Two weeks ago I had the honor of playing a small part in a big story that demonstrated the power our SAP Mentors yield within the SAP Community. The lessons I learned were too important to skip, so I wanted to summarize them in this post. The story revolves around a colleague (Natascha Thomson) who recently joined our Social Media Audience Marketing team and was previously with the Ecosystem and Community Marketing team and a regular at the TechEd events. When the SAP Mentors found out that Natascha was not joining them this year, they decided to mount an aggressive campaign that eventually got Natascha to Las Vegas.
While this 'campaign' speaks volumes for the respect Natascha has with the SAP Mentor community, it also provides us with some lessons that we can generalize as we think about applying those more broadly in our industry:
- ‘Swarm’ around a topic of interest to the community: Although Natascha is not a ‘topic’, it is pretty apparent that her appearance at TechEd was something the community was passionate about
- Orchestrate effectively across channels: Done across Twitter, Idea Place, and Facebook
- Leverage the power of the influencers to amplify the message: While only a 10-15 individuals drove most of the ’noise’, they were the most influential community members, and at last count, this event generated more than 120 tweets (including more than 85 under #nataschatoteched – which was only set up towards the end of the campaign).
- Be creative: In addition to finding a new use case for Idea Place, other ideas included a suggestion by one of the SAP Mentors to fly Natascha to Las Vegas in his own private plane, room sharing so Natascha can have a free room, and multiple suggested agendas for Natascha to make the 'business case' while she was there
- Get to the decision makers quickly: In this case, the ‘decision makers’ were Mark Yolton and myself and they were able to get us very quickly.
I am truly honored to have played a small role in this remarkable story and look forward to leveraging these lessons for us. A big thank you to Mark for his good spirit and generosity, John Appleby, Jon Reed and the rest of the SAP Mentors for their ingenuity and persistence, and of course Natascha for being such a good sport!
For those of you that want to get more details, here are the assets this ‘campaign’ generated:
- John Appleby’s (the SAP Mentor that drove most of this) idea on Idea Place: highest idea ever on Idea Place with 23 votes
- #nataschatoteched: This is the hashtag I setup at a late point during the campaign, and based on my last count had over 85 mentions (there are many other tweets that did not include it, search for @SAPMentors, @MarkYolton, @nathomson and @sapountzis if you want the full story)
- 13 min video of Mark, Natascha, John and Jon talking about the experience from the floor on TechEd
- 2 Expert sessions Natascha hosted while at TechEd, aptly named “Social Media: Why Should You Care?”
- John Appleby’s #nataschatoteched - A tale of two cities. about the experience on SCN
