~Contributed by Steve Benfield, Senior Director of Corporate Communications ~

Need a translation? Here you go: What In The World Is Wrong With “SGF?”

Make sense now? Surely I don’t need to spell out SGF for an audience of SAS users, do I? Well, a quick Google search will tell you that SGF is an acronym for Smart Game Format, a common file format. That’s what I mean, right?

Um, wrong!

Of course, what I really mean by SGF is SAS Global Forum, the premier event for SAS professionals worldwide and the largest single gathering of SAS customers and prospects. Isn’t it obvious? Well, maybe it is to us, as SAS employees, but we have what Dan and Chip Heath, co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, call “the curse of knowledge.” These brothers explain the curse of knowledge as the point where “we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.” What SGF stands for may not be so clear to people outside the established SAS user community. This is particularly true for newcomers to the community and potential customers. That is one problem with the use of acronyms in marketing communications: the assumption that your target audience understands them.

Maybe you think I’m being hypercritical of the SGF acronym. After all, when we use it in the context of the conference communications, everyone will get it and almost no one has a problem with it. But before you “LOL,” let me tell you about the kerfuffle I created the week before this year’s big event in Seattle.

It started when SGF Connect Online came to my attention, a concept that I wholeheartedly support, by the way. But, when I saw the name of the online tool, alarm bells went off.

Why?

Well, some of you may remember that our premier user event used to be called SAS Users Group International, more commonly known as SUGI. People were really attached to the SUGI acronym. They felt all warm and fuzzy about it. But one problem with it was that the SAS in SUGI had been all but lost. So, a few years ago, when we were collaborating with the Users Group Executive Board on refreshing the conference brand, we agreed that we would not let “SAS” be dropped from the new name because we want newcomers to feel just as included in the event as our long-time users. And our legal team weighed in on the matter as well.

Therein lies the bigger problem with the acronym: the legal issue. You see, SAS® is a registered trademark. And, legally, trademarks should never be abbreviated. We run the risk of minimizing its value -- and even losing its trademark status -- if we use it in abbreviations too frequently. We can avoid that risk by not using acronyms like “SGF,” but we need your help.

What do we do now, in 2010, when conference literature with the acronym has already been printed, shipped and handed out at the event? And the Twitter hashtag (#SGF10) has already been created? And SGF Connect Online is getting a lot of traffic? And people are busy tweeting away and typing SGF in e-mails to customers?

Well, we do the best we can. Certainly, we didn’t change the Twitter hashtag for the 2010 event; it was too late in the game. And it was way too late to call the SAS truck back to campus and reprint conference materials. But now that we all know better, we can make an effort to change for 2011. We’ll get back on the straight and narrow path. We’ll show good faith intentions. We’ll look forward to next year, when we’ll be more diligent about protecting the SAS Global Forum brand.

You can help us by tweeting the hashtag #SASGF11 for the 2011 conference, and spelling out the full name of the conference in your own blog posts and other written materials. And let’s all hope that April in Seattle will be remembered as the best SAS user group conference ever!