January 2006 A good rap song is hard to resist. Just ask the employees at SAP who helped spread a customized rap song to more than 85 percent of their colleagues. The rap song, written and produced by Morsekode, was the cornerstone of a viral marketing campaign that was honored this month by MarketingSherpa, Inc. as the favorite among the top 12 viral marketing campaigns of the year.

The campaign was developed by Morsekode to raise awareness for the agency's creative work for SAP and to generate sales leads within the organization. Built around a rap song titled "The ERP of This Century" (ERP stands for "Enterprise Resource Planning"), the campaign was intended to spread via e-mail forwarding, blogs and internal postings throughout SAP.

"We wanted to show SAP our expertise in the technology sector as well as our specific in-depth knowledge of SAP," commented agency principal, Mark Morse. "Our campaign met both objectives. When we call SAP today everyone has heard of us and our calls are returned – even at the senior levels. That's exactly what we needed."

According to Morse, the URL to the rap song was originally sent to 20 people within SAP. The e-mail did not include a forwarding request. However, within the first month the song was played more than 14,000 times and to this day is played thousands of times each month. In addition, it has been posted on blogs all over the world, on internal SAP discussion boards, and has even been used for internal meetings at SAP locations around the world.

Lyric here...

We all love ST22. I have seen many funny messages there. And this one, well it's a tribute to SAP short dumps. See for yourself and have fun.

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The manual to run the toaster would be approximately 10,000 pages long. The toaster would come with 2,500 switches which would all have to be set in an exact pattern and in a precise sequence in order to toast specific kinds of bread. Each pattern would be established by SAP's experts as the Best Practices method of toasting that kind of bread. It would take a team of basis and functional contractors about 1 year to configure the toaster in the best manner, and then another 6 months to test it. In the mean time, your entire family would need to attend extensive training classes on how to use the new toaster. In order to support end users and consultants, MIT would establish a list-serv for people to post questions and answers regarding toaster set-up and operation. Of course, the online help would randomly pop up in German. But once it was running, you'd get the best toast in the world.

What about others...