Judy says I only asked SAP “softball questions”
Judy (not sure what her last name is, but her about page says she’s a PR person) makes a point that SAP confuses bloggers with journalists and that I only asked softball questions.
She’s right (about me).
I did only ask softball questions. Why? Cause I was still trying to figure out what SAP is all about. I don’t cover them day in and day out.
But, now that I’ve done my softball interview (it’s hard to get into any depth when an executive is only available for five minutes in between other meetings) I’ll be able to step up my game too.
I’m looking at the SAP coverage on Google News, though, and I don’t see too much controversy. Is it a journalist’s job to stir up controversy where there is none? Or is it to ask questions and report on what the answers are?
Not to mention they have open forums where you can see lots of controversial things discussed. I learned, for instance, that there was a recent controversy when SAP came out with a toolset for developing ABAP (SAP’s language) and it only ran on the new versions of SAP. But, even there the controversy ended well and SAP backported that tool.
Anyway, Bloggers got different badges than full-time journalists did (they had badges that say “press” on them).
Now, if HP invited me to a board press conference today, you better believe I wouldn’t be asking “softball questions.” But on my first five-minute meeting with an executive? What was I going to ask?
UPDATE: Charlie Wood is still at the SAP event (as a blogger) and gives more details.
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September 13th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Actually I was referring to the questions asked by bloggers in the press conference, not your 1:1 with Shai Agassi. No personal criticism intended ;) I think it’s great that SAP is reaching out to the bloggers in its ecosystem of partners, but my point is that I don’t think it’s appropriate to include them in the press conference. As you say, it’s not the job of journalists to stir up controversy where there is none, but it is their job to ask the hard questions that dig behind the corporate message.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Judy: well, I wasn’t in the press conference, but if I had been, I would probably have been listening to what the pros were asking too. Questioning people is a skill that’s acquired over time. Asking hard questions requires having a lot of knowledge of the space and also the company at hand.
Maybe they didn’t have the right bloggers there? I don’t know who was there and who wasn’t, unfortunately. The PodTech guy we sent (Michael Johnson) is a professional journalist and worked for NPR, among others.
And, did the bloggers take anything away from the professionals? If not, then what harm is there in including them in such an event?
September 13th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Robert
Most people *research* a lot about the person and the company to find the 3 to 5 most important pressing questions that matter. These are typically not softball. Again, you are doing a great job given limited time you probably have, but here is what I would have asked. These may not be great, but its a start:
1. Shai, you have 20,000+ customers in the high end business that’s good, but you have only made few inroads into medium and small business. Do you have a strategy or are you saying that your software works only for large businesses.
2. The NetWeaver project is a huge undertaking for most customers. How are you convincing them the make the investment to ugprade? After having spent millions on just implementing SAP are they still willing to invest again on NetWeaver ugprades?
3. How are you going to keep up innovation if you just promised your customers NO new upgrades until 2010? That is a long time between upgrade releases.
Again, just a few thoughts.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
“But on my first five-minute meeting with an executive? What was I going to ask?”
I like how you threw “five-minute” in there, as you definitely spent more time than that with Bill Gates ;)
September 13th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Mukund: >>Most people *research* a lot about the person and the company to find the 3 to 5 most important pressing questions that matter.
I didn’t know I was going to be interviewing Shai until a few minutes before the interview. Sometimes you don’t get time to do research (I had barely enough time to hit Google and learn a little bit about who he was).
But, those are good questions! One thing I like about blogs is we can even invite their executives over here to answer them! No need to wait for a press conference.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
TechEd Bloggers Accused of Bias
An “opinionated PR professional and self-confessed grammar geek” thinks SAP is confusing bloggers with journalists. There’s certainly some confusion going on, but it’s not on SAP’s part.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Richard: Bill was one where I researched and had a list of questions to ask. But I only got 17 minutes with him. That’s just not enough time to really get meaty. Plus, there wasn’t much way I was going to ask him a really tough question. If I had, he would have had a smooth answer (he gets those all the time) and then I would have earned a reputation for being a jerk, too.
Which plays into this as well. If you just get access to something you didn’t have access to before you’ll be careful not to blow the access for next time. I’ll cop to doing a bit of that myself. But, like I said, there’s always the comment area of my blog to get hot and heavy about a topic.
September 13th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Pressing towards the 3 to 5 questions may be a model to work from in the development stages of a product or service. “What do we consider to be the 3 to 5 most pressing questions about our product or service?” The connection here for me is that many of the groups we work with wait for the critics to ask the questions and then are left to react rather than proact and anticipate the questions as the design and development process begins and continue to revisit these ideas.
Have you seen this phenomenon recently where groups wait to react?
September 13th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
[...] Scoble reports on accusations that the SAP TechEd bloggers are biased. Judy says SAP is confusing bloggers with journalists. [...]
September 13th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
The comments under Judy “Whoever”’s post actually became a pretty good conversation; not much to add there.
“asssuck”, congratulations, you’ve arrived to a new high today ….
September 13th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Robert: I wasn’t suggesting you didn’t handle your Gates interview well. I liked that video! I was just pointing out you have spoken to executives on camera before ;)
September 13th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Heh, I’ve done two SAP implementations and I’m STILL wondering what they’re all about.
My best guess: provide a living for a million SAP consultants.
September 14th, 2006 at 12:42 am
Robert, I’m under impression that you have mainly used and evaluated products aimed to the masses. They are simple, user-friendly and fun to use. They look cool and have cool-sounding names.
Take a deep look at the SAP solutions and you realize that you have been playing with the kid’s toys in the past.
Here’s a link to SAP Help Portal:
http://help.sap.com
Check the terminology, the layout, the component names.
HELP was the word that came to my mind when I first got there.
Jump to the SAP world is a big one - it takes some time to accumulate all the information and see what is relevant.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:05 am
[...] Posted by Peter Mitton on 06 Oct 2006 at 11:05 am | Tagged as: General I am always surfing around, trying to find interesting bits of Salesforce knowledge. Normally, I kept that information to myself or shared it with my team. But with the start of this blog, I feel a need to share that information when I find it. As a new blogger, questions like this are important to me. In his post, Kingsley at SuccessForce writes… After Scoble and Charlie Wood blogged about how well SAP treated bloggers at their conference, I’ve been wondering - how can we treat our bloggers better? [...]