Organization Name: SAP SE
Industry: Software
Web References: Company Website, Twitter, Facebook
SAP SE is a software company based out of Waldorf, Germany. SAP provides solutions in the space of enterprise software, which helps companies around the world, manage their business operations and customer relations. SAP operates in over 190 countries, affecting over 293,500 customers.
Along with more traditional forms of marketing, SAP has been actively involved in Social Media to resonate the message of its products from latest releases, upcoming releases, customer case studies, partnership agreements, webinars and other event information along with other items that their large user base would require in order to keep up to date with latest trends and information.
SAP has been active with a social media strategy since at least 2011. Among the tactics used by SAP are to be involved in various channels developing proven best practices. This includes activities such as defining the audience, finding the audience, setting goals and success metrics, gauging resources required, selecting channels and then ensuring that the channels are used effectively. I work at SAP as a Senior Director of Product Marketing for Analytics, focusing on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software. The software I work with helps organizations perform Budgeting and Forecasting tasks. As part of the Product Marketing team it is of the utmost importance to me and my team to ensure that the messaging around our product reaches our customers not only through the right channels but that we can ensure the effectiveness of those channels.
One example of this is event promotion. In a few weeks I’ll be participating on behalf of SAP at SAPinsider Reporting & Analytics, an event showcasing Analytics solutions from SAP, its partners and customers. Working with the SAPinsider team, they had asked me to educate the SAP user base about the event and part of that involved writing a blog about the upcoming event. This blog was written on the SAP Community Network Business Trends forum where customers can learn about the latest and greatest trends. For me this blog is important because I can see the number of views this topic has generated within the global SAP community as compared to other topics within Business Trends. Additionally the SAPinsider team has provided me with a unique URL that I’ve embedded within my blog so as to ensure that the visits to the event website can be traced back to the activity I’m generating. However to promote the blog and the event, its not just a matter of blogging and links, but widescale social media promotion. LinkedIn has been leveraged to promote the blog and event, as has Twitter through the @SAPFinance twitter handle to inform the over 5,000 followers about the event.
S/4HANA Finance, Reporting, Analytics and Planning come together @SAPinsider BPC Bootcamp https://t.co/D7kEKkfokg #SAPBPC #SAPEPM
— SAP Finance (@SAPFinance) October 28, 2015
Additionally metrics are important not just to generate leads and events, but also to track how important innovations and ideas are to our users. One way of communicating new features to users is leveraging the EPM Playlist within the Analytics Solutions from SAP Channel within YouTube. Within this channel, product features are showcased and demonstrated; additionally events are promoted and the views are a great way of gauging the popularity of a topic area. According to Karuna Mukherjea, Senior Director of Product Marketing at SAP for Analytics (EPM) “Metrics are an important part of our Social Media Strategy to gauge the interest from our customers not just for events but to ensure we can push information to them and understand how important the information is for them to consume in their customer use case.”
Lessons Learned
SAP engages with its customers, partners, and entire ecosystem through a multitude of Social Media platforms. To provide a consistent user experience it is important for SAP push information through various social media platforms including the SAP Community Network Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to ensure it spreads at the same time and in a cohesive manner. Additionally it is important to gauge the metrics including views on items such as blogs to gauge the level of interest in a particular topic area. The greater the interest the more attention and assets can be created to support that particular area, and additionally consider that particular area for further product development.
Submitted By: Pras Chatterjee
To contact the author of this entry please email at: pras.chatterjee@gmail.com
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