We had the pleasure of having Gail Moody-Byrd, Sr. Director of SAP Global Ecosystem Marketing, join TheCR Network members this week to share how she thinks of the relationship between SAP’s core communities, their social media outposts – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, & SlideShare, and SAP’s presence in traditional media sites. Unlike many organizations, SAP is fortunate to have a very successful hosted community so their social media efforts are complementing the community whereas many organizations are leading with social media initiatives which are then followed with a hosted community. This makes the goals for those social media channels different than we typically see and serve to extend and deepen existing relationships, participate in real-time, and converse with a broader audience not necessarily to drive awareness or increase the number of people engaging with them.
I really liked the way Gail articulated how SAP participated all their engagement channels:
In particular I like the participate-orchestrate-host perspective and how it relates to the internal level of effort required to execute. Gail mentioned that SAP is undergoing an initiative to better educate a wider set of employee teams – including solution and product teams – on how to use various channels to complement their existing communications methodologies. Having this framework is extremely valuable to create a common understanding of how to best participate given a specific business goal and available resources. This graphic also articulates a three-part model of how to participate effectively in any social channel – using Content, Cadence and Conversation.
Jim & I talk a lot about cadence so I was particularly interested to hear Gail talk about its importance. SAP is working to understand the optimum cadence of content and activity for each channel. In some channels, activity is less immediate and more sporadic so it is easy to overwhelm the people participating in that channel with too much content and conversation. In other channels, people are more active and therefore expect and can absorb much more activity. Understanding this is critical to optimizing engagement and is a great lesson that Gail shared – more is not necessarily better.
Gail has graciously shared her slides so that we could share them with you – well worth the read:
