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.

"There's a culture inside large companies like SAP that's much different from the way their brands are presented to the market. But almost nobody is speaking to that culture. We knew if we could entertain them, in a fresh way, in a relevant style, the song would be passed on," commented John Pollard, Morsekode client strategist and composer of the song. "What could be more entertaining than a rap song about enterprise business applications?"

MarketingSherpa, Inc. is a research firm that publishes case studies, benchmark data and how-to information to more than 173,000 marketing, advertising and public relations professionals. The organization reviewed more than 100 submissions from marketing professionals around the globe to choose the winners.

Listen to "The ERP of This Century"