Erred on the side of more marketing?

I’m writing this blog because I’m naive on social media etiquette. I learned a great deal about social media last week through Vijay’s blog , subsequent comments and Dennis’s blog.

I really loved reading Vijay’s blog because he explains things in very simple language. He says

My own opinion is that SAP handled this in a rather heavy handed way. Looking at it with a quantitative lens, probably SAP got the results they wanted. They took over a good part of the traffic with hash tags #OOW and #OOW12 with HANA content. They clearly did a lot more than just story correction. As much as social pundits might enjoy the idea of marketing and corporate communications using social for more things – I think the net result is just more overhead for people who use these platforms, and event organizers. The need for sophisticated filtering just got more important and troublesome, in my mind.

Sophisticated filtering is the solution? Just like Spam or junk folder in email systems, should Twitter give user an ability to Exclude tweets containing specific words?

HANA is clearly superior to the EXA* products in what it does.

In this blog, Vijay states:

I do expect SAP to come out with a larger number of HANA customers – I am guessing 700 +/- 10%. Any more than that will definitely make their competition sit up and take notice in my opinion.

Is 700 +/- 10% customers really large from SAP standpoint? If the competition is not already sitting up and taking notice, then I see a problem, not small one; a huge one for a company who wanted to be #2 DB vendor by 2015. And remember I happened to read this blog and LJE’s keynote on the same day and you can imagine how bad this news(combined) was for those who have been following SAP-HANA story for 2/3+ years and the shareholders.

How did SAP get here? My opinion: SAP didn’t market SAP-HANA as well as they should have. They continued to err on the side of less(marketing).

Result:

• In 2011, LJE’s answer to SAP-HANA was Exalytics (Exadata is one component of Exalytics);and SAP argued, correctly, Exalytics-HANA comparison is not apples to apples.
• In 2012, LJE announced Exadata-X3; while announcing Exadata-X3, what he mentioned about SAP-HANA was just unbelievable. Steve Lucas summarized:

• Let’s just say it’s taken me 24 hours to get my eyebrows to lower to their normal position

  Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sap-steve-lucas-larry-ellison-hana-2012-10#ixzz28eLcyQKe

• What LJE meant was that Exadata-X3 is state of the art, futuristic technology, not comparable to SAP-HANA! Just in one year, he went from offering a comparable solution to better than SAP-HANA with only one component of 2011’s comparable solution! Does this make sense? I’ve not seen anyone – except SAP – discussing this so it seems did make sense to almost every non-SAP individual. I’m not trying to support SAP but I’m just trying to question the logic behind LJE’s claim.

In order for me to do my job and invest wisely, I need to know all facts. If Exadata-X3 is really better than SAP-HANA, I would like to know now than later. It seems SAP realized the mistake that they were erring on the side of less marketing. So they began a campaign – which it seems – including tweeting about SAP-HANA to hashtags OOW and OOW12. LJE made Exadata-X3 claim in Oracle Open World ’12 so SAP’s tweeting to the hashtags OOW and OOW12 made sense.

Currently several SAP Mentors believe SAP crossed the line by tweeting about SAP-HANA to Oracle’s hashtags. In the past, SAP erred on the side of less marketing. It didn’t work. It failed miserably. So did they start the campaign with the objective to err on the side of more marketing?

I see a parallel between Informix/Oracle Vs Oracle/SAP-HANA.

The Informix and Oracle Billboard Wars on highway 101.

The battle soon escalated into each company’s advertising, and Oracle even parked a mobile billboard in front of Informix’s headquarters.

Do you believe that SAP’s usage of Oracle hashtags is more intrusive and unethical than Oracle’s parking a  mobile billboard in front of Informix’s headquarters? Vijay’s recommendation for more sophisticated filtering feature in Twitter is great one.

Many at Informix wished the billboard wars had never started; however no one suggested what Informix or Oracle did was wrong. 

many at Informix wished the billboard wars had never started. It seemed we had awakened the eight-hundred pound gorilla and it was coming directly at us.