stuff, Kevin. Makes me want to blog. And John, did someone trick or cajole you into blogging, or was it something that you found on our own?

Appleby: We hear the story that it's always Marilyn Pratt who is involved, and this wasn't the case for me. Where it came from for me: Bluefin is an organization that has a really knowledge management-centric culture. We think that sharing is caring. So quite early on I found that writing about my experiences around difficult situations and technical problems was very cathartic.

It almost puts these problems to rest when you resolve the problem on a customer system, write about it, and describe what you did. It's documented forever and people can reference it and I use it as my long-term memory, if you like.

What I realized one day was that I'd written all this content, and really it was content that would be interesting to a wider community, but I'd considered it to be IP. What I came to realize is that IP is not really all that important; the collective knowledge is much more important. I woke up one Sunday morning at 10 a.m. and just decided to write my first blog on SCN. That was the most popular one I ever wrote, I think, and that's what I've continued to do.

Repurposing existing information is the really important point. We all write. We write technical documentation or project documentation or whatever it is that we write. That information can be repurposed for a wider group very easily; you don't have to write reams of information. And just what Kevin said: once you're over that hurdle, once you've written the first blog, it's really easy. It's writing the first one.

Reed: Before we wrap up, I'm going to give you a quick lightning round and put you on the spot. Tell me about one mobility trend you're keeping an eye on in this coming year.

Appleby: For me the big one is Android, without a doubt. If you take this scenario where you supposed that Sybase has a choice: it can only develop for one more platform, so is it going to be Android or is it going to be Windows Mobile 7? The rise in Android of 700% on handsets year on year is just enormous. And it hasn't really penetrated the enterprise market yet. That's going to be the big trend for me this year coming.

Benedict: Yesterday I talked to a research firm that just finished face-to-face interviews with 100 SAP customers and their organizations about what topics they're most interested in. The fifth highest topic is enterprise mobility this year. I found that fascinating and right in line with a lot of the news and developments within SAP.

In addition to that, I think business-to-consumer mobile apps are huge. Companies, as John pointed out earlier, focus on these point solutions of fixing internal requirements and generating internal operational efficiencies with mobile applications. But companies are starting to look beyond that very quickly by asking what apps they can get in the hands of their customers to provide customer support better. For example, they can show new product catalogs easier or establish a closer relationship and develop loyalty with that customer through business-to-consumer mobile apps.

That leap between consumer and enterprise apps are closing rapidly. All the MEAP vendors and the enterprise focus mobility vendors are going to have to start looking at how they create those business and consumer apps as well.

Reed: Very good, I appreciate both the blogging inspiration and your views on mobility trends. We'll look for your latest work online at SCN. Thanks a lot for joining us today.

Before we sign off, I also want to make sure our listeners know how to access the mobility resources on SCN. If you're not registered for SAP's online communities you can register for all of them, including the Developer Network, Business Objects Community, and BPX Community at the same time. Once you're in the communities you can find plenty of mobility resources on sdn.sap.com. In the User Productivity section, there's a mobility resource collection; also, in the blogging section there's a mobility category you can subscribe to and browse.

On that note I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this SAP Community podcast. With that, that this is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you online at scn.sap.com.