Mark Yolton leads the professional social networking communities for SAP, the world’s largest business application software company. The SAP communities use social media tools and best practices to enable more than two-million individual members to interact around the clock and around the world in 200+ countries and territories. SAP Community Network (SCN) members connect and collaborate online through blogs, wiki’s, discussion forums, a content library, and other community information-sharing and relationship-building capabilities, they extend their collaboration on public social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and at global in-person events such as SAP TechEd conferences. They also conduct commercial transactions in the SAP EcoHub, the community-driven solution marketplace and app store where SAP customers can easily discover, evaluate, and initiate the purchase of SAP and partner solutions in more than 600 storefronts. Individual SAP community members, SAP customers, SAP partners, and SAP itself benefit from cost-savings and business process efficiencies, top-line revenue growth, increased sales leads, customer service responsiveness, an accelerated pace of competition via rapid solutions and best-practice sharing, greater influence and impact, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, career growth through education, professional connections, visibility, and information access – all enabled by the SAP community’s global reach, immediacy, and intimacy.
Mark Yolton has been leading the SAP Community Network for all of his five years at SAP, by way of Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Unisys. He has degrees from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, and has completed MBA coursework and continuing executive education at LaSalle University (Philadelphia, PA), at INSEAD (France), and at Stanford University (California). Mark is a Board Observer with InnoCentive, which operates a crowd-sourced innovation marketplace, and he is Board Member of the Unity Care Group, a non-profit agency focused on serving foster children and their families in the Silicon Valley. A Philadelphia native, Mark lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and travels globally as he works with SAP Community Network members, customers, partners, and colleagues around the world. He is a brother, husband, father, and grandfather with a passion for continuous learning, and a collector of rich life experiences, whenever possible from the saddle of Harley-Davidson motorcycle.