How SAP Uses Communities to Connect With Customers

By Michael Stelzner
Published August 5, 2011

In this video I interview Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network.

Mark shares how SAP’s community of 2 million members from 200 countries is organized around business roles (such as developers, IT professionals and business process experts) to better engage with customers.

You’ll find out how SAP puts together content focused on specific needs to build their community. Listen to the tips to learn how you can get customers to participate in your community.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to get your customers to participate in your community
• The value in providing a platform where customers can get answers to their questions
• Why you need to look at customers as individuals and not brand accounts
• How to use Twitter to build your community
• How to use social media to give customers a platform for discussion
• How Twitter can improve your event marketing

And listen for these hot tips to get your customers involved in your online community:

• Find a problem, focus on solving that one issue and expand from there
• Do a lot of listening and responding; use the feedback to move you forward
• Expect to have a learning curve

Connect with Mark on Twitter @markyolton and check out the SAP Community Network which everyone is welcome to join.

Do you use social communities to connect with your customers? What tips do you have to share? Please leave them below.

Tags: community, customer community, customers, event marketing, mark yoltonb, michael stelzner, sap, sap community network, social media community, social media marketer