Israel Blechman

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 .

I’m a very big fan Sam Lawrence, Jive’s CMO. I like his vision regarding the future of marketing and I think that he does a great job utilizing social media methods and tools in order to promote Jive’s social media tools and services.

Sam has developed the character of  the “enterprise octopus” to illustrate the concept of social media within the workplace, and the octopus has become both Sam’s and Jive’s trademark.

A couple of months ago Sam has published a blog post titled: “Norman Naysayer,” the Enterprise Octopus arch nemesis which I somehow managed to miss.  The post portrays the image of the  enterprise octopus nemesis, i.e. the corporate executive which will stand in the way of embracing social media tools and methods saying things like “Social is what you do outside of work”,  “Show me the financial justification for this investment”, “Show me a business process this improves” or “What if people post bad stuff?”.

I have met some Norman Naysayers during my social media voyage so far, most of them have repent and even became social media advocates, understanding that being a constant naysayer makes them innovation opposers in an innovation-centric era.

Being rational and responsible when making business decisions is not a bad thing of course,  but being a Norman Naysayer is just being frightened.

(From Sam Lawrence blog post)

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Via Bertrand Duperrin

Tags: collaboration, knowledge management, mindmap, presentation, tacit knowledge

Based on a recent Forrester report, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb is anticipating a great future for Enterprise2.0 (but not without hurdles):

A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

This change is not without its challenges. Although there is money to be made in the industry by vendors, Web 2.0 tools by their very nature are defined by commoditization; as is much of the new social media industry, a topic we touched on briefly here, when discussing how content has become a commodity.

For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:

1. I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as “consumer-grade” technology
2. Ad-supported web tools generally have “free” as the starting point
3. Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments

Seems to me like the greatest challenge facing Enterprise2.0 adoption,  the organizational culture, was left out of the report. Was it?

Larry Dignan also refers to the Forrester report and emphasis the future role of Social Networking within the enterprise:

The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t quite cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI.

update:Dion Hinchcliff’s take on the report.

Tags: definition, Enterprise2.0, Forrester, organizational culture, social networking