How We Built and Engaged the MVP Community of SME Influencers
SAP and Social Media Today were responsible for selecting, aggregating and building relationships with "new" influencers in the small-to-midsize market to expand SAP's brand recognition in the SME space. Early on we decided the best way to execute this was not to market SAP solutions but to position the company as a thought leader in Web 2.0 and as a trusted advisor to SME businesses. That meant engaging the targeted audience in a creative and meaningful way.
The most significant challenge was how to do it so that was organic and truly functioned like a community. The MVP community needed to promote active engagement, enabling SMEs and growth companies to solve critical business issues. And MVP needed to do all this while allowing SAP executives to observe and dip their toes in the water without actually becoming part of the conversation. It wasn't until early 2009 that SAP executives began regularly blogging on the site, with most of the content focused on, Web 2.0, startup management experience and the explosion of social media platforms.
Social Network Fine-Tuning Builds Participation, Leads and Buzz
Once the SAP/SMT team began tracking comments and the subsequent interaction, they noticed that some of their best influencers were those who targeted a smaller segment of the small business marketâ€" business owners commonly referred to as "Gazelles", or companies sustaining rapid growth year after year. That subtle shift among the posters, readers and community members prompted the team to quickly re-engineer the site and tweak MVP to better serve the "growth" audience.
Once we made the shift in content and started applying the success we were having to our traditional marketing efforts, we were able to reach out to new bloggers. That's when things really ramped up--the content got even more exciting and the community grew larger and stronger literally by the day.
Letting the Conversation Take Shape
SAP/SMT's leadership had to accept the fact that they might not always like where the conversations led and they knew it might present issues. However, SAP executives agreed that MVP could be an extension of SAP into the SME market if co-sponsored by SMT and SAP; that meant in the beginning of its evolution no SAP banners and/or, SAP logos were prominently displayed on the site. SAP's role was to provide the forum and with SMT's help, manage the social network. What happened in the background is what would solidify relationships and build trust. That's the alignment we wanted with the SAP brand experience.
The SAP/SMT team worked closely together to build a process that allowed SMT to moderate posts and comments and to facilitate when appropriate. Instead of just generating content by aggregating other blogs, MVP was specifically designed to attract the content and types of business owners and professionals that SAP had targeted from the outset. In turn, those members could blog directly or add their own blogs to the community, creating the very sense of participation and ownership that SAP wanted to cultivate.
Leveraging MVP as a Platform for Lead Generation and Brand Building
During the summer of 2008 it became increasingly apparent that a global economic restructuring was beginning and a US driven recession was looming on the horizon. In an effort to provide more value to SME businesses, the SAP/SMT team created a marketing campaign coined, Weathering the Economic Storm. This evolved into a widely-used white paper and series of three webcasts that leveraged MVP's existing blogging network along with LinkedIn. The team invited Chad Moutry, Chief Economist for the Small Business Association to post a poll question on LinkedIn, "What can small businesses do to weather the economic storm?" In less than two days, the team received over 1200 responses to the question which were aggregated and shared with attendees of the upcoming webcasts. A series of three webcasts, each including an SAP customer, a prominent thought leader and moderator significantly enhanced SAP SME brand experience,while at the same time generated over one thousand leads for the SAP demand-generation team. The SAP/SMT team leveraged SAP's online and offline relationships with influencers to get the word out, including the vibrant MVP blogger network.
Weathering the Economic Storm featured events leveraged MVP as a social network platform and highlighted ways SMEs could succeed in 2008's down economy. The result was unprecedented participation and engagement among the very people the team was targeting and it also led to press coverage, analyst and influencer recognition that SAP was doing more for it customers than just selling software and services.
Measuring the Results: Innovative Success on the Social Media Fronts
The SMT/SAP team is:
- Monitoring and measuring the number of unique users and visitors to MVP, as well as the number of registrants for webinars, conferences, and other special events.
- Since going live in late 2007, MVP has gone global with over 20 countries and more than 2000 registered companies participating in the network.
- MVP was one of the first sites in the industry to leverage inbound social media channels, and the site features over ninety blog feeds from key influencers
- MVP is averaging 11, 500 unique visitors per month in 2009.
- MVP launched one of the industry's first social media integrated marketing campaign, Weathering the Economic Storm, whcih generated more than 1000 new prospects for the SME sales teams.
- MyVenturePad.com has won SAP several awards, including the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) Excellence in New Communication Award
- Several industry analysts have applauded SAP for best practices and its success in marketing to small businesses and building strong relationships within that segment.
The Personality of Fish: Carcharodon carcharias - The Great White Shark
Every 4th of July I have tradition of watching the movie Jaws, and I enjoy it more and more every year, primarily because the movie was set in my home state, I never tire of the feeling of terror it creates. This week we profile the personality of the Charcharodon carcharias, perhaps one of the most famous of all sharks, but not regularly considered a man eater like its cousin the tiger shark, which is found in abundance in the Pacific Ocean. The first thing to understand about Charcharadon is that it is a poikilotherm. This is important because it is able to vary its body temperature with ambient environmental temperature. In other words Charcharodon is cold blooded and this has added to its stigma as a killer. Humans and many other creatures are considered Homeotherms, meaning that they have to maintain a constant body temperature range and are unable to adjust to ambient environmental temperature. This enables Charcharadon to greatly extend its range in the world's oceans from Cape Cod to South Africa to nearly everywhere there are food sources. I once participated in the dissection of a 340 lb female off of Cape Cod during the early 1980's.
Our fish was less of a gourmand, but in JLB Smith's Fishes of South Africa, circa 1939, there is a description of the stomach contents of a large Great White Shark,which included: half of a goat, two pumpkins, a gourd, a dog, the feet and hands of several humans and various forms of unidentifiable garbage. Great Whites will eat almost anything floating on the surface that looks like a food source including buoys, beer cans and kayaks. JLB Smith is perhaps the most famous of all ichthyologists and he discovered the missing link between fishes and reptiles, the Coelacanth. These days I live in what is called the Devils Triangle on the California coast which extends from Ano Neuvo to the Farallon Islands and up to Point Arena. There are reportedly more than 60 Great Whites that live in this triangle and the Farallon Islands are a natural breeding ground. Every day I drive by Surfers Beach where I live in El Granada and wonder which lucky surfer will get a visit from the landlord, but for the most part they don't eat surfers on a regular basis. Sharks like to surface feed in the twilight, early morning or early evening, this is when they have the best vision due to the angle of the sun. So next time you are in Hawaii, don't swim early in the morning or late in the afternoon, that is when the Tigers come out.
Recently, Charcharadon has taken a liking to kayaks, particularly red sit-on-top kayaks, and in the last two years they have attacked two on the Northern California coast. Why? If you look from below a sit-on-top kayak looks like the silhouette of a sea lion, just as the surfer's silhouette looks like a seal. Both Kayakers escaped unharmed, although they were knocked into the water, but Charcharadon only took a bite out of the kayak hull and disappeared into the depths. I was actually on the beach just two miles from this attack the day it happened. Many of the white sharks in California feed on the abundant marine mammal populations which have recovered dramatically since inception and enforcement of our marine mammal protection act in 1972. Until next time great social media marketing and selling in the millennium and remember that we are the participants in the market; the cognoscenti are the observers.