It's a cold day in hell pretty rare when a large company invites bloggers to sit in on (and actively participate in) a real working marketing strategy session but SAP, the once reclusive software giant that has embraced social media in a huge way, did just that Tuesday by inviting Jeff Nolan, Jason Wood and myself to join the SAP Social Media Summit in downtown Manhattan.
The meeting was convened by Steve Mann, head of SAP's Total Customer Experience, Competitive Marketing and Services Marketing functions, who looked amazingly alert for a man who recently became the father of triplets. The goal was to come up with a strategy to build on the success of SAP's Blogger Relations program, run by Mike Prosceno, which has garnered all kinds of positive support in the enterprise software corners of the blogosphere and for the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities, headed by Mark Yolton.
The SDN has doubled in size over the past year to 850,000 members and become a popular community for global geeks who get points (and maybe even a free t-shirt or luggage tag) for participating in forums, answering technical questions, and blogging. The site now has 2,800 active contributors, draws 5,000 forum posts a day, and the average time between post/question to first response is 20 minutes. The BPX community, which had 10,000 early adopters, has now passed 150,000 members.
Although SAP's social media efforts are among the most advanced I've seen among enterprises, they are still young and much of the day-long discussion focused on such basic questions as how far the next phase of social media development within the company should go and how fast, when to look for senior level executive sponsorship, and what existing internal and external initiatives might be best candidates for "socialization."
I wasn't able to attend day two but at the end of the first day a consensus seemed to be building toward trying not to make rules that might discourage innovation, accelerating the social media adoption process by trying several test projects to see what works best, and deferring the pursuit of top level "sponsorship" until the program matures a bit more. Having spent a number of years working in big company communications, I found all these ideas to be extremely sensible.
My meager contribution to the proceedings was to suggest that because social media can't be controlled or directed through traditonal marketing and public relations methods, there will almost certainly come a time when something unexpected happens and the program will need "air cover" from a top executive who has been willing to adopt it as his or her own. Most midlevel large company grassroots initiatives I know about are not there yet, but at the "keep informed, but don't make responsible for" stage.
I also stressed the importance of living the values that embracing social media implies, which are such rare corporate habits as transparency, honesty, accessibility, and trust. The blogosphere is unforgiving of perceived hypocrascy and reputations can be damaged by social media as quickly as they can be bolstered if there is a gap between what corporations say and what they do.
But, the simple fact that Jeff, Jason and I were in the room (and not asked to sign NDAs) tells me that this is a lesson that SAP's social media leaders and innovators already understand.
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