All posts in “SAP”

February Speaking Engagements

SMG speakers will be coming to a city near you! Throughout the month of February, three members of the SMG team will be speaking at events across North America, check out if they will be coming to you:

Google+ PR Summit

February 14, 2012, Las Vegas, NV
Tactics and strategies for engaging customers, clients and the public on the newest social network.
Speaker: Maggie Fox, register online here

SAP Global Marketing Social Media Week Event

February 15, 2012, Palo Alto, California
Discussing The Great Content Disruption: How Content Marketing is Changing Everything
Speaker: Maggie Fox, register online here

The Changing Face of Research and Implications for Marketers: You’re not in an interview anymore, Dorothy.

February 16, 2012, Toronto
Discussing advances in our understanding of behaviour and decision making, how insights are collected in a fully digitized world and new tools and opportunities. A must for those looking to understand narratology, gamification and how to leverage online advocacy!
Speaker: Patrick Gladney, register online here

5th Annual Social Media Marketing (Open Dialogue)

February 22-23, 2012, Toronto
Discussing Social Marketing to Business vs. Consumer Audiences: What’s the Difference?
Speaker: Ruth Bastedo, register online here

Is Twitter the New Help Line? Improving Customer Service with Social Media (Webinar)

Join Maggie Fox next Tuesday February 14th at 12pm EST / 9am PST, as she hosts an exclusive, live webinar from Social Media Today on Is Twitter the New Help Line? Improving Customer Service with Social Media.

More companies now are monitoring Twitter and other online social channels and responding in real-time – often within hours or even minutes. They know the power of social media and the capability of bad news to spread like wildfire. They also recognize the opportunity to influence the message by jumping into a conversation sooner rather than later.

Join this panel to examine:

  • Why social media and customer service are made for one another
  • How your company can jump into social monitoring
  • Notable corporate social media gaffes and what was learned from them
  • Best practices for companies actively engaging customers online
  • The cost-effectiveness of social media monitoring and immediate response as customer service tools

Register online, here

 

 

 

'On-Demand Computing: Soaring with the Cloud' Tackles Current Tech Issues

I’m Michelle McCudden and I’m the new intern here at SMG.

We are excited to let you know about an event our friends (and clients) at SAP are helping put on later this month.

On September 28, MyVenturePad, along with SAP, will present “On-Demand Computing: Soaring with the Cloud.” This four-and-half hour global summit will cover cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. This summit is specially tailored to high-growth enterprises, so if that describes your business, you should definitely check it out.

Attendees will have the opportunity to hear A-list speakers like Reid Hastings of Netflix, John Byrne of C-Change Media, Brent Leary of CRM Essentials, and Doug Merritt of SAP discuss SaaS, the ins and outs of On-Demand, and how cloud computing can impact your business.

By registering, you can attend all or part of the summit, or just view the archive of the event later. If you’re already involved in On-Demand or want to learn more about it, visit the registration page here and sign up for this exciting event.

Is it "Collaboration", or Matchmaking?

A few weeks ago, I was the guest of SAP’s Blogger Relations program at TechEd Las Vegas. One of the announcements that week was the sponsorship of the SAP Innovation & Technology Pavilion within the InnoCentive community.

If you’ve read Wikinomics, Don Tapscott’s highly regarded book about the value of collaboration and crowdsourcing, you’ve heard of InnoCentive. Their corporate literature describes the company as,

A global open innovation marketplace, where individuals… collaborate to deliver breakthrough solutions for organizations driven by research and development. InnoCentive Seekers, who collectively spend billions of dollars on R&D, submit complex problems to the InnoCentive Marketplace, where more than 160,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business people and research organizations in more than 175 countries are invited to solve them. Solvers who deliver the most innovative solutions receive financial awards.

The joint press release referred to the “co-innovation” facilitated by InnoCentive:

Forum for Global Community Co-Innovation… The addition of InnoCentive to the SAP ecosystem further fosters co-innovation

But here’s the thing: much as I applaud the inherent sense behind the InnoCentive concept (and there have been many, many success stories that would not have been possible without their unique approach to R&D resourcing), it’s not really co-innovation (it should be more accurately described as open innovation), and it is certainly not collaboration.

Here’s how InnoCentive works: participants in the community who have a problem post it and value the solution at $5,000 and up (they’re the “Seekers”). If you have a solution (or think you do) you submit it (you’re a “Solver”). The Seeker company reviews all submitted solutions and determines which one best meets their need. The winner signs over their IP and gets the money.

However, this isn’t collaboration. It’s match-making in the “I have the rollerskates and you have the key” sense of the term.

Wikipedia defines collaboration as a circumstance,

Where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals… by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Collaboration does not require leadership… teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.

In the case of InnoCentive – the loss is that the winner takes all, therefore there is no motivation to true collaboration (i.e. multiple parties coming together to find answers they could not reach singly). While many more solutions are undoubtedly found as firms tap the resources offered by tens of thousands of InnoCentive Solvers, it stops short of enabling true collaboration. If I have half an answer and someone else has the other half, the inherent self-interest that is the guiding principle behind the community will keep us apart (the platform does not provide any collaborative space around projects – to get challenge details, you must sign up for access to a rather lonely “Project Room”, in which you are the only occupant).

This is, ironically, in sharp contrast to the robust collaboration that takes place among members of the SAP Developer Network, given that the partnership with InnoCentive is being positioned as an enhancement to SDN. On SDN questions are posed and dozens, if not hundreds, of community members respond in an effort to come up with the best solution. The incentives are participation-based reputation points, rather than the Big Cash Prize! for The Winning Answer! InnoCentive model. On SDN Seekers are offered the true, deep benefits of crowdsourcing – hundreds of qualified Solvers working together to iterate the best possible answer to their problems, for reasons that go beyond mere financial reward.

Update [Full disclosure: SAP is a client]