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

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.

Tags: 308BlogTour, Blogging, Coversation, GM, Shel Israel, Social media