Israel Blechman

The role of marketers has long been to hunt out clients and, with the aid of salespeople, capture this prey. However, particularly with the maturation of the Internet, the tide is turning. For instance, in the vacation market now, many people hunt out the holiday they want themselves. They use the Internet to find and then make choices, sometimes interrogating potential sellers online. In industries like this, the role of marketing is to make sure that a company’s products or services are easily found online, and that the company responds effectively to potential customers.

(Mistakes Marketer Make by David Corkindale, published in the recent MIT Sloan Business Insight edition).

Tags: marketing 2.0, mit sloan, quotes

I have recently conducted a small research about Cisco’s social media presence for an Israeli software vendor that launched a new product alongside Cisco. locating Cisco’s activities within the social web wasn’t a very hard task to accomplish, since Cisco is absolutely everywhere. The vast and diverse participation of Cisco in various communities, social networks, and collaboration sites is really admirable (here is a Cisco presentation portraying a social media product launch strategy ). Add to that the social features Cisco has implemented within its own web site for customer, prospect and partner engagement and you get one of the most committed corporate social media adopters.

Cisco also employs social media tools and methods internally (Enterprise2.0) to “enable the company to accelerate productivity, growth, and innovation”.

It became a well known fact that successful web2.0/enterprise2.0/corporate social media adoption must be accompanied by an internal cultural change and have a senior sponsorship.  After reading John Chambers’ vision about collaboration and web2.0 as the new enterprise engines, I am certain that Cisco got the senior sponsorship issue covered…:)

Update: More from Om Malik

Tags: cisco, Enterprise2.0, Social media

Been a long and quiet Saturday with plenty of time to catch up with my long waiting reading materials. Following are some recommended inks.

• Innovation Loves a Crisis. Jonathan Schwartz wrote a publics memo about the financial markets crisis as a catalyst of innovation and new opportunities.
• Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media - Will It Continue? Bill Ives of FASTforward thinks it will.
• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples. A list gathered by Peter Kim comprised of 239 companies utilizing social media for marketing purposes. Admirable effort.
• IBM Rolls Out Bluehouse Social Office Suite. IBM is  publicly opening its Lotus Connections (in my opinion -  the most mature enterprise social computing environment available today) demo site.
• All Their Base are Belong to Us. Prof. Andrew McAfee is looking for E2.0 research questions suggestions.
• Crowdsourcing? Try expert sourcing. “Corporate America has hopped on the crowd sourcing bandwagon, but they may want to start considering another option: Expert sourcing.”
• An interview with Matt Rhodes of Freshnetworks. FreshNetworks is a social media agency from the UK and Matt is talking about the shift in the way companies engage with customers and prospects he witnesses.
• Shel Israel’s interview with IBM’s George Faulkner. Faulkner, editor in chief of IBM media library is talking with Shel Israel about IBM’s behind-the-firewall social media initiatives and experience.
• The Many Challenges of the Social Media. Jeremiah Owyang about the challenges social media professionals face and need to overcome.
• SocialText - the next generation. The E2.0 veteran (I’m following Ross Mayfield since 2004) is still innovating .