Welcoming our Resource Centers to SAP PartnerEdge!

We've been in a microsite frenzy lately! The past couple of months have been taken up with creating partner resource sites for SAP and some of their key alliance partners. These one-stop enablement sites have been extremely well-received as they bring together a wealth of information and assets into single locations optimized for fast and easy usage. Now, the sales force and regional marketing people can quickly get the info they need to do their jobs without having to contact a zillion people or hunt fruitlessly through a load of disparate repositories. Working closely with SAP IT, we were able to integrate the sites directly into SAP's partner portal and enable access via the partners' single sign-on. We're still working on one more site but was too excited to wait to post after seeing this drop-down on the partner portal home page!

Happy Belated HANA!

Cleaning up my desktop, I discovered a couple pics from July that I didn't get a chance to post. It was a whirlwind time as we were flat-out working on a number of big projects for SAP. Not really a good excuse though to forget to say "Happy first-year anniversary!" to SAP HANA, the fastest growing product in SAP's history.

We've been honored to have been a small part of HANA's meteoric success, as we got to design and create the product box, server chassis and faceplates as well as pieces like this big timeline visual behind Dr. Vishal Sikka as he celebrated the anniversary on a live webcast. So, happy belated and thanks for all the memories!

Mobile Marketing Event: Our Take on Their Takeaways

If you haven’t been thinking about mobile marketing and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, it’s time to get a move on (ha ha, get it? Oh, never mind.) We’re seeing many of our clients dipping their toes into these waters to a greater or lesser degree, and with greater or lesser success.

A recent BC Association of Integrated Marketers (BCAIM) event brought together a panel of “mobile marketing industry experts” to discuss this still-nascent medium. Three takeaways from the event were:

• Mobile marketing isn’t cheap. Take what you would normally allocate for a TV spend – and put that same amount towards mobile instead. (Agreed, you can’t deliver usable, effective mobile apps on the cheap – although this directive sounds a bit self-serving.)

• Don’t plan more than 8 months out. As new technology is continually being introduced, and discontinued, the reality of planning your marketing for a full year is a thing of the past. (Honestly, we find in the software industry, we’re lucky if marketing plans are available one quarter in advance.)

• 90% of text messages are read within 6 hours. If you’re looking to reach your audience with relevant and timely messages, look at text messaging. Email marketing won’t deliver these kinds of results. (Although personally, I am very annoyed by spam text messages so I think you need to be very, very careful about permission marketing here. I also think this response rate will drop wildly as more marketers spam, I mean, use this medium. Remember when emails got high response rates too?)

During the luncheon, there were many discussions about other emerging technologies (hello near field!), however there was a consistent message throughout: mobile marketing cannot be ignored and is critical to the success of every integrated marketing plan.

Our caveat: don’t just jump on creating an app just because everyone else has one. Deliver mobile marketing solutions that address a need, deliver useful and usable content, build engagement and strengthen customer relationships.

Interested in exploring this topic more? Read the CMO article on Why Mobile Marketers Shouldn’t Obsess Over Apps and Harvard Business Review on Building a Mobile App is Not a Mobile Strategy. Want to see a brilliant example (that probably did cost as much as a TV campaign + media buy)? Check out the Guinness Passport to Greatness Cantonese speaking mobile app, pictured above.

Happy Hallowe'en: Free Productivity Treats

As a virtual agency, our team is distributed far and wide. We have team members who live in eastern Canada, western Canada, central US and all points in between. We even have our contingent in Germany plus extended team members in Switzerland and Hawaii. And tying us all together are some excellent free productivity tools – Google docs for up-to-the-minute status reports and budgets, Skype for calls, instant messaging and screenshares, and SAP StreamWork for online collaboration and document repositories.

A recent blog post by our friends at Capulet Communications offers a useful primer on other free treats for your digital marketing toolbox. They included another fav freebie, Wordle. Can't call this a productivity tool though as I can spend literally hours playing at making word clouds, like this one showing Hotfusion services!

From Sea to Sky

One of the many great things about Vancouver as an event city is the easy proximity to one of the most inviting all-season resorts in the world – Whistler, British Columbia. You can drive along the breathtaking Sea to Sky Highway and arrive in less than 2 hours from downtown or charter float planes for an unforgettable flight, as we did for an executive summit portion of a software conference we managed in Vancouver.

While Whistler is best known as a ski resort, one of my favorite times to visit is right now during the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Every year, the entire village participates in the annual “Turkey Sale” with bargains galore for the skiier, boarder or après-skiier. The weekend combines everything a visitor could want – hotel savings, excellent food, gorgeous scenery, lovely walks, discount shopping and even a fantastic farmer’s and artisan’s market. If you’re running or attending an event in Vancouver and have the time, a side trip to Whistler is well worth it.