The SAP Influencer Summit dominated tech media and Twitter backchannel conversations about SAP all week. The event offers a good example of real time influencer relations management. If you’re planning an influencer summit for 2010, consider these 3 points:
1. Open discourse. Several tech providers nixed live blogging and live micro-blogging (Twitter) during their influencer events this year. SAP set an important precedent by keeping all social media channels open and participating in conversations in real time. Live sessions were blogged, reported, tweeted and debated by people in attendance and by virtual attendees around the world. Follow SAP’s example: Limit NDAs to the situations where they make sense, such as the strategy development work leading up to an event like this. When the content doesn’t mandate an NDA, don’t curb use of social media.
2. Employee engagement. Many SAP employees expanded on speaker and audience comments via Twitter. Creating a wider circle of employee commentators makes perfect sense. And you know what? The press, analysts and consultants were likely to contact their “unofficial” employee sources anyway. It’s a much better idea to involve more employees by design, than to pretend that exchanges are limited to the featured spokespeople and handlers in the room.
3. Diverse attendees. SAP invited a diverse group of influencers to participate. Among tech industry influencers, big brand analysts and media dialogued side by side with solo opinion leaders and every size in between as well as customers and bloggers. Gathering diverse opinion leaders together to share the same information at the same time at a flagship event is smart on several counts. One, it’s efficient. Two, it sets up diverse, multiple touch points with marketplaces. It also helps build enough momentum to flow directly to offline conversations. In other words, no single point of failure and lot of juice.
For more on the SAP Influencer Summit, check out:
- Timo Elliott, an evangelist for SAP. He offers light commentary on what was going on behind the scenes here. Â He also links to a PDF document of Twitter feed from #sapsummit.
- Jonathan Becher, SVP marketing at SAP and official SAP blogger for the event, posted here.
- R Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, offers one analyst’s summary of the event themes and SAP’s performance here.
Update December 14th: Adding 2 more links to analyst reactions. Please feel free to add more attendee links in the comments. - B
- Jon Reed, a fellow with PAC , weighs in on the experience and resulting expectations among attendees here
- James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, gives a candid analyst viewpoint that was widely accepted among other analysts here
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December 11th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Hi Barbara:
Thank you for taking notice of the event! I will post to my blog (next week) with focus on some great innovations and best practices that came out of the summit, this year.
This event (the seventh annual) has become very important for SAP and has evolved with the expansion and design of our overall Influencer Program.
Don
December 11th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I’ll look for your post next week. Congrats on an putting on an outstanding event.
December 13th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Great ideas, Barbara. Thanks for sharing. We’re just starting to work on the Sybase event for May and have been talking about how to better use social media. I’ll check out Don’s blog as well.
Kathleen
December 15th, 2009 at 3:35 am
stone cold awesome. this post is wonderful. would you object to me reposting it on full on monkchips, or should I just cut and paste liberally…
December 15th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Great post and some good thoughts. The NDA discussion is one that I feel often offers the most resistance as it depends greatly on the content you are aiming to share and the strucutre of the firm you represent.
Having filled AR roles for publically listed firms, private firms and small biz I have found that the rigour around the NDA can often hamper what you can share (and what can be Tweeted by extension). Agree wholeheartedly that it shouldn’t wreck the opportunity but when you are shairng the detail around where a company will be investing in the future (ie something influencers would be hugely interested in) often there is little choice.
Great engagement ideas for the broader audience though - a good way to foster the debate and get more subject matter specialist involved easily in the conversations.
December 15th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Great comments!
Kathleen: I’d be interested in discussing the Sybase event with you offline in the new year.
James: Thanks - and you are welcome to repost in its entirety. Appreciate the attention and the link.
Tim: I hear you. Reducing use of NDAs is a bit like firewalking for many executives. They couch the conversation in whether the company can trust analysts, especially analysts they see as tethered to competitors. Instead, they need to take a fresh look at what information ought to be protected under NDA and for how long.