Buzzgain

Much as the technology industry is claimed to be an early adopter of all things social, Web 2.0 and community, its not making as quick progress as people think it is.

SAP TechEd08 is the annual SAP developer conference, is currently taking place in Berlin. Our good friend Mike Prosceno (who authors a good blog in his own right BTW) is there and so are many of the other SAP folks we know. I dont believe its for lack of trying. They have a TechEd Blog, a full time twitter account just for the event and forums for discussion. Over 16,000 people attend the show worldwide and a good number (over 30%) just in Berlin. So we should expect a lot of sharing, blogging, twitter, etc. Right?

1. Tweet volume (# tweets) over the last few days barely broke 300 (Just to give you a comparison, BlogWorldExpo broke 3000+ tweets daily).

2. By the hour tracking shows tweeting was more frequent in the afternoon (very counterintuitive) than in the morning. This was again very different from BlogWorldExpo.

3. The people LOVED the show though, so SAP’s gotta be happy. Positive sentiments showed up overwhelmingly which is again very different from BlogWorldExpo (where it was at 55% positive).

4. The number of unique people that did twitter was less than 0.01%. That’s very low compared to the 43-55% for BlogWorldExpo. Maybe the SAP guys are just not the chatty types.

5. Here is the best chart. Who were the influencers? The top 7: SAPTechEd, Mike Prosceno, Mike Stopforth, IdaRose Sylvester, Vuk Trifkovic, Phillip Pott, Dennis Howlett.

I do have all the data on blog posts, delicious and the rest of social media to give you a comprehensive perspective, but this post is already too long.

Summary: Few people did share and talk, and the ones that did absolutely loved it.

Questions:

1. If even a technology company with leading edge early adopters (developers) is not very socially engaged, is the market still early? Or is social media just getting acceptance? What stage do you think we are?

2. What other questions would you want to have me address from a social media perspective (what reports do you wish to see) on SAP TechEd so we can get a more comprehensive perspective?

# Update: We were primarily tracking SAPTechEd, SAPTechEd08, TechEd as the keywords. Mike and Tom Raftery emailed me saying they are seeing a lot more twitter and delicious folks, who are using no associated words to describe the event.