Live and un-cut notes at the Enterprise Software Summit. The Necessary Elements of an External Social Media Strategy 1. Lay down core building blogs
1. Management commitment to guid use and involvement with social media 2. Centralized social media platform on corporate site to aggregate content 3. RSS/Atom feed distribution2. Develop External Relationships
1. Community groups 2. Federated blog network (3rd party bloggers, citizen journalists, etc.)3. Drive content awareness
1. Executive and employee blogs 2. PodcastsLooked at who is blogging about enterprise software, then evaluated who is actually influential. Jeff's blog is four times more influential than SAP's website. Using Umbria for blog analytics, intellisynch, Technorati conversation tracking. Interesting tools let you put some intelligence into this. Then they called up the influential bloggers. Offered some information access. 100% of people contacted, just 30 blogs, all said they wanted to have further information on a regular basis. Only deal is that we are not going to manage you. If you write something negative about SAP, the first thing is, is it true? If it is, then we may even get you more access for the issue. Just give us the opportunity to respond. The best way to deal with people that are truly negative on SAP is to engage them. Stick to the facts, engage in conversation, perhaps nobody wins the debate, but that's okay. Nick Carr writes a lot of negative stuff on SAP. On the one hand, I think he has an axe to grind with the industry, but I haven't chosen to engage him because if I did it in the way I want to, I'm not sure it would reflect positively on SAP. Moved on this project in October. Takes time to change the course of your battleship. Decentralizing the chain to let people use their judgement has challenges. Legal challenge, this may violate a code of conduct. Went from having a 120 day timeframe to about a year to fully get traction. They had to modify the code of conduct to enable blogging. Be prepared to take the bad with the good, if we "manage" message we will be ignored. I think executive blogs are a waste of time. We have them. Shai Agassi writes his own, others leverage their staff so they are not particularly credible. I would like to think that CEOs would have better things to do with their time, but some like Jonathan Schwartz pull it off. The untapped goldmine is the level of executives that are direct reports to the CEO who are more tactical, tend to be credible, give them a voice. Disclosure: SAP is an investor in my company, Socialtext. Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory. He also writes
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