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.
At SAP I work as Senior Director Product Marketing, Enterprise Performance Management. The software in my group’s solution set includes tools that assist the Office of the CFO / Finance Departments at small, mid-sized and large organizations (Public and Private) perform tasks such as Budgeting, Forecasting, Profitability Analysis and Consolidations. These tasks are imperative for large organization to complete to be able to pave a way to understand their future fiscal health as well as report their existing results to stakeholders.
Because the outreach for our marketing efforts are targeted around the oCFO and Finance departments, social media is a useful tool to promote product messaging. Currently social media platforms that are leveraged include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress (Blogs) and Community Platforms (SAP Community Network). These platforms are quite effective as the products we deploy have a complex messaging for the finance audience that targets features such as business performance, agility and the platforms provide an effective means of spreading the product message.
LinkedIn groups will continue to be a source of larger expansion. Because there are thousands of groups dedicated to Finance, Finance products, Enterprise Products, SAP Solutions, it is not always possible have complete coverage over all groups in real time. This is why it takes a collaborative effort amongst members in Product Marketing to be engaged in as many relevant groups as possible and ensure group discussions relevant to our finance solutions are answered in a knowledgeable and relevant manner.
Another platform I forsee gaining traction in the future is tools in the area of Sentiment Analysis. At SAP we have a product referred to as SAP Social Media Analytics application by NetBase. This product processes billions of social media posts across millions of sites globally to extract structured insights and metrics that enterprises can use to quickly discover market needs and trends, quantify perceptions about products, services and companies, and effectively track their success in the market.. The EPM products we have at SAP ar leveraged by our customers in ways such as exploring market sentiment on their products.
This sentiment across various channels can be used by organizations to see how their products are trending by date, time, region, platform, and then placed into Predictive Analytics solutions to give an idea based on current trends where the organizations can expect future results. There is the possibility at SAP that this can be used in the Enterprise Performance Management, Product Marketing department to analyze the sentiment of our solution, as well as the market sentiment towards current trends in finance topics. One example might be in the space of Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) which is a very important topic soon that stands to get a lot more attention in the coming while and Social Media Analytics can be used to gauge the relevance of the topic before while being addressed by SAP solutions.
According to Karuna Mukherjea, Senior Director of Product Marketing at SAP for Analytics (EPM) “Internet of Things will continue to get attention as Finance departments look to drive results in a real time manner and this will be actionable as devices are connected even more and thus Finance departments can help make useful decisions from this data driven analysis, as well as learning about IoT through Social Media channels.”
Lessons Learned
SAP currently leverages quite actively more traditional forms of Social Media in promoting Office of the CFO products. However as this user group expands, SAP will also expand by offering information through Social Media not just in terms of information that is marketing based, but information that can be used to drive decisions.
Submitted By: Pras Chatterjee
To contact the author of this entry please email at: pras.chatterjee@gmail.com
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