AbleBrains

Moving forward with Social Media

I posted a few days ago about our upcoming social media summit. In it I posed some open questions to the community to help us focus  SAP's social media strategy AND execution.  Especially in the context of  the customer experience.  And Dennis Howlett provided his assessment of SAP's social media transformation as well.

I largely agree with Dennis' analysis. Especially this notion:

I believe the best way to assess transformation is through an analysis of what is happening in the conversations between SAP, its customers, observers, analysts and prospective customers. This is a much more complex landscape to navigate than that which exists today.

How far has SAP actually traveled? SDN has opened the door to developers and outsiders. Heck - they’ve even allowed a curmudgeon like me inside! But as Craig Cmehil explained to me, SDN has really proven itself as a valuable resource for engineers and implementation folk who are looking to discover alternative ways of solving problems or implementing functionality. In other words, SDN is an extension of the well understood forum that geeks have used for many years.

Absolutely on target.  I don't believe we have analyzed what is happening in these conversation. Like any nascent market research effort one begins with reporting...and that we are currently doing in spades. Even to the point where the company is using techdirt to assemble executive PR reports and that these reports includes relevant blog postings.  But to my knowledge we have not gone there yet.  The SDN team may have but and if so, that would be an ideal starting place.

But Dennis' statement about SDN "open[ing] the door to developers and outsiders" particularly rings true with me.  We've done a good job on development side (congrats Mark Y.) but what about the business side?  Our efforts have not been nearly as cohesive as those around the Developer Network.  I am hoping that what comes out of our summit is the recognition and go forward plan to develop and SAP Business Network - SBN, which would be a sister community to SDN and BPX and become a place for connected conversation among customers and between customers and prospects.  The  communities working together (in addition to our efforts around around product specific community) should provide a rich forum for conversation that leads to sales acceleration.   Well, that's the theory any way.

Help SAP Craft its Social Media Strategy

I've asked the team to start thinking about a unified Social Media strategy for SAP.  Its clear we have fantastic pockets of innovation underway with varying degrees of creativity and depth.. some clearly far ahead of our competition and some not.  I have this  gnawing at the back of my brain that we could be doing this so much better if we actually had  a unified strategy that plugs into our overall Go-to-market strategy.  Mark Yolton has nailed it on the community side.... how do we extend what he's accomplished to other areas of the business?  What else do we need to do?  What aspects of our business should we be looking at? Marketing? Development?  GTM? So I need your help in crafting an agenda.  What things should we be looking at? What items should we be considering when we pull this diverse team together?  This is an alignment exercise NOT an ownership exercise so what are the vectors we need to bring together to make this happen.  Please give me your input so I can make this effort as impactful as possible.

Social Media Today Rave on SAP's Web 2.0 Efforts

Mark Yolton forwarded me this rave around SAP's successful use of Web 2.0... this was authored by the Social Media Today collective.

Social Media Today also sent two bloggers to Sapphire Atlanta.  Jerry Bowles published a post titled "SAP to Enterprise 2.0 Community: We Get It"  ... Here is Jerry's original post

Kinda Cool: Map of Online Communities

Via Kotke.org - home of a fine line of hypertext products

Pipe Tips

Over at O'reilly

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This video has come at me from both my wife's profession (anthropology) and from folks in the enterprise software space - was posted on Craig's blog as well.  Great piece talking about the evolution of the web