November 19th, 2009

Hello Salesforce Chatter, so long Yammer?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:37 pm

Categories: CRM, Corporate Social Networking, Dreamforce 2009, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing, Salesforce.com, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force Management, Sales, Jennifer Leggio

Salesforce.com yesterday announced its new Salesforce Chatter at Dreamforce 2009. Dubbed as an enterprise collaboration application and social development platform, Salesforce Chatter promises to provide a secure social network within the enterprise, complete with individual profiles, status updates, feeds, applications, as well as integration with existing popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. “Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need.”

When the product is available in 2010, not only will companies be able to use the standalone Salesforce Chatter features in new applications within the enterprise in a more secure fashion than one-off cloud offerings, Salesforce.com plans to immediately make social its other 135,000 native Force.com applications.

This is a good opportunity for Salesforce.com, as enterprise hesitation over pure in-the-cloud social networks is rampant — and legitimate. With Salesforce.com being a trusted enterprise collaboration and application development solution already, this could up-level the use of such social enterprise applications, and bring more Twitter and Facebook data, into the enterprise.

Salesforce Chatter’s biggest threat seems to be that of SocialText, which provides similar services and offers compelling enterprise-worthy collaboration and social networking services. It’s likely now, however, that current Salesforce.com customers would choose the incumbent offering, so Salesforce Chatter adoption might grow through current user base first.

Other competitors, such as Yammer, may not have as much of a leg to stand on in competing with Salesforce Chatter. While Yammer has made some enterprise traction, most companies that use it are smaller to mid-size businesses versus large enterprises. Most large enterprises with whom I’ve spoken about Yammer express trepidation over the service’s pricing and community model. At the same time, SMBs with whom I have spoken about Yammer don’t seem to have the same security or expense concerns, so Yammer could stay a viable solution for the smaller markets. The introduction of Salesforce Chatter, and the already strong SocialText solution, should knock Yammer out of enterprise consideration.

“We are constantly evaluating tools that promise to increase the productivity and collaboration of our employees. Salesforce Chatter recognizes that enterprise collaboration is more than connecting people, but also connecting content and apps. With Chatter, collaboration within our company will truly come alive, all from within our trusted Salesforce apps,” said Daniel R. Chiazza of Harris Interactive.

November 12th, 2009

What the duck? Aflac gets quackin' on Facebook

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Aflac Inc., Branding, Benefits, Vertical Industries, Marketing, Human Resources, Jennifer Leggio

Usually in my Fortune 500 series I take a look at a company’s broad social media strategy. But this time I decided to have a little bit more fun with it and dig into one company’s use of Facebook in terms of supporting its brand awareness as well as its charitable giving. That company is Aflac. You know, the insurance company with the endearing little duck.

Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.

The Aflac “Cause”
With the Causes application, users have created more than 300,000 charitable causes that have benefited 60,000 nonprofits in the United States and Canada, raising more than $14 milliion in total. Aflac was able to raise $1.16 million to benefit the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, making it the largest sponsored campaign in the history of Causes.

The company donated $1 for every Facebook member who joined its Cause page, as well as matched all monitary donations. As of today, the Aflac Cancer Center Cause has more than 1 million members. According to Laura Kane, Aflac’s vice president of external communications, the Causes application was chosen because it seemed to have potential to reach a wide audience.

“The fundraiser was very much a test of the application to determine whether it would be an effective platform –which it clearly was,” Kane said.

The company is still determining whether or not it will use the Causes application for another fundraiser, though the Aflac Cancer Center is the company’s main charitable focus and fundraising continues year-round through other means.

Just Ducky
From a brand awareness perspective, the Aflac duck has more than 164,000 fans. The company uses this page to interact with users, disseminate company information as well information about its charitable cause, and promote contests for friends of the duck. What I found most endearing about the fan page is how the duck’s “personality” shows through with its individual updates. Some are more serious, of course, but you can get the duck’s thoughts on even mundane daily things such as Halloween candy or even fantasy football.

While the duck’s fanship might be modest in comparison to some other consumer brands, this particular fan page is an example of how using a brand’s character as a cornerstone to a social media program is better than a static corporate presence. In direct comparison, Aflac the company has a page too, but it only has just over 2K fans in comparison to the duck’s 164,000. Aflac was smart about engaging the little duck to create customer loyalty and engagement through its Facebook presence.

Aflac isn’t currently tracking how its Facebook fan interaction is turning into sales of insurance policies, but more tracking it as a brand awareness activity on its own.

“Aflac views social media as an opportunity to generate awareness and a establish an ongoing relationship with users in a way that is relevant to their lives,” Kane said. “We don’t have any numbers that we can provide in terms of how many of the Duck’s ‘fans’ go on to become Aflac policyholders, but we do measure the number of people who become fans as a reflection of our success.”

November 10th, 2009

Creepy elves and disco dancing: A business win for OfficeMax

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Dance, Portals, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Who knew that weird dancing elves could be good for business?

OfficeMax today announced the return of its Elf Yourself portal, a silly site that allows people to create elf-like images of themselves doing a variety of dances from country to disco and even hip hop. While I’ve been a fan of Elf Yourself for some time but had no idea that it had come back for the 2009 holiday season until ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow posted his (hilarious) personalized elf last night. While all of this is entertaining, I got to wondering about what value this is really driving for OfficeMax. Last year I spoke with OfficeMax vice president of marketing and advertising Bob Thacker about the company’s social media strategy for my Fortune 500 series, and he brought Elf Yourself up as a social media success.

“Social media embraced the ‘Elf Yourself’ concept, endorsed it and readily shared it among online communities, which turned this campaign into a digital phenomenon that attracted millions, set a new viral marketing record and landed a considerable ‘win’ for OfficeMax,” he said.

I reached out to OfficeMax again today given the launch of the new site, which is now chock full of Twitter and Facebook connectivity. As a matter of fact, users of Elf Yourself can just connect to the site with Facebook Connect and select a picture from any album, saving hassle and upload time. And later today, the feature will launch that allows users to automatically post these elves to their own walls or their friends’ walls, spreading the Elf Yourself chaos even further than before. An OfficeMax spokesperson said the company selected to leverage Facebook this year to enable a deeper social media experience.

But, beyond creating giggles, what is this really doing for Office Max? The stats I received from OfficeMax are surprising:

• The Elf Yourself site has had 284 million site visits each holiday season since the tool’s launch in 2006. These site visits were measured over only a two-month period each year when the site was live.
• Of these 284 site visits, 256 million elves were created
• A study in 2007 showed that more than 1/3 of Elf Yourself users said the visit to the elf portal influenced their decisions to visit OfficeMax

What’s so great about Elf Yourself is that while it’s clearly an OfficeMax deal (powered by JibJab, of course) it’s not so in-your-face with its marketing that you grow tired of the brand. Yet, somehow it gets engrained in its users that OfficeMax is behind the whole thing.

What do you think of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself? Oh, and here’s my terrifying Elf:

November 9th, 2009

American Express OPEN keeps 'pulse' on small business with social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:44 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Microblogging, Small Business, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, American Express Co., Small Business, Small Business Owner, Business Owner, IQ, OPEN Forum, Jennifer Leggio

The Fortune 500 series has historically focused on how large companies are using social media to help to further their own businesses. One company, American Express, has a division called OPEN that is exclusively dedicated to the success of small business owners and their companies. The growth of these businesses in turn means that OPEN will succeed, and the company has realized that social media has become a priority for small business owners and is putting a great deal of focus there with its social media activities and its new Pulse offering.

I spoke with Jason Rudman, director of strategy and marketing for American Express OPEN, about the company’s social media strategy and delivery, as well as benefits to its small business customers.

Q. [Jennifer] How exactly is American Express OPEN is leveraging social media to grow the business of its customers?

A. [Jason] Business owners tell us every day that their business resiliency and growth depends in part on their ability to connect with others for advice, support and networking. At the same time, many business owners have what we call a “high relationship IQ” but a “low social media IQ.” Beginning in 2007, OPEN Forum established itself as a leading source of business insight and advice. We have evolved the experience to be both an online resource and networking site created to meet the needs of small business owners, to help them solve problems and to start to bring relationship IQ and social media IQ into equilibrium, thereby helping our customers through the social media learning curve.

Q. How did OPEN’s social program begin?

A. Originally launched in 2007, OPENForum.com initially served as the on-line companion to a live event-driven platform created with the goal of providing key networking opportunities for small business owners to grow their businesses.

Q. What are the most important objectives that American Express OPEN is trying to meet with social media?

A. Engage business owners in a new set of experiences that increase loyalty, value perception, and relevance of our brand and continue to lead in the online engagement space to attract partners, so as to ultimately create additional compelling benefits for Cardmembers and convert prospects.

Q. How are you measuring the success of these programs?

A. For OPEN Forum, we keep a pulse on how we are doing by measuring engagement and soliciting feedback. The level of engagement in both our content and the business interaction among our Cardmembers is the best indicator of our success.

There are a set of metrics that we focus on monthly, such as unique visitors (UVM), repeat visits, time spent on the site, enrollments in Connectodex^SM [our proprietary networking tool for OPEN Cardmembers], etc., that form the basis for how we are resonating with business owners.

We are also starting to measure the brand impact that OPEN Forum is having for OPEN – it has been extremely positive since we started measuring our impact in Q4 2008, as well as amplification effect of our content and the “buzz” quotient of all that we do. Finally, there are some emerging stats that are peaking our interest – for example, how many times and how frequently is OPEN Forum being retweeted; this again shows a level of engagement and interest in what we are providing business owners.

Q. Marcy Shinder of American Express OPEN said during her presentation at the Conversation Marketing Summit that social media was invented by business owners. Why do you think this is true?

A. Small business owners are successful by building individual relationships – for example, with customers, prospects, vendors – based on an innate ability to talk to everyone, to get to know people. You might say this is “social IQ” and that many entrepreneurs possess this in droves. You see it frequently when a small business owner engages their customers or reaches out to new ones through a very personal style of marketing. Social media as we know it today is just an extension of this in the digital universe.

Next: Introducing Pulse –>

November 4th, 2009

Nothing is viral, but everything is contagious

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:42 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Digg, Web Site, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Brandon Mendelson

It was approaching midnight when the phone rang. Usually, one of two things go through your mind when someone calls that late: “Who died?” or “Do I have enough to make bail?” I was wasn’t so lucky. It was a television show host I was working for, calling from a hotel room somewhere deep in the heart of America. They had an idea. “We’re going to make this campaign go viral! What do you think?” I said the idea was terrible and went to bed.

You don’t need to be Miss Cleo to know how the campaign ended; however, there’s an important lesson for those new to social media: How does something really spread?

Thankfully, there’s a paint by number formula to answer that:

Step 1: Create something funny or informative. It used to be in the form of text, now it’s almost exclusively video. This material has to be good. So good, your friends like it enough to comfortably share it. If you stop promoting here, your prospects will taper off because we can only know so many people willing to share your material. (150).

As a tip: You can measure if something is truly viral if it spreads into the real world. Usually when that happens it’s watered down and / or no longer funny. So be warned. Example: Everyone at work using “Fail” in regular conversation.

Step 2: Then, through a variety of ways, but most notably through Digg’s upcoming section, you and your friends promote the item. You need about thirty friends, the more the better, to help vote for the item. Unless you bring in the votes, nothing is going to move on Digg under their current system.

The point of submitting to Digg and having your friends vote isn’t to get on Digg’s front page. The point is to keep your item visible for websites who pull content off Digg. There are many who do this and twice that of people who find rising items to submit to these sites. And increasingly, to their own followers on Twitter. In turn, there are larger websites who monitor these smaller websites and pull the content from them.

That’s why you often see the same stuff posted online. It’s rarely if ever viral, people are just pulling material from the same source.

Step 3: With luck, you can make these feeder websites and that’s where the content begins to legitimately spread. Why? Credibility. From here, the material might make the Digg front page, a celebrity might talk about it, or a  mention on a national media outlet may occur, which is where the item then translates into something mainstream.

Doubt it? If I told you something was funny, only a few of you would take my word for it. If George Carlin told you something was funny, you would all take his word for it.

We trust George Carlin. We trust the celebrity. We trust the national media outlet and their blog. We don’t trust random, unknown bloggers or Twitter users that no one has heard of.

That second step is often glossed over or totally ignored by social media “experts” but it is critical. No matter how great your material is, and it better be contagious, you need to make it visible and allow for others to feature it. This lends your item credibility and allows for it to spread legitimately.

If all else fails, buy your way to success. A lot of deep pocketed marketers have figured out they can buy access to these web sites and have them feature their content, inflating their view counts and creating the “illusion” of viral success.

Don’t buy the hype or the books. This is something anyone with a motivated group of friends and good material can do.

Brandon Mendelson is the author of the wannabe viral sensation, Dracula And Kittens. When not desecrating public domain masterpieces, Brandon can be found blogging about social publishing, whatever that is, on Soap Box Included.

October 27th, 2009

2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:19 am

Categories: Blogging Best Practices, Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Government 2.0, Marketing, Microblogging, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media and Security

Tags: Social Networking, Facebook, Marketing, Network, Twitter Inc., Social Media, Foursquare, Poken Pulse, PR People, Jennifer Leggio

The year 2009 has been a pivotal one in social media. We’ve seen the explosion of a previously misunderstood social network as well as the rampant adoption of social media by major brands. We’ve seen these companies take big chances, some ending in success and others ending with harsh lessons learned. It seems that almost everyone’s brother, sister, mother and grandfather are now on Facebook, and that social media itself is a bubble baby no more. At the same time, it’s important to note that both business users and consumers have barely scratched the surface of opportunity that the tools and strategies around social media can provide.

In order to achieve continued success many things have to happen. Cracks in the echo chamber, widespread communication of proven successes, best practices for return on investment (ROI) are just a few. And as companies embark on their 2010 planning, they are hoping for a glimpse of what is to come.

Rather than create a wish list, I followed Peter Kim’s model and turned to my network to find out what it believes social media will become in 2010. I asked about 40 people to participate and 31 responded with at least a few words on what might happen next year.

The predictions are meant to be thought-provokers more than gospel, and come from a mix of thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and folks who get their hands dirty every day dealing with social media for their companies. Predictions range from general social media to enterprise 2.0, government 2.0, security, public relations and even location-aware social networks. But the over-arching theme of most of the predictions say that 2010 is the year that social media will just be, rather than serving as a shiny new toy.

Without further ado, here are the 2010 social media predictions.

Next: David Armano, Karen Auby, Andrea Baker, Nenshad Bardoliwalla –>

October 13th, 2009

Nine 'don't miss' social business sessions at Blog World & New Media Expo

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:59 pm

Categories: Blog World Expo, Blogging Best Practices, Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Community Management, Conference News, Corporate Social Networking, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Media, Blog, Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

Next week kicks off the long-awaited Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The conference is an annual event dedicated to trends in new media, including blogging, podcasting, social media, online video, music, television, radio, gaming, entertainment and communities. Keynotes include many of the usual social media suspects: Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang, Guy Kawasaki, Laura Fitton, and so on. There will also be some entertainers on hand to keynote as well, such as Kevin Pollak, Anthony Edwards and Jermaine Dupri.

The most interesting pieces of the conference, to me anyway, lie in the Social Media Business Summit, a track that focuses on tools and guidance for businesses using social media. This summit runs Thursday through Sunday alongside the other tracks at the regular conference. Here are the business sessions that I have marked as “don’t miss” on my own schedule:

• B2B Social Media
• Internet Marketing for Smart People
• Why Blogs Are Your #1 Search Marketing Tool
• Crisis Communication in the Era of Social Media
• Listening 2.0: Activating Social Media Across the Enterprise
• Bullseye Marketing: Precision Targeting on the Social Web
• Social Media Customer Engagement, Customer Loyalty
• From Skeptic To Advocate: Proving the Business Case to Your Boss or Client
• Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly
  

I’d like to selfishly note that yours truly is speaking during the Social Media Business Summit at 12:45 p.m. on Friday on “Don’t Jack My Brand: Security Awareness for the Marketing Manager,” a session that puts some of the security onus on marketers who need to protect their customers, partners and corporate entities against the risks of brandjacking. Add it to your schedule here.

I’ll also join Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group, Ted Murphy of Izea and blogger/entrepreneur Wendy Piersall on the keynote panel “Sponsored Converations” at 2:45 p.m. on Thursday. Please join us.

What other sessions are a “don’t miss” for Blog World & New Media Expo?

October 8th, 2009

Sears Holdings Corporation: A silent giant in social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:23 am

Categories: Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Sears Roebuck & Co., Social Media, Customer, Q., Jennifer Leggio

Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC) has been a silent giant in social media for some time. Its online community now boasts more than 300,000 users and it was one of the first major retailers to adopt OpenID to connect MySears.com directly from major social networks. The company has been injecting social into most of its brands, which, in addition to well-known Sears, include KMart, Lands End and Orchard Supply Hardware. It hasn’t always been a pretty story, as Sears has suffered some online woes as well, most recently a defaced group of product pages on the Sears Web site. However, the company credits an existing social media presence with helping them deal with that crisis swiftly by allowing immediate engagement with its customer community. I spoke with Rob Harles, vice president of community for Sears Holdings Corporation, about this and more.

Q. [Jennifer] How is SHC using social media?

A. [Rob] We are one of the only retailers – and the only one of our size – that’s created online communities specifically for our customers (MySears.com, MyKmart.com, MyVoice.com for our MyGopher concept). The goal of these communities is to connect with our customers. We offer discussion forums to facilitate questions and answers between customers and associates, an ideas platform to hear what new innovations are most important and product reviews written by customers. The communities also offer an opportunity to address customer service issues. We offer members information about sales, deals, discounts and access to unique coupons and specials for their participation.

Q. How did the use of social media start?

A. We started our first version of our customer community about two years ago. It was primarily intended for research; we used it as a platform for surveys and online focus groups. We realized the greater potential in this forum and quickly moved to expand our community offerings. We launched MySears.com and MyKmart.com in the spring of 2009 with product reviews, discussion forums, member profiles, a company blog, the ideas platform and a number of options for members to find and connect with one another around similar interests. MyVoice followed in July.

Our marketing initiatives have included a social, online interaction, component for some time now on platforms like Facebook. We are becoming more and more purposeful about engaging with customers on those platforms. One example is the recent Sears Back to Campus campaign where we utilized Facebook, Twitter and blogs to let consumers know about the product offering from Sears. We also created several online interactions like the Facebook application that allows college roommates to plan the lay out of their dorm room together, online. They can then buy what they design, creating a link to social commerce.

Q. For which brands, and how?

A. All SHC brands have a social component to them. All brands are represented in our customer communities and have their unique platforms and programs on the greater Web that meet their customers where they are.

One example is our Kmart Design brand. This initiative has introduced our Kmart designers and their design process through blogs, videos and Twitter to customers. Being transparent and upfront about what goes into our design process has proven to be successful; we’ve seen great response in customer engagement and in sales.

Q. What are your social media objectives:

A. Being present in a variety of social media outlets is part of our “Shop Your Way” concept. Shop Your Way is about letting customers choose what works best for their schedule, their shopping preferences and their budget and providing for them through our SHC properties. Our social media efforts offer a choice of online forums for customers to learn more about our products, to share their thoughts with us and to have their concerns or service questions addressed and answered. All within the course of their current online habits.

Support and crisis response –>

October 7th, 2009

Enterprise investment in online communities continues to grow

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:01 am

Categories: Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Community, Recession, Investment, Finance, Jennifer Leggio

Enterprises are investing heavily in online communities in the face of the recession, a new survey says. According to the “2009 Tribalization of Business Survey,” 94 percent of respondents stated that they plan to continue their online community investments, despite other signifiers that these companies are still struggling with social media. This study was conducted by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, and surveyed more than 400 companies, including Fortune 100 organizations.

The survey also found the following:

• A majority of surveyed companies agreed that increasing word-of-mouth (38 percent), customer loyalty (34 percent) and brand awareness (30 percent) continue to be the top business objectives of online communities
• Idea generation (29 percent) and improved customer support quality (23 percent) come second
• Marketing continues to be the main driver of online communities, which unfortunately results in a significant gap between community goals and organizations’ capability to fully leverage these communities on an enterprise wide basis
• More than 32 percent said they are paying closer attention to community value derived by “lurkers”
• Another 20 percent of survey respondents have set up ambassador programs to entice outsiders to participate in the community
• Near 40 percent said that more jobs are being created to manage such communities

Finally, the study unveiled that goals and measurement of online communities may not be well aligned, reporting that the two top most-used metrics for determining success are the number of active users and how often people post or comment. If goals are indeed as stated, more useful analytics such as increase in search engine rank or citations and links should be higher priority, the report states.

This study echoes a recent research report published by analyst firm IDC, which forecasts strong growth in the online community market despite the recession. The firm predicts that the U.S. online community software market will grow from $278.4 million last year to $1.6 billion in 2013, at a CAGR of 41.8%.

September 28th, 2009

10 Fortune 500 companies doing social media right

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:53 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

Throughout the last year I’ve highlighted several Fortune 500 companies who have a smart approach to social media. Writing about the large companies demonstrates that even giants with hundreds of thousands of employees can successfully flex to run solid social programs. I get approached by a lot of different companies for this series but I only select the ones I think are really onto something. Here are excerpts from the top 10:

Office Max: “Marketing is all about change. There’s a saying that ‘if you don’t create change, change will create you.’ It’s a great thought. I’m continually open to new ideas and new media and new approaches and new methodologies. At OfficeMax, we’ve embraced social media and incorporated it into our marketing strategy to reach today’s digital consumer through humor, entertainment and personalization.” — Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising

Newell Rubbermaid: “The more we engage with our consumers, they more we learn and the more we can expand our social media efforts. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to start small, be flexible and be willing to pull back and change if something does not work.” — Bert Dumars, vice president of e-business and interactive marketing

Cisco: “We see social media, such as blogs, as a great way to build your business and tap into the ideas and input of people using your products.” — Carlos Dominguez, senior vice president in Cisco’s Office of the Chairman of the Board and CEO

Texas Instruments: “First move is to always understand who we are trying to serve. What problem are we trying to solve? We want to create a customer support strategy, not a Twitter strategy! Once we understand the need we are trying to fill, we look at benchmarking against best practices. We have no shame in learning from what other companies are doing.” — Devashish Saxena, director of global Internet marketing

Continued –>