Since 2001 SAP has brought together its top influencers (industry analysts and bloggers) in a small intimate setting to share and receive input on its product strategy and direction. Last month’s event was hosted in Santa Clara, California and besides the 120 influencers attending onsite, another 500+ also participated virtually.
2010 also marked a major change in the ‘social’ coverage of the event where upwards of 50 SAP colleagues participated in leveraging social media to extend the reach of the event beyond the selected few that were invited to participate. When we set out to plan our social coverage, we had three goals in mind:
- Build awareness and create excitement to drive participation through the live Twitter coverage
- Amplify the key messages during the event for people following the event through Twitter
- Provide real-time feedback to the SAP presenters and help the ‘social’ audience engage
So how did we do? The infographic on the left highlights the major Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we used to measure our impact, but I wanted to highlight some of the key figures:
- We were able to reach a large audience: While we predominantly relied on Twitter, and had over 12M impressions, our supporting activities on Facebook, Youtube and blogs further amplified our reach
- Our audience was engaged: More than 75% of the total 7,850 tweets were produced by influencers, the ratio between retweets and original tweets was more than 1:1, and we had more than 3x blog posts written by influencers than by SAP employees
- We were able to improve SAP’s perception and grow our community: This is the area that was the most unexpected given the size of this event. During this event we increased the positive sentiment for SAP’s key solution areas by 8.4 points and increased our Twitter followers by 7.4%
While we had provided social coverage in previous events, this marked the first year of such a concerted effort and we now have a baseline to compare ourselves against. I am very proud of what we were able to accomplish and look forward to leveraging these learnings for our future events.
Great blog. The graphic is a fantastic way to represent data in a new and exciting. Nicely done!
Hi Ted,
It was a pleasure to meet you at the Summit.
I think it’s really interesting article that you’ve written. I like the transparent internal SAP attitude to what you’ve written. I agree – it’s OK to increase the size/volume of your engaged marketplace?
What did you feel about this as a personal experience? Would love to hear your take on what it meant to be there and how that related to a social experience.
Regards,
John
John,
Thank you for your kind comments, it was nice to finally meet you in person as well last month.
Transparency is indeed the ‘name of the game’ in the brave new social world. While we had provided similar ‘high-touch’ support in previous events which we leveraged for the Influencer Summit, this was the first time we attempted to systematically measure the impact of our activities. These metrics are still I believe fairly basic and will have to be refined as we progress, but I was personally very positively surprised at the impact our efforts had-much of the credit of course goes to you and the rest of the influencers that participated and enriched the conversations.
As for my personal impressions, the one thing I took away was how fulfilling and draining it was to actually support the event live from the floor. Because I was so focused on extracting the ‘so whats’ of the sessions in 140 characters or less, I had to always be focused on the presenters and synthesize their key messages in real time. At the end, I think it helped me absorb the content much more than I would have otherwise.
Thanks again for your support, we couldn’t have made it without you.
Best regards,
Ted
Ted, for those who are far from SoMe marketing, but are still interested to know (my BI analyst brain is now turned on ;-):
1/ What are “impressions”? How do you measure those?
2/ How do you measure pts change in products sentiment?
Thanks and regards,
-Vitaliy
Vitaliy,
Impressions is a fairly simple metric that counts all the followers of each person that generated one of the 7,850 tweets. There are obviously many duplicates in there, and although it is becoming an emerging standard, I am a bigger fan of measuring ‘people reached’ which is a bit trickier to get.
Sentiment is whole different story, and there are many tools out there that parse unstructured data (ie text) and generate an automatic sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) based on selected keywords (e.g., good, bad, etc.). These solutions are all topics we track on an ongoing basis and were able to measure the difference in sentiment before and after the event. The underlying technologies are still fairly immature and we had to manually adjust many of the individual tweets/posts, etc.
Best regards,
Ted
Thanks for some quality points there. I am kind of new to online , so I printed this off to put in my file, any better way to go about keeping track of it then printing?
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Susan Emerick IBM and Chris Boudreaux Converseon joined me in presenting these slides and discussing how IBM is encouraging and enabling employees to participate in the social media landscape…