The other day I filed an expose of Oracle’s less than respectful treatment of enterprise bloggers. Part of that story centred around the contrast between the way Oracle sees potential conflicts and how SAP has developed what is now a vibrant, growing community of developers, business people and commenters.
I mentioned the way the relationship between Ed Herrmann, Dan McWeeney and Mike Prosceno has gorwn. The relevant piece from Mike’s blog is worth the repeating:
When a customer becomes a friend and a friend tells you that one of the reasons that being a customer is fun, at least in part, is because of you – WOW. How do you top that?
The question some must be asking is whether this is not-so-subtle PR spin to create a feel good factor. While in Munich at SAP TechEd, I met with Mike, Ed and Dan. I wanted to test Mike’s assertion so asked the question directly. Dan was surprised I should ask but confirmed the comment and context.
This is interesting because several mainstream press seemed perplexed about the relationship that exists between SAP and the blog community in general. An IDG beat reporter said: “I find it hard to put up with this touchy feely stuff SAPs doing right now. Makes me suspicious.” So it should. It’s different. It’s not an arms length relationship in the past sense of vendor/commenter positions.
SAP wants to influence certain people and has chosen a particular way of achieving that. It’s open and up front about it. It believes part of that comes from recognizing there is no longer a specific distinction between press, analysts, bloggers or for that matter customers. SAP sees people as individual centres of influence. That’s interesting because it breaks down communication silos and puts ‘us’ all on a more or less equal footing. There will always be distinctions, depending upon the person’s perceived ‘value’ and in truth the model is not perfect. It is however a lot better than the cat ‘n’ mouse game we used to play where sifting fact, fiction and fantasy was a lot more difficult.
Two questions that anyone have to ask themselves are these:
- Does the way I’m treated influence what I say? The answer should be in the affirmative.
- Am I being sucked into a reality distortion field and missing the real story? That’s much harder because none of us is entirely objective. If we were, we would not be human.
What about the upside? As Thomas Otter remarked: “Companies have to decide what they want. People talking on the basis of half baked information and assumptions or from facts obtained from the inside.” I’d add – and from the outside as well.
