SAP recently launched Business Suite 7 in SAP’s New York offices in New York City, to a room was packed to capacity with journalists, analysts, and customers. They were shown a presentation, demonstration, and customer panel, followed by a live Q&A session.
There was also support for internet viewers, with a video feed and conference call, and after the event, the presentation, photos, and screen shots from the demonstration were made available.
Social Collaboration Around Events
But the interesting part of the event was the support for social networking and interaction outside the main event.
Online Presentation Room: An Adobe Connect room was available for SAP Mentors to view the slides as they were presented, and they could questions as part of the live Q&A session.
Connected Commentators: many of the attendees at the event used social media such as Skype and Twitter to interact with audiences outside the room. Click on the tag “#bs7” and “sapsuite7” to see the conversations that ensued.
Social Media Aggregation: This was the interesting part. Dennis Howlett, an industry analyst, blogger, and SAP Mentor set up a Cover-it-Live session on this blog sites that allowed participants to Tweet directly into a cover-it-live session. The result was a flood of comments — as he explained later in a blog posting:
“[there] was a richness and diversity of opinion and reaction along with clearing up ambiguities that I could not possibly have got without a lot of phone calling AFTER the event.”
“Of all those people included in that shot, I had only asked one person to participate. That gives you some idea of the value that tags can bring to these types of application and the extent of reach that can be achieved.”
Dennis went on to muse that:
“in the era of non-events, or rather scaled back events, applying these technologies to draw in more people could be an attractive proposition and a useful adjunct to the increasingly popular webinar format.”
The Results
To date, more than 230 media and blogger articles have been published in more than 20 countries, and the video replay has been watched by over 3,000 people.
Many thanks to Dennis, and everybody else who participated in pushing forward the frontiers of enterprise events using Web 2.0 technology!
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Image credits: coveritlive transcript and setup by dahowlett. Event photos: SAP