My interest in social media has led me to do a bit of consulting in the corporate communications area. Tomorrow I’m up in Auckland for the day talking to a large corporate about driving web traffic, part of the discussion will, I hope, revolve around developing and implementing a corporate communications strategy that is in keeping with the modern, inclusive, collaborative and dissent allowing culture.

With this in mind I was interested to read this post regarding both Oracle and SAP and their respective communication policies. It seems that SAP encourages bloggers to talk about them, to the extent of subsidising their travel and accommodation to SAP events around the world. Oracle on the other hand has a very “hands off” approach – inviting bloggers but no more.

Now those with conspiracy theories would say that SAP gets the all good press from a brainwashed media, this is in fact not the case. SAP gets as much criticism from the sponsored bloggers as Oracle does, however on the larger scale they gain the kudos of being seen to be encouraging dialogue and at the very least they get some good ideas from what the bloggers are writing.

So NZ corporates – learn something from SAP – include, encourage, co-opt and if needs be facilitate – the world, and your business, will be better for it.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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