Cisco Likes Facebook's Like Button

Cisco has gone live with Facebook’s Like button throughout its Data Center product pages and select Small Business product pages. Cisco continues the trend of staying ahead of the curve in utilizing social media technology to better communicate with its customers and partners. The Like button will give Cisco customers and partners an intuitive and elegant way to share content they find valuable.

Cisco has developed a strategy on how to integrate social media into Cisco.com, leveraging Jeremiah Owyang’s framework, which outlines the evolution of social corporate websites. Today Cisco is proud to announce the rollout of Facebook Like buttons on over 180 product pages on Cisco.com. You will notice them when browsing Cisco’s Data Center or small business product areas.

Why Facebook? Cisco has over 685K fans on Facebook across it’s various Facebook pages and it has seen referral traffic from Facebook increase over 50% in the last year. So Cisco’s customers are on Facebook and they are using Facebook to share information – why not make it easier for them to do that? In fact on other Cisco sites where this feature is deployed – Cisco Blogs, News@Cisco and the Cisco Umi site – Facebook quickly became the third biggest traffic referral behind Google and Cisco.com. Similarly other companies are seeing huge traffic gains, The Washington Post has seen its Facebook referral traffic climb 290%, ABC News saw an increase of over 250 percent in Facebook referrals and Levi’s, who was an early adopter of this feature saw more than 4,000 likes on it’s website in the first week!

For now this is still just a pilot program at Cisco but if things go well as Cisco suspects, you can expect to see Facebook Like buttons appearing on product pages throughout the site and who knows where next!

I would like to take this opportunity to recognize and thank the Marketing IT team, the Web and User Experience Team, as well as the Data Center and Small Business website strategists, for working with Social Media Marketing to make this happen!

So what do you think…do you “like” it?

It's All About Video at Cisco - Rap Video

This is a response video to The Coolest Intern at Cisco - Greg, check it out:



Lyric credits to @ShanaDanekari for spending 3-hours on Friday night getting it just right! =)

Soundtrack: Puff Daddy - It's All About The Benjamins (Instrumental)

Uh, oh huh, yeah
It's all about Video baby
uh
It's all about Video baby

Now, what y'all wanna do?
Wanna be ballers, shot-callers
Speakers -- who be beamin on stage wit the hologram
Or on the TP spitin’ my jam

Cisco intern, your rap is cool
But don’t forget, you gotta finish school
I be working that 8 to 5 but without the drive
using WebEx, to teleconference live
President of Russia, I haven’t seen
But for me it’s all about Guy Kawasaki…that’s right Guy Kawasaki

Yeah you know you wanna be like me

Forget the ThinkPad, move to a Mac
And get an intern that’s got your back
Keep bloggin’ and tweetin’ and you will see
You’ll fit right in, to the Cisco family
Social Media Marketing is where it’s at
Yeah, you know, we got it like that
Like your ergonomic desk chair, well make it yours
Stay with Cisco and there’s nothing but doors
Doors of opportunity
social network wizardry
tons of creativity
Get a fatty paycheck, stocks and all
So come on...step up to the plate and take the ball

Yeah…You down with the Cisco crew?

It's all about Video baby
It's all about Video baby

Ghetto Technographics

Sure, you can get your Technographics Marketing Research from some firm like Forrester, or you can take that budget and bring a bunch of non-techy friends to the beach like Nicholas Carlson in this hilarious piece from SAI.  My favorite of his invaluable market research from this focus group of “normals”:

• Groupon is absolutely the greatest thing ever. Normals ask each other all the time if others have heard about Groupon and the amazing deals it provides – at restaurants, at gyms, and golf courses. Living Social is great too, and even a perhaps a little bit more upscale.
• Twitter, which used to be just a weird thing, is now recognized as having some value for people obsessed with the news, narcissists, and the overly-plugged-in, but no, it's still not for me, thank you. 

Although most marketers know the cardinal rule of not mistaking the market’s impression for yours, most marketers are still expected to have a “nose” for sniffing out what their demographic is looking for.  The danger comes from being trapped in the “echo chamber” of a social network that both affirms and perpetuates one’s own perspective.  For example, now that I can build virtual social networks in several domains that quite literally care about all the things I care about, it’s reducing any exposure I have to people who don’t think the same way I do.  For a marketer whose demographic is literally everybody in the world, this is less than optimal.  I’ve found close friends and family to be a refreshing exception, but that’s not nearly enough.  I’m interested to hear how other marketers are dealing with this or even whether its considered a problem.  Are you concerned at all that your reliance on “birds of a feather” social networks are insulating you from broader market perspectives?

Don't Listen to Seth Godin - Keep Talking!

Seth Godin is one of the most influential marketers of our time. He’s also one of the most prolific bloggers and is known for writing posts that become critically acclaimed marketing books. Today’s post is a bold proclamation of “marketers should do this or they’ll die.” I don’t know about you, but I love stuff like that.

Here’s what he has to say about it:

Good at talking vs. good at doing. This is the chasm of the new marketing. The marketing department used to be in charge of talking. Ads are talking. Flyers are talking. Billboards are talking. Trade shows are talking. Now, of course, marketing can't talk so much, because people can't be easily forced to listen. So the only option is to be in charge of doing. Which means the product, the service, the interaction, the effluent and other detritus left behind when you're done. If you're in marketing and you're not in charge of the doing, you're not going to be able to do your job.

I have an issue with this, mainly because it seems to fly in the face of A LOT of conventional, (and contemporary), wisdom. We live in an age where there is, literally, more information available on anything we want to learn about than we could ever consume, and marketers who’ve published that information measure it not only by its effect on the listener, but by its effect on the listener’s social network. Seth’s argument seems to be that because traditional marketing output; static, corporate marketing messaging; is no longer as relevant, then marketing messaging is no longer effective.

I agree with the first part, not with the second.

Yes, static, corporate marketing messaging is no longer as effective as it once was. The conversation is moving too fast and the customers have too many choices for a business to rely on “one message fits all”. But that doesn’t mean that messaging or branding, on its own merit, isn’t critical. It’s now even more critical. Marketers can no longer be satisfied with building one message and seeing how it plays. We have to build 10x more information assets, consumable in every way that it can be built up or broken down into parts depending on what’s needed to satisfy each individual customer. Marketing can no longer survive on producing sculpted, iconic, messaging vehicles that are designed to last for 6-18 months. We need building blocks of infographics and 300 word narrative and case studies and business analysis reports, videos and tweets that we can repackage and deploy depending on the appetite and education level of the consumer. Its no longer good enough for marketers to be content producers, we all have to be content strategists.

“Saying stuff” isn’t less effective in the information age where every beautiful graphic or insightful remark by a satisfied (or dissatisfied) customer has the chance to go viral; rather it’s more important than ever before. Different? Definitely. Less relevant? Absolutely not. As Seth has said previously, marketing is the conversation. Your new marketing department won’t be made up of billboard artists, but experts in the practice of steering and adding to the conversation that moves your product.

There’s a conversation happening out there. We need to be part of it. Can’t do that by not talking.

Which Companies Are The Most Social?