PR Squared: SAP's First (and Second!) Social Media News Releases

Via Thomas Pliel in Germany, I (belatedly) learned about SAP AG's first experiment with the Social Media News Release format. Not surprising that they chose a relatively low-impact announcement to try out the newfangled approach. (I hope that if the industry reaction was mellow, it's attributed to the relative value of the news --- still, this is a heartening sign of the SMNR's traction.)

... As I was drafting this post --- no, I am not kidding; it was near-miraculous coincidence --- I got an email from our MarketWire representative, who excitedly pointed out this latest SMNR by SAP: "SAP Developer Challenge Fosters Co-Innovation and Global Networking". Without getting into details about the relative strengths of the PRN MultiVu vs. MarketWire qualities of the two releases, this second release does win on style points. It's a far more elaborate, graphics-rich depiction of the SMNR's virtues.

The "Developer Challenge" news itself is also a pretty cool preview of how virtual worlds in Second Life can be integrated with real-world back-office systems (which will be critical if you ever want to shop at an "Amazon Store" in Second Life!):

"In the winning demo, a Second Life Resident avatar initiated a transaction by gesturing at the product she wished to buy from a Second Life storefront. The winning team members... demonstrated how updates to back-end data were reflected in real-time in the Second Life storefront."

The SAP SMNR even integrates a full-motion video of this SL transaction within the online release itself: you can choose to run the machinima demo without leaving the page, or click on over to the demo's higher-resolution version at Google Video.

Here's the bummer, though: check out how the German ERP giant posted its rich-media SMNR on its own website. All the new-media tsotchkes are missing-in-action! It looks like just another ho-hum release. A wasted opportunity to up the Company's cool-factor, eh? Hopefully the forward-thinkers who pushed for the SMNR format can work their way up through the brand guardians who must've put the kibosh on cool.

Tags: social+media, social+media+news+release, sap, marketwire, prnewswire, hrelease