Mark Yolton deeply engaged our audience about SAP’s stupendous success in collaboration through social software. Businesses see a fundamental shift to a dynamic world of deep, relentless change, which demand companies to adopt informal interactions to remain competitive; so they “need to accelerate the pace at which they respond to change, make decisions and overcome unforeseen obstacles”.
SAP provides businesses solutions, has 49,000 employees, 100,000+ customers, operates in 25 industries across all market segments and pulls in $15B in annual revenue.
Harnessing social media in B2B is challenging. The SAP Community Network is a ‘meaning-place’, where the community brews greater social innovation, social insight and social commerce. With 2+ million collaborators, the concoction is a heady mix of human psychology, value-creation, positioning, leveraging, delicate balancing, branding, giving and taking. One mistake could impact millions off the bottom-line.
Much of the network is curated and there is not much of automation by way of algorithms (for instance, there are no bots that identify patterns). The measurement of effectiveness and returns are proprietary but this is still a challenge.
This highly interactive session (every person asked a question) shattered another myth that big corporations cannot innovate enough. SAP is truly a conscious pioneer and a leader in adopting social software.