SAP: 8 Years In: Elements of a Maturing Practice — Live from Blogwell

Coverage of this session by Viviana Faga of Jive Software. Connect with her by following her on Twitter.

3:50 – SocialMedia.org’s Kurt Vanderah introduces SAP’s Senior Vice President, Mark Yolton.

3:51 – Mark: I’m going to talk about the different models that we’ve used and which ones have been the most successful.

3:52 – Mark says SAP is running the guts of some of the largest companies in the planet.

3:53 — Mark: What we have is the SAP Community Network that our customers access. It is a network of communities that deals with different demographic group.

3:54 — Mark: Some stats: 2.5M members strong; 200 countries and territories; 1.5M unique visitors / month; 4k posts per day; 8k bloggers, 2/3 are non-employees who we have given the keys to the castle. We’re averaging 12 – 15 blogs per day.

3:55 — Mark: We are connected to an app store for partners called an eco-hub.

3:56 — Mark: We have been at this for 8 years. It started with a focused developer network. Then we noticed interesting demographics that drove other communities. For example, a community for project managers at SAP. We created a community for business objects, upon acquisition. We also created a university community for people to register their skill set and to take courses. All along, we’ve added more features like wikis, blogs, forums, etc. over the course of 8 years.

3:57 — Mark: Anywhere in the SAP ecosystem, this is where you will want to connect with other practitioners.

3:58 – Mark introduces his four pillars of success.

3:58 — Mark: Social Innovation: Drive product innovation from your employees.

3:59 — Mark: Social commerce: Drive increased leads and revenues with a focus on big plays through targeted campaigns.

4:00 — Mark: Social intelligence: Active sharing of knowledge, best practices among community members.

4:01 – Mark: Social insight: Observe meta behaviors to share best practices and act quicker than competition.

4:01 — Mark: There is a farming metaphor we use for every community: map presence audience (what are the goals), seed community to start critical mass, cultivate conversations (you have to drive engagement), harvest for impact (start to see loyalty, but only after you’ve done this).

4:02 — Mark: We constantly ask ourselves, “How do we drag content out of groups that have specific experience that we want to source? How can we create connections between members of our community? What is the frequency of this conversation? How can we tune it to get it to the right pace so it isn’t too fast and it can be consumed?” Mark says he uses the 3 C’s: Content, Conversation, Cadence

4:04 — Mark: To get a perspective of our community eco system, at the center is SAP.com where you control the message. Then you have the hosted communities where you can let the community drive the message. Then you orchestrate the message on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and finally, there are the publications that you participate in, like Forbes. Social media is present throughout.

4:05 — Mark: Foundational pieces: Policies & governance. Metrics.

4:06 — Mark: How do I demonstrate the ROI of what I’m doing? Top line is to align your metrics with your business objectives. For example, if you’re looking to attract loyal customers, then you need to measure customer loyalty.

4:07 — Mark: How do I get critical mass? How do I drive collaboration? Getting critical mass and driving collaboration will help you get your ROI.

4:08 — Mark: There’s a lot of business benefit we have seen – Hundreds of millions of euro’s saved in efficiencies.

4:09 — Mark: Social Business drives professional benefits, business benefits, and measurable value. And in my 8 years of working on this, I’ve learned that this is a repeatable process. Any company can be successful in this by employing some of these models and methodologies.

Q&A

Q: Can these models translate to Facebook, Twitter?

A: Mark: Yes, this is an SAP community we’re hosting ourselves, but we are reaching out into Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to extend our message. Some of these models can translate to these spaces.

Q: Has ownership of the community evolved over time?

A: It’s evolved a lot. We started with developer programs. Marketing is the right place in SAP for this to live. Some people start in service and support as well as product development.

Q: What have you learned in working with small business owners?

A: Working with free social media tools is key. Getting to the influencers is important.

Q: Are employees a part of your community?

A: Yes, we have a community for our 50k employees. In that, anyone can post anything. We have a social media area to get the 50k employees to get up to speed on what they can and cannot do. We also coach them on how they can leverage social media for their marketing efforts.

Q: What is your staffing model?

A: It has changed over time. We have 15 or 20 people working on our app store. There are a core 15 people on my team. There are 600 people moderating part time for a topic where they are an expert – 170k brands that we support WW. Between 50 – 70 people engaged full or part time.

Q: How do you handle competitors? What about sensitive topics?

A: We do have competitors in there. They are welcome to be in there so long as they are talking about SAP topics. It’s OK to have a negative reaction if you want to, it is part of the culture we instituted. If someone goes down a “bad” path, the community members will step in, not so much the SAP employees. We rely on the community to alleviate the frustration. We will delete if we need to, but only in extreme circumstances.