03.08.2009

SAP Community Network

By: Stefan Nicola

SAP.info: So you have brought the spirit of Web 2.0 into your community.

Yolton: Yes. Web 2.0, social networks, and social media are all about enabling and encouraging active participation and engagement by the members of your extended ecosystem. Social media allows us to have a genuine conversation with our customers and partners through tools like discussion forums, blogs, wiki’s, audio, and video – and through programs like our reputation management system. It’s about better understanding customer needs and pain points – and then working to relieve those with our products or services. Web 2.0 really means a change of attitude for companies.

SAP.info: How does that work in practice?

Yolton: Well, let’s take the launch of SAP Business Suite 7 in New York City a few months ago. For the first time, we invited members of our community – such as bloggers and industry experts – to attend the news conferences and briefings. They authored their own and linked to our blogs, wikis, forums and pod casts on SCN. The people in the room were using Twitter to let the broader community around the world know what was going on live. Community members were tweeting back saying, ‘Hey, could you clarify this?’ those in the room asked the question in real time in the session and got answers on the spot, and re-tweeted to the world. As a result, SAP Business Suite 7 was one of the top 10 trending topics on Twitter that day. So really, we created a storm of information in the marketplace that we couldn’t have done otherwise.

SAP.info: You are also active on some other platforms.

Yolton: Yes, we have LinkedIn and Facebook groups for SAP EcoHub, for SAP Tech Ed events and for the SAP Community Network. We have nearly 100 videos on YouTube of community members giving testimonials, keynotes from our events and demo’s from webcasts. When a blog is posted in SCN, it immediately sends a Twitter alert to almost 2000 followers. We have viral widgets on our SCN pages that allow community members to add the SAP blog stream to their private websites and blogs. We make personal connections in Facebook and professional connections on LinkedIn. So, all of these Web 2.0 tools and others are being used by SAP to extend our reach beyond our platform to tap into the broader market .In the end, this makes us at SAP more efficient, more effective, and more successful, because we’re using every tool and technique available to make our customers more successful.

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