As Shelly Milam mentioned in an earlier post, the annual SAP conference, SAPPHIRE NOW, was a great social media success. In addition to her points, I wanted to touch on two other strategies that Page One and SAP developed to encourage quality levels of social media activity.

1. Use of official hashtags
The conference underwent a name change, from Sapphire 09 to SAPPHIRE NOW. To make sure social media users were clear about the re-brand, Page One made sure to use the #sapphirenow hashtag in the majority of our tweets from the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed. This helped to ensure that the new name would gain visibility before the conference started. We didn’t want to risk having the Twitterverse split up mentions of the SAPPHIRE NOW conference by using more than one hashtag when they tweeted about the event.

Hashtags allow tweets to be grouped together so that they can be easily located via Twitter search. For a large conference event like SAPPHIRE NOW, the hashtags were particularly useful for three groups of people. Many conference attendees in Orlando and Frankfurt were active live-tweeters who used the #sapphire to tag their updates, especially during the keynote speeches, which were timed to be presented to both locations simultaneously. SAP also launched an innovative website that allowed people to attend the conference virtually, and many online attendees were live-tweeting while streaming the keynotes. Finally, for people who could not attend the conference physically or virtually, the #sapphirenow stream was publishing such a high volume of tweets that it provided them a play-by-play of the conference’s most important events.

The #sapphirenow hashtag collected over 12,131 mentions by the end of the conference on May 19. On May 18, during the executive keynote speeches by Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, the hashtag was the number 4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S. This uniform use of the correct hashtag would not have happened without establishing #sapphirenow as the official hashtag weeks before the conference.

2. Designating multiple routing paths for the Twitter concierge
In addition to being the official voice of the conference, one of the functions of the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed was to act as a concierge for attendees who needed assistance with anything from finding the nearest bathroom, getting more information on a certain session, or navigating through the virtual website. Many attendees asked questions via @reply or DM, and Page One and SAP worked together to designate the proper routing path for each type of question and for each location (Frankfurt, Orlando, or online). Each routing path led to the appropriate SAP employee either on-location or back at SAP headquarters. This made sure that every question asked would be answered as soon as possible via Twitter.

A Twitter feed cannot just spew out information. It needs to listen. Social media platforms are expected to meet a higher standard when it comes to customer service. Corporate accounts are expected to have a personal voice behind the brand that engages with its followers and fans. Social media users like to know that their opinions are being heard, and when the @SAPPHIRENOW feed responded to followers who had conference-related questions, they were appreciative of our help. This helps spread positive content about the Twitter feed, and it lets our followers know that they are important to us.

The development of both these strategies helped to make @SAPPHIRENOW a successful Twitter feed leading up to and during the conference. An overwhelming majority of the Twitter conversations about the conference were extremely positive and attendees were very impressed with SAPPHIRE NOW’s social media initiatives. Key takeaway: in social media, a little pre-planning can lead to a high payoff.

Last week Page One finished up a social media engagement with SAP to support the SAPPHIRE NOW user conference.  This was the first year SAP put a social strategy together for the conference and Page One was tapped to manage the Twitter feed and Facebook Page.  By the last day of the event, the Facebook Page had 3,332 fans, with 194 wall posts and 115 comments, and the Twitter feed had 2,037 followers, with over 780 retweets and over 12,130 uses of the #sapphirenow hashtag.

The team is still working on the final analysis reports, but I thought I’d share a couple of the tactics we used.  These two seemed to  work out especially well:

Influencer Identification and Outreach

SAP’s sheer size is both a blessing and a curse.  While a large ecosystem definitely helps amplify social messages there are an overwhelming number of groups within SAP and they all tend to have different goals and objectives.  One of our first tasks was to identify all the potential external and internal influencers and organize a master list.  We then developed a strategy for outreach to help amplify our reach.  Using a combination of automated social media monitoring tactics and good old fashion direct phone calls and in-person meetings, Page One was able to pull together a list of external influencers (analysts, media, bloggers, SAP Mentors, SAP Alum, and customers) and identify their social media locations.  We then went to work identifying the internal influencers (employees, partners attending the conference, marketing teams, speakers) and organized their various messages and goals for the conference.  All of this came together in a master multi-tabbed Google Doc spreadsheet that the team accessed on a daily basis to reference which assets to promote, who to reach out to, and when to push certain messages.  A master content calendar of our daily Tweets and Facebook posts was also created and regularly updated to share with SAP so the internal teams could help retweet and re-post our content.

Live Social Media Coverage

During the month’s leading into the conference we worked with SAP to develop a “week-of” Twitter and Facebook strategy to facilitate conference conversations through social media channels.  While there were many on-site programs that came together last week (a Twitter Concierge program, social media Q&As during keynotes, video content from the show floor, jumbotrons displaying tweets at the Santana concert, etc.) the real gem was the Social Ambassadors program.  In addition to the main @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed, we had a group of social ambassadors on the ground at both conferences that live tweeted highlights each day.  Each ambassador reported on a specific conference topic and acted as the real-time eyes and ears on what happened at Orlando and Frankfurt. They were given a dedicated Twitter feed, topic hashtag and FlipCam to help upload videos straight from the floor, as well as share their thoughts and insights on the latest news that came out of SAPPHIRE NOW.

Page One has been asked to provide social media support for quite a few conferences in the past few years, ranging all the way from Google I/O to McAfee FOCUS.  While there are still no silver bullets, each time it seems like we pick up a few more tips and tricks to make the social media experience better for the conference attendees.  What tactics have you found most useful for conference promotions?

The social media campaign we just completed for the SAP Open Tennis match was especially challenging since we only had a month to get 22 million impressions for their Twitter content on a brand new feed. Starting from zero, we got 3,500 Twitter followers, a 30 percent engagement rate on the feed, and more than 500 visits from the feed to the Ticketmaster site for online purchase of tennis tickets.

Many of the activities involved leveraging existing tennis communities, including fans of the Australian Open which took place a few weeks prior to the SAP Open.

This is a great example of how social media can be used to acquire new customers.

In 2009, most of our experience was with social media campaigns designed for customer retention or customer engagement. For example, the @CiscoGeeks Twitter feed engages existing customers of Cisco routers and switches. Right now, we’re running fun contests for existing Cisco customers to share pictures of networking equipment with each other.

Typical social campaigns are based on self-publishing models that push out product information, discounts and prizes from central places like a Twitter feed or Facebook Fan Page. For example, we’re in the early stages of a campaign with VMware to manage content and interaction on Twitter, Facebook and the corporate blog. Since most customers of VMware’s vCloud Express product are still in beta, initial efforts have focused on publishing information to people that are either using the beta product or a related VMware product.

Some social media campaigns are similar to opt-in email marketing campaigns where the target audience is already familiar with the product.

However, new types of social media campaigns are targeting new “green field” customers. The SAP Open Tennis campaign is a good example of the new type of social media campaign designed for new customer acquisition.

Some of the techniques we used included:

* leveraging existing tennis communities and engaging with people interested in related topics like the Australian Open;

* joining discussions around famous people like Andy Roddick who won the SAP Open Tennis tournament in 2009;

* managing contests, including one with a prize of a signed Andy Roddick tennis racket;

* getting people that were going to the tennis tournament to pass the word on to their friends that weren’t going to the tournament.

The last technique is the key to success of any social media campaign designed for customer acquisition.  We’re tracking message distribution by counting the number of ReTweets and hashtag use on Twitter.  On Facebook, we’re focusing more on measuring user-generated content.

Although I think that the majority of social media campaigns in 2010 will still be focused on customer retention and engagement, I’m really excited about the opportunities to work on more customer acquisition campaigns as well. I’ve already started developing a new campaign for a secret client to acquire new customers from a competitor’s base.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Let’s end the fantasy. Social media monitoring tools (and I’ve seen a lot of them) do not produce comprehensive “reports” or “dashboards” that are all that useful to marketing executives. At least not to the type of marketing executives who have a deep understanding of social media. Tools don’t determine strategy or provide usable analysis. People do. Tools dig up a ton of data and information. In order to build a strategy around a set of findings from that information, you need to drive your own process informed by ultimate business goals.

At Page One PR, we’ve assisted companies like SAP and Cisco with their various monitoring campaigns. We’ve learned over time that useful “monitoring” really means in-depth analysis of a problem, using data from our own manual observations and social media keyword searches, to achieve a specific result or make a strategy recommendation to a client. While these campaigns come in all shapes and sizes – from an assessment of a client’s existing social media implementation to an analysis of a competitor’s online marketing programs – we believe that most monitoring projects can be performed according to a five-step process. Blame our public relations pedigree, but we believe a message-driven approach to monitoring will produce the best results.

Step 1: Audience Segmentation

At the beginning of the monitoring project, whether your focus is your own company or your competitors, it’s important to gain an understanding of the various audiences that the observed marketing or PR activity is attempting to reach. Ultimately, you will want to know whether or not content is positioned and delivered effectively for specific target audiences.

Step 2: Message Categories

Dividing monitoring parameters by major conversation themes and marketing messages focuses the monitoring project on organized, actionable data. You don’t need to know about every John Doe or spam bot that happened to mention your new product. You do need to turn a wild social media jungle into key findings that lead to specific strategic recommendations.

Step 3: Origination and Delivery

After discovering and building a list of key themes and messages, it is important to determine the location of those messages, who originated specific conversations, and how messages were distributed. For example, some of the questions you may ask yourself include:

– How is your company driving messages through its own social media channels?
– What social media channels contain important conversations?
– Do conversations link across multiple channels?
– How are external actors changing the focus of conversations or seeding new message themes?
– How are messages spreading virally?

Step 4: Goals

What are you or your competitors trying to achieve through marketing or PR activities? In order to determine the effectiveness of messages, it’s important to understand the purpose of those messages. At the end of the day, social media needs to achieve a business goal or it’s not worth doing.

Step 5: Effectiveness of Marketing/PR Messages

Try and answer two questions: did the messages reach the right target audience and what action did the target audience take upon exposure to the messages? These questions will help you determine if your campaign or a competitor’s was effective. If key influencers are commenting on blogs, “retweeting” messages, and making content go viral across multiple social media channels, you need to have a deep understanding of this process and how conversations are framed in specific contexts. Understanding effectiveness in this sense requires the kind of careful analysis that an automated tool simply cannot perform by itself.

The Page One social media team now starts every social media campaign with some form of monitoring to ensure our developed strategy and plan is based upon detailed research and analysis. Although this process seems simple enough, monitoring is by no means an easy task. Especially on complex projects, it’s important to have a team that carefully deliberates on analysis and strategy and remains vigilant in linking the findings to the ultimate goal of the project.

What do you think of this process? Have you used a different approach successfully for in-depth analysis of social media campaigns and monitoring results? I’ll even invite the plethora of tool-makers in the space to share their thoughts. Although if you say your tool is a cure-all for PR and marketing professionals, expect a robust debate!