Q&A from the Growing Your Business With Social Media Webinar

On Friday, Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang and myself participated in a Webinar on using social media to grow your business  (Replay available here).  Thank you so much to all who attended and to those who asked questions.   There were some questions specific to me and some that I'd like to weigh in on:

1. When you talk about co-creation with customers, how do customers benefit from that contribution? (i.e. why would they contribute if they still have to pay for the product afterwards?)

Co-creation has intrinsic value to the customer.  Specifically, they benefit because  (1) they have the opportunity to directly influence the product portfolio, thereby able to direct SAP to create solutions that better fit their particular needs,  and (2) customers form closer relationships with SAP thereby gaining transparency into what our plans are and again, having that visibility provides them with the opportunity to give us direct feedback on them. At the end of the day, its a win-win for the customer and the provider.

2. How is SAP leveraging voice of the customer WRT business partners, employees - VARS and ISVs?

SAP had developed a VOC program as part of its Total Customer Experience initiative. The purpose was to include customers in the design process.   We were focused on the Web and Tele design work we were doing.  This type of process was also utilized to obtain feedback for SAP's Business ByDesign SaaS solution and was run by the regional go-to-market teams.  I believe that as we do more work with partners, a Voice of the Partner program will be extended to them as well.

Other questions....

3.  How do you measure social media (not monitor)? Can traditional web analytics systems be used?

I think the first question you need to ask is what are you trying to achieve?  Then you can more easily apply the appropriate metrics.  For instance, if you want to use social media help improve customer satisfaction, then one of the measures I'd invoke would be NPS (net promotion score)... correct, it doesn't measure social media effectiveness directly, but then, I'm more concerned with the business objective.  Social Media in my mind would be one of a stable of tactics to drive net promotion.  How do I see if social media is having an effect or not relative to that objective?  Baseline your efforts without it or do a geo compare where the initiative isn't running.  Many ways to skin this cat.

4. What are your thoughts of user generated content like reviews? What about negative reviews?

Big fan. Its a part of that co-creation thing.  I dig the fact that customers should and could become my product's most vocal evangelists... and critics... its how we get better. What you need on the backend though is a system to route those comments both positive and negative for action and response.   This happens on SDN and BPX and I'd love to see something similar for the business user.

5. So, understanding each target audience's online behaviours and techno graphics is essential before developing the appropriate social media tactic to implement?

I forget the context in which this question was asked but assume it relates to the Forrester graph on types of users.... I don't think its essential to segment your market by online behavior, but I do think its important to (1) clearly identify corporate or functional group objectives and then (2) align them with potential social media strategies (3) run a cost benefit analysis against a prioritized list of potential actions.  And don't be afraid to experiment.   I'd be more interested in performing an attitudinal segmentation for targeting purposes than by trying to target by online behavior alone.  Attitudinal segmentation is more robust.

More to follow.