An enlightening article by Lara Lee on Forbes describes the advantages of managing Community Relations by businesses (embracing communities, creating them or helping them thrive): Communities cost less, they grow loyalty, maintain authenticity, drive innovation and support natural reinvention.
And here is a related presentation by Awareness:
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
Been a long and quiet Saturday with plenty of time to catch up with my long waiting reading materials. Following are some recommended inks.
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.
Yesterday we (at Blink) launched a blogospheric campaign for Peugeot 308 (Hebrew), which is about to arrive to Israel in the next couple of weeks. The campaign invites Israeli bloggers to join a cross-country tour with the car and blog about their experiences (they are encouraged to travel to and write about their favorite places, and not necessarily about the car itself). Currently bloggers are invited to register (and many already have), but eventually only seven of them will go on the tour. Each blogger will drive the car for two days and pass it on to the next blogger. The tour will start at the north and end at the most southern (and fun) point of Israel - Eilat. The tour will be followed by the 308BlogTour anchor blog. Needless to say - the Tour is first and foremost about the bloggers and their stories. This is the first time a commodity is being launched exclusively in the Israeli blogosphere, and I think it shows that the Israeli groundswell is finally getting the recognition it deserves from the local business community. Community engagement of this sort is very hard to achieve, especially since bloggers are suspicious when it comes to communicating with brands and organizations. We are getting great feedback from local members of the blogging community, most of them note that they also see this campaign as a blogging-awareness campaign, and we are very (!) happy about it. Yesterday must have been the “social media and cars day”, since besides our launch of the 308BlogTour, Shel Israel published a video interview with Bob Lutz from GM about his personal experience with social media. It is a very sincere and inspiring report about the role social media is playing in GM, and its impact on GM’s PR, marketing, media relations, customer and employee engagement. I have been following GM’s social media adoption for quite some time now and getting the “behind the curtain” perspective was very enlightening for me.
