AbleBrains

Twitter for Business: Managing The SAP RFP Process

If you're following me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I've been talking about our Social Media RFP for our Services Marketing team.

The majority of the RFP solicitation, requests for engagement and questions and our notifications back to vendors was done thru Twitter.

We initially started with a list of 4 vendors... not a lot. And it was a very inside-out list. We generated a list based on folks we knew and had worked with previously.   That wasn't good enough.  So we put it out on Twitter and simply told folks we were issuing an RFP and would they want to receive it.

12 Social Media teams stepped to the plate and asked for the RFP.   Contact info was sent to our procurement team, who, using email (hey we're working on it) issued NDAs and the RFP.  2 vendors contacted me via Twitter to say that after review they decided not to pursue the project.

RFPs were received on Feb. 20, 2009 and the team took this past week to read and develop a short list. We are in the process of notifying vendors who made the short list via Twitter.

Ok so that's what we did.  But from an engagement perspective, I'm finding the use of Twitter to manage the RFP process to be as, if not a more efficient way to drive this process forward.  Notifications of our intent were instantaneous as was feedback and requests to participate.  When vendors needed us, they primarily contacted us thru Twitter.

What insight did we uncover from managing this business process via Twitter? Well, during our conversation today, one of the team members asked me what are some of the criteria I would use to make a final decision on a vendor. My response?  In addition to all the standard criteria organizations use to evaluate vendors, Vendors have to be eating their own dog food - they've got to be using Social Media to market and engage with their customers.  They need to be using Social Media to manage their own business. This is one instance where you can't just be a teacher.

If you want to follow updates on this process you can subscribe to this feed.

Evolution, Enterprise 2.0 and Integrating Conversations with Processes

Enterprise 2.0 is spurring the evolution of us business professionals.   Its enabling employees, no matter their role in an organization to engage directly on behalf of their brand - to advocate for their brand, products and services.  We all know the market talks about our brands - with or without us being present.  By integrating conversations with business processes, brands can not only tell their story with convication and passion but they can act on those conversations.

          Now, the ZDnet crowd as well as many of the Enterprise Irregulars and many others have weighed in on the SAP Business Suite launch and the Enterprise 2.0 functionality now found in the Suite.   As I've been lucky enough to be included in some of the discussions around this type of integration, I thought it'd be helpful to share a bit more of our thinking and perspective as we approached this new wave of functionality.

Lets start with a couple of assumptions:

1. Social Media is a HOUSE OF CARDS

Easy to Build and Easy to fall apart unless you tie it directly to your business objectives and hence the processes of your organization and use it to enrich the experience ca customer has with your organization

 

2. Conversations Can Impact Top and Bottom line Revenue Growth

When a customer or prospect has an experience with your brand--  "marketing" in any form (product experience, service experience or Big M marketing, conversation begins.  Those conversations may be with the brand or with other customers.  If customers find value in those convesations, they begin to develop not only an affinity for those value driven exhanges but relationships develop.  Out of those relationships and value exchanges eventually the customer not only comes to appreciate the intrinsic value of the conversation but affinity for the brand develops.  At this point, a buying cycle is likely to proceed to everyone's satisfaction.

You can think about people engaged in conversations as a non-linear process.  In any conversational dynamic, individuals take away nuggets of information and pass that information onto other groups and other individuals.

    

 

What we've done is integrate conversations into enterprise processes so that they are actionable on behalf of the enterprise.  These take 2 forms.  Conversation -> Process integration and Process -> Conversation.

A good example of Conversation -> Process integration was demonstrated yesterday briefly but to elaborate, by pulling Tweets into the SAP Business Suite and applying a sentiment engine to those tweets, a customer service rep can make those conversations actionable by identifying and emerging customer or brand issue. Someone may be complaining about your product or service.  With Sentiment analysis not only can an organization proactively address a looming customer crisis but they can initate corporate processes such as raising a Customer Service Ticket to initiate a problem resolution process.

 

Once done, SAP can then issue the results of those trouble tickets on Twitter itself!

Going the other way, a super example of Process->conversation integration is the deployment of Marketing Campaigns using Social Channels.  Using Business Suite functionality,  users can now design and deploy marketing campaigns which can execute over a variety of social environments, including Twitter.

And there ya go...

 

Enterprise 2.0 is the latest evolutionary pressure on businesses.  Those of us that adapt will survive this pressure and thrive as the new ecosystem comes to dominate our business dealings.  Those that don't will find themselves facing extinction pressures that will be hard to avoid.