Cisco Social Media Marketing – Top 5 Social Media Programs for 2012!

2012 has been a great year for social media marketing at Cisco! The organization as a whole is really starting to experience the value of social intelligence, social engagement and social reach which were our key objectives this past year. We have had so many wonderful achievements this past year but I’d like to reflect back and recognize what I consider to be our top 5:

1. Fully Integrated Brand Campaign! For the first time ever we delivered a brand campaign across paid, owned, and earned media which included a fully integrated cross channel experience. The campaign kicked off with a social strategy for the pre-launch phase introducing the Internet of Everything and how it will transform the way we live, work, play and learn. For the launch we revealed our new tag line: Tomorrow Starts Here through an integrated global advertising, digital, mobile and social media strategy including augmented reality-enabled print advertising. With a smartphone or tablet, readers can bring print advertising to life. They can open up a a number of assets that they can share, like, follow or download. Social media was responsible for a total reach of 10.8M in the pre-launch phase with over 16K blog views and 34 organic blog picks from influencer sites such as Kurzweil and DailyBlogTips.  

2. Social Media Listening Center - #CiscoListens! Social media listening has been the foundation of our strategy from day one. We launched the first phase of our social media listening center last year – it included 6 LCD screens strapped on our cube walls run on four struggling Dell towers. This past year we took advantage of a building remodel to create a bigger an better social media listening center in our marketing offices – now with nine touch screen LCDs we can visually represent what conversations are happening at any time. We also deployed a six-screen version in our executive briefing center where we can demonstrate to the 10K+ annual visitors how we listen and engage in conversations. Additionally a two-screen kiosk version outside of our executive offices allows our executives to get a quick pulse on market conversations. Lastly, our strategy includes a “pop-up” listening center that we can build for physical events. We deployed a “pop-up” listening center at the London 2012 Olympics and were awarded the 2012 Forrester Groundswell Award for best-in-class social media listening. You can learn more about our social listening efforts here, here and here!

3. Social Login on a B2B site! At a big company like Cisco, implementing something like social login across Cisco.com is not an easy feat! But, we did it! Social login (okay, it’s really more of a social fill-in today, but we’re still working on it!) made its debut across all Cisco.com registration pages as of May 2012 and since then we have had tens of thousands of people choose to simplify their registration process through a social login. It’s interesting to note that while we offer Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google as OpenID providers Facebook is by far the preferred choice.  

4. LinkedIn Social Ambassador Program – fancy! We did an audit and uncovered 1,400 groups on LinkedIn with the word “Cisco” in the name, but little was known about the activities taking place in those groups. We then conducted an analysis of the groups to determine the best way to optimize our engagement in the groups. The analysis revealed there were 17 active groups that were lacking a Cisco voice. We then tapped into the Cisco Ambassador Program to match subject matter experts with groups. This program enables Cisco to reach 243,000 group members to: • Extend the face and voice of Cisco and enable peer-to-peer interaction • Better enable the sales process through authorized responses to inquiries • Gather market insights from Cisco followers to share in the social listening process Since its inception, the program has grown to include over 30 LinkedIn groups. and the number of Cisco Followers on LinkedIn has grown 17% to 314k, with the highest number of new Followers during this pilot timeframe.

 5. Really Cool Pilots! Okay, so this is more than five things because I’m going to talk about a handful of things. Innovation is always top of mind for everyone on my team and we are constantly testing and piloting new concepts, technologies and ideas. Once a pilot can prove its value we start scaling it across the organization. Here are some early results from pilots that haven’t fully scaled yet.  

YouTube Calls to Actions (CTA) – YouTube added the ability to add clickable calls to actions on your videos as of earlier this year. We immediately started testing this with a CTA at the :15 second mark and the end of the video. The first CTA is related to the video, where viewers can learn more, and the second CTA is to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We have tested this on a few hundred videos so far and are seeing an average click-through rates of 5.4%!  

Social Demand Generation – We are just at the infancy of this concept however in an effort to kick things off quickly we deployed a simple no-cost pilot that involved putting a registration form to access gated content on our Facebook page. We then promoted it with social updates on Facebook and Twitter and in just 60-days, we had 1,881 click-throughs to the offer page with a 4% form completion rate! There are a lot more ideas and pilots under development that expand this concept further. For more on this program and other initiatives from this team click here.

Listening for Leads – We first ran a "listening for leads" program last year with underwhelming results. We learned from that experience and approached things differently the second time around. We leveraged a new listening process we developed called the "ABCs and 123s". First “Action-Based-Conversations” (ABCs) are identified and tagged -- we used seven categories for tagging such as question, lead, support, etc. Then, we prioritized the conversations and used the 123s to designate the priority for responding. We used this model to identify and route leads to call center agents who nurture and qualify the opportunities, leveraging LivePerson’s Click-to-Chat capability to enable private conversations. We are only 2 weeks into the pilot and nearly two-dozen <unqualified> leads have been identified. You can read more about this pilot here.

It’s been a busy year, and this is just a taste of the accomplishments from my team this year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of my team who contributed to this year's success: Charlie Treadwell, Leslie Lau, Leslie Drate, Davythe Dicochea, Roberto Araujo, Andy Grant, Bernadette Koscielniak, Richard Lam, Deanna Belle, Lindsay Hamilton, Michael Hopps, Tim Husband, Albert Qian, Jennifer Roberts, George Metrik and Nancy Rivas. This doesn’t include all the folks across the various teams at Cisco we worked with, but you know who you are and we thank you for your continued partnership!

Looking forward to more social media innovations in 2013! Happy Holidays!

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.

Cool Social Media Survey

The Social Media Examiner just released a new report: 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report that covers how marketers are using social media to grow their business. Here are some of the highlights that stuck out for me:

• The top benefits of social media marketing: The number-one advantage of social media marketing (by a long shot) is generating exposure for the business, indicated by 85% of all marketers, followed by increasing traffic (63%) and building new business partnerships (56%).
• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs were the top four social media tools used by marketers, respectively. (for Cisco I would move Blogs after Twitter)
• Only 14% of businesses are outsourcing any aspect of their social media marketing. (I’d say about 14% of groups within Cisco are outsourcing some component of their social media marketing so that’s consistent with what I’m seeing)
• 56% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week and 30% for 11 or more hours weekly 
• Those who've been using social media for years picked Video/YouTube as the top area in which they will be increasing their efforts, with 81%

Everybody's doing it, so why don't we?

This is a video (courtesy of justin.tv) of the Social Media Club panel I was on titled, "Everybody's doing it, so why don't we? The event was moderated by Jennifer Lindsay and joining me on the panel was Violet Blue, Janet Fouts and Erin Robbins.

One of the more interesting topics was around personal vs. business brand where we talk about the recent Forrester announcement that prohibits employees from blogging about business outside of their corporate blog. The video clip of this conversation was caught on video by Michael Brito here!



Watch live video from richreader on Justin.tv

The Evolution of a Social Media Marketing in a Product Launch

Here's a presentation that Melissa Mines, Marketing Manager at Cisco and I did with BrighTalk showing how we evolved our social media marketing tactics from the Cisco ASR 1000 launch to the the Cisco ASR 9000 launch.

The Corporate Blog Manifesto Update

This is a guest post from one of the great Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketers on my team, Don Nelson. He often has insightful emails and this time I asked if I can post it on my blog.

Quick background - this email was actually a response to someone who sent a link out to Robert Scoble's post from 2003, "The Corporate Weblog Manifesto" and I thought it was worth sharing so here you go:

Just in case you jump right into the content and not see the date of this posting.....Scoble wrote this in 2003 which pretty much makes it a dinosaur in Internet time. However, there are still good points to be made here in 2009.

My take is this....

1. Tell the truth: always always always. If you're not sure, best to leave it out of your writing all together.
2. Post fast on good news or bad: it is after all about communicating with our customers and the influencers in the many markets and industries we now play in.
3. Use a human voice: we're all on the honor system of sticking to corporate and ethics, so hopefully you know which lines not to cross.
   
4. Make sure you support the latest sw/web/human standards: technically, not so much these days with our Blog platform. we already have RSS and try to instill the proper use of keywords for search engine optimization.
5. Have a thick skin: opinions and elbows - everyone has them and they will use them so be prepared for all manner of responses to your writing
6. Don't ignore Slashdot: there is much more beyond just Slashdot these days. we do keep social media monitoring in our pockets and try to do as much as we can with what we've got to help guide you in the conversations out there.
7. Talk to the grassroots first: base your writings on established concepts and leadership and you should be fine. It doesn't hurt to know or build relations with a broad range of sources that you can read and interact with via your blog but know that PR is also handling relation building here too.
8. If you screw up, acknowledge it: as clear as it can be word for word
9. Underpromise and over deliver: excellent strategy and should be used at every opportunity
10. If Doc Searls says it or writes it, believe it: I had to look him up so I'm thinking so did you there are many "experts" so I'd extend this to those you know based on level of influence you think they have in any particular market.
11. Know the information gatekeepers:
12. Never change the URL of your weblog
    
13. If your life is in turmoil and/or you're unhappy, don't write: true. unless you can turn the turmoil/unhappy experience into something that relates to your company fixing it for you!
14. If you don't have the answers, say so: same as #1 and #8, true to the last word
15. Never lie: see #1, #8 and #14
16. Never hide information: disclose disclose disclose where appropriate or just don't write about it
17. If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit, see a lawyer before posting, but do it fast: similar to #1, #8, #14 and #15, when in doubt leave it out of your writing or pursue our legal contacts if unavoidable.
18. Link to your competitors and say nice things about them: true to an extent. now partners and ecosystem partners, they should be acknowledged/credited when it directly impacts your writing.
19. BOGU (Bend Over and Grease Up): true also to an extent. more simply stated, if someone comments on your writing, treat them all as if they are VIPs
20. Be the authority on your product/company: you are all experts, but do pay proper respects to whom you know and/or reference in your writing.
    

Skittles Twitters The Rainbow

What if a real company decided to turn their whole site into a twitter conversation?

That’s what skittles did in what can only be described as a bold move to embrace Web2.0.

What a unique approach. In a traditional viral campaign, you launch a viral concept and it takes on a life of its own, living in media largely beyond your control. Skittles did one better. They launched a viral campaign and turned their website into an incubator for the virus. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is! An argument could be made that the skittles website isn’t core to their product sales, so replacing it with a twitter results page isn’t as big of a risk as if a B2B company were to do it. But still, you have to respect the moxie of Skittles’ Web 2.0 marketing team. What a great campaign!

Cisco's Newest Social Media App

Cisco is breaking social media ground yet again with it's new VNI PC Pulse application. I happen to work with one of the masterminds (Thomas Barnett) behind this application so I was able to talk him into an interview to give other social media enthusiasts a back stage view of what went it's creation.

Can you give me a brief description of the new Cisco VNI PC Pulse application?

>> Thomas: Cisco has created a free application to show users how much network bandwidth they consume and the types of applications they use. This application shows users the amount and types of traffic that flow to and from their computer and provides aggregated network usage proof points of all global users of this application for comparison purposes.

This is a great idea, how did you come up with it? What is the benefit to the end user?

>> Thomas: As part of our Visual Networking Index (VNI) initiative, we are interested in activities that can help provide qualitative views of network-based consumer video usage patterns and trends. Cisco has sponsored and will continue to explore consumer preferences and perspectives through surveys/questionnaires (see Cisco VNI Pulse political survey and Initial Cisco VNI Pulse consumer survey). A natural extension of our direct engagement with consumers was to offer a free utility application to develop a deeper understanding of consumer video behaviors and attitudes on a global scale. End users can gain a better understanding of their personal PC use and compare their bandwidth consumption with the aggregate average of others worldwide. They can compare their personal historical bandwidth usage stats (i.e., personal high, personal average, personal low) against WW stats (world high, world average, world low). The application measures LAN and Wi-Fi connections.

What have you learned since the application has been available?

>> Thomas: Data retrieved through the Cisco VNI Pulse application showed that on January 20, 2009 (the day of the U.S. inaugural festivities)individual users downloaded more than twice the amount of data they do during a normal day, at 322 MB vs. a typical average of 159 MB. Doug Webster, a marketing executive with Cisco, speculates that many people had the inaugural festivities streaming in the background while they did other things
Are there any social elements of the application? Thomas' Response: At this point, the ability to compare personal bandwidth usage against world stats is the primary social feature. Users could also compare their usage directly with family, friends and colleagues that choose to use the application. Cisco plans to develop a interactive web page in later in 2009 that will provide additional social networking elements.

What is the main objective of the application and how are you measuring your success?

>> Thomas: By using the Cisco VNI PC Pulse application, consumers will gain a better understanding of their online preferences and needs. The aggregate data will help Cisco build a better understanding of what we all demand from our networks. Data from this application will be shared publicly on a quarterly basis. We will measure our success the number of global users we are able to attract and the quality of new and insightful findings that we are able to share with the telecommunications industry and others interested in IP networking consumer trends.

What future apps can we expect from Cisco?

>> Thomas: We have developed a new mobile application that is currently available for iPhone users and will soon be available for Blackberry users as well. The Cisco Global Internet Speed Test (GIST) for iPhone application is publicly available via the Apple iPhone App Store in iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/).

To learn more about the app check out Doug's post 'Are you a Super User?' or of course go directly to the download site and check it out for yourself.

Social Media is the End of Tradeshows

Just about every company is using the current economic crisis as an excuse to re-evaluate its event strategy. More than just a few companies have decided to forgo their booth presence, something that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. Scobleizer puts the blame of the dying tradeshow industry on bloggers and social networks but I think tradeshows have been struggling to show tangible return on ROI for quite some time and social media offers the first successful alternative.

Whatever the reason, social media and web 2.0 are being utilized more than ever to connect with customers. Here are just a few ideas I had when it comes to leveraging these tools to maximize your involvement at a tradeshow:

• Blogging - okay this is an obvious one but make sure you have one or two people covering the show. Summarize keynotes, write about what's hot and what's not - and not only traditional blog posts but microblogging with Twitter is a great way to make people who aren't at the show feel like they know the major happenings and video can really bring things alive!
• SMS - if you have a keynote session you can use SMS as a way to poll the audience or take questions.
• Widgets - Maybe you can create a widget that ties everything together, your blog posts, event schedule, collateral - you can even create a countdown to the show or any other major announcements.
• Virtual Presence - In lieu of a booth promote and send your customers to an online environment where they can not only attend a virtual event but they can ask questions, network and be part of a community you can grow over time. Check out what ON24, Unisfair and InXpo are doing in this space...
• PowerPoint - Post your webcast and keynote presentations on your community (ie. Facebook), on your blog and on SlideShare to extend the reach of the content.
• Mobility - Leverage the fact that everyone has a cell phone these days. Allow people to see the event schedule from their phones and offer to provide reminders to your events. Provide mobile promotions where you can send links to content or videos to those who request them. You an even enable your sales folks to send mobile business cards to people they meet.

If you have other ideas I'd love to hear about them...

Cisco Social Media Case Study - Free Webcast

In addition to all of the conferences I'm speaking at (as noted in my previous post) I just finished a live webcast that is now available on demand here. Enjoy and feel free to submit questions here on my blog and I will respond to you. I am also welcome to feedback and suggestions for improvement. Thanks!

Social Media Marketing Summit - Recap

I presented the Cisco ASR Case Study example at today's Social Media Marketing Summit. I was a little rusty since I've been on LOA for 2 months now (for those who may not know I had a baby girl on 8.8.08). I stumbled on a few words then to top it off the computer prompted me to restart now or later for an update and of course I accidentally pressed now. The crowd responded with a "oooh noooo" and it still took me a minute to realized what I had done. I tried to keep my cool and keep on going and according to this post from Trisha Lyn it sounded like I didn't do that bad (I swear I didn't pay her).

Uunfortunately didn't catch much of the other sessions with the exception of of a presentation, by Tara Hunt. Her presentation, "Increasing the Social Capital of your Brand" was largely based off her book "The Whuffie Factor" which she is expecting to be released in April. Her delivery was awesome and although the presentation was high level it sounds like it'll be a good read to reinforce the basics.

As for my presentation, if you missed this conference you'll have two more opportunities to catch me. I'll be speaking at the Social Media Strategies Conference and the SIPA Mid-Year Marketing Conference.

If anyone who has seen my slides or better yet who has seen me present has comments or suggestions for improvement, please let me know!

UPDATE: If you're going to the WebGuild Social Media Strategies Conference use this discount code to save $150 "community56"

Social Media Conversation with 1to1 Media - Part I

July was social media month at 1to1 Media and I was asked to participate in an interview along with Tac Anderson of HP and Michael Brito of Intel. Why us? Well we all have jobs at Fortune 500 companies and our roles are focused on internal and external social media initiatives (and we all blog at Conversations Matter). The interview which is also available as a podcast (sorry, buzzing due to technical difficulties) was broken into two parts. The first part focuses on the challenges we faced when it comes to implementing social media.

Because the three of us have been practicing social media for sometime now and because we are all in positions where social media is valued in the organization, the challenges lie in the execution. How do you match the right strategy and tools to the people you are trying to reach and how do you ensure that your team is choosing to go down the social media path for the right reasons. For that Cisco has adopted Forrester's People-Objective-Strategy-Tools (POST) methodology (perhaps with an extra look at the Strategy).

However for the folks who aren't lucky enough to be at the next phase of adoption, I am commonly asked how I was able to get management on board to execute social media campaigns (like the ASR launch). And although that wasn't addressed in this podcast, I thought I'd address it here. For me the journey began with education to my team on social media and how it can benefit us to participate in 'conversation marketing.' The next phase involved testing the waters with small projects, successes of those projects led to the support of social media as a standard marketing practice with a team to support it. It's been almost a year since my team has been chartered with finding the right opportunities to engage in 'conversational marketing' through social media with our customers and we constantly live this cycle of adoption as we get deeper into social media.

Stay tuned for part two next week...

Wrap-up Interview from Forrester Social Media Bootcamp

Today we had Jeremiah Owyang and Laura Ramos of Forrester co-host a Social Media Bootcamp at Cisco. After the event I was able to catch Laura for a quick interview (unfortunately Jeremiah had to run off to another meeting). Check it out:



I wanted to address that last question again - should it be People-Objective-Strategy-Technology (POST) or People-Objective-Technology-Strategy (POTS)? Laura's response sounds logical and seems to be what everyone who responded to my Tweet agrees with but I'm still not convinced. In talking with Jeremiah about it one thing he said was that “strategy” and “technology” actually go hand-in-hand with some overlap. For example if your planning process led you to creating a blog the strategy that you put together would be very different than if you were creating a Facebook group. Perhaps the right methodology is POSTS so you can revisit the strategy after you've chosen the technology?

UPDATE: For more on the bootcamp read this post from my collegue at Cisco, Brian Ellefritz - "My first Social Media bootcamp, and it didn't even hurt"

Building an All-Star Social Media / Web 2.0 Team

If you could only bring 6 Social Media Pros to an island to start a Web 2.0 Marketing Department, who would they be?

Making it on Jeremiah's list of 'Social Computing Stategists' got me thinking about my team, what we do, what we want to do and what's next. My team is fairly new and we've been at it for about 9-months now and the various disciplines and skill sets of our team was built trial and error over the past few months. As we plan for the next fiscal year I can't help but think big so I started creating a list of all of the things a 'Social Media and Web 2.0' team should focus on (leaving out the boundaries of resources). Here's what I've come up with:

Social Media Strategist - In 'Alice in Wonderland', Lewis Carroll wrote "if you don't know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take". At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. This is the person who pulls everything together. They build the Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.

Community Manager – There are currently two communities that we have an active presence on - Facebook and NetPro having someone actively facilitate conversations in these communities would really take things to the next level.

Social Site Management – The great thing about engaging your customers in social media is that you can tweak your message depending on the audience. The tough thing about engaging your customers in social media is that your message could end up looking different for every audience. At the core of any marketing strategy lies a common message. We now have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Depending on the campaign we may leverage one or more of these channels and having someone to manage the communications and having it centrally executed is critical.

Blogging (including Micro-blogging) – Blogging is made up of two basic parts: content creation and content distribution. You could be channeling Shakespeare in your daily journal but if nobody knows about it, it won’t ever matter. Offering assistance to our bloggers to help optimize their posts for the search engines helping with suggestions on key or hot topics or sending out Twitters when new posts are live can make all the difference in the world.

Monitoring – If a tree falls in your community and you didn’t hear about it; WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU DOING THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT?!? Whether it's with Google Alerts, Nielson BuzzMetrics or TruCast, it's important to have an ear on what conversations are happening about our solutions so that we can actively participate in those conversations.

Web Innovations – This involves looking at the technolgoy our web pages use and determining if there are new capabilities available to better communicate or present something on our website. For example behavioral targetting, implementing widgets, or something as simple as adding Lightbox treatments can give your entire website a 'web 2.0' feel.

What do you think? What additional superpowers should a Social Media / Web 2.0 all-star team stock up on?

Coffee's for Closers

Go viral or go home
Since 1996 Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson has claimed he invented “viral” marketing when his portfolio company, Hotmail, included a line on the bottom of each email that said "Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/."

Although viral marketing as we now know it was used by companies much earlier, the Hotmail example perfectly illustrates why marketers chase “viral” as if it were the cure to stopping spam. After getting the right message, the biggest challenges facing marketers are message distribution and authentication. If someone doesn’t see your message, you lose. If they don’t think it’s legitimate or don’t trust its source, you lose. Viral campaigns solve both those problems; accelerating propagation faster than we could ever do ourselves and authenticating the message by having it delivered by a trusted source. It’s marketing Nirvana. Forget visions of sugar plums dancing through my head - when I sleep I see social networks acting as Force Multipliers; delivering my carefully packaged message to receptive and qualified customers.

Easier said than done
But hey if it were that easy everybody would be doing it. There are many perils on the long winding road up the peak to Marketer’s Paradise not the least of which is crafting the perfect message. But let’s say you get through that, how on earth do you build a messaging vehicle that has the potential to go viral? And even after you do that what’s really the benefit of doing so? Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of viral effectiveness on buying decisions? I mean, even if the message is right and its delivered by a trusted source in a reasonable time frame is it more effective than a billboard in Times Square?

We’re still very early in our understanding of how effective social media and other 2.0ish technologies will be in helping plain Jane campaigns achieve “viral” status, but the returns so far are encouraging.

One thing that’s much harder to measure however is the effect of networks on individual behavioral (buying) decisions. We know that message reception and retention will be higher when coming from “the network”, but how influential is “the network” on decisions overall?

Viral messaging or networked buying?
New research out of Harvard Medical School indicates that social networks may have more to do with individual buying decisions than we thought. When coupled with Social Media Marketing campaigns this can be much more powerful than just a more effective message delivery campaign. Instead of just permeating an effective message, a “tuned” network could theoretically process a message and if followed up with positive product purchase experiences, directly influence the purchasing decisions of others in the network. This makes the “message spreading” potential of viral marketing seem downright anemic. Traditional viral marketing still relies on the effectiveness of my message to be effective. But if this research holds true for Social Media networks, then there might be a more compelling and cost effective way to harness “the network” in marketing campaigns that transcend traditional message delivery.

When thinking strategically, its easy to get caught up in thinking that marketing is about messaging and message delivery. But its not. Its about selling product. Too often I think we’re content with getting qualified buyers to the table. What if we could more directly influence actual buying?

Certain markets are already operating in this paradigm and as I consider new campaigns in the future I will certainly be looking closer at “network influence on buying behavior” campaigns rather than the traditional “network influence on message delivery” projects that have worked for us in the past.

Cisco Marketing Has Got Game

Some call it social media excellence some just say we've gone crazy...whatever you call it, it seems to be working.

As an extension to the social media efforts that we're leveraged for Cisco's ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.

I haven't exactly kept it a secret that I'm one of the marketers behind this campaign so of course I think it's cool but here are a few specific reasons why I think it’s working for us:

1. We're reaching our target audience in a new, fun, and engaging way. Last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population -- almost 217 million people -- and according to CIMS, 24% of those were IT professionals! Us marketers are always trying to fish in a big pond but it helps when they’re all swimming in the same place.
2. Low cost, high ROI. This program was an extension of an existing program. The EDGE QUEST game was created at launch so the cost of the tournament includes just the "carrot" of $10K plus the router. We also invested a small amount in changing the game a bit for the "money round" of the tournament but no budget went into promotion we focused solely on social media outlets. In return we've had an influx in PR and Blog pick-ups and a substatial increase in traffic to the game and product page. All of this activity of course is being measured and considered as part of the ROI of the campaign.
3. It was just a blast to work on. Hey there's nothing wrong with that - it's fun for the people engaging with Cisco in a new way and it was fun to be part of the marketing team to develop and creatively promote the game and tournament leveraging social media tactics which included a social media release, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr.

This particular campaign won't work for everyone but creating a social marketing campaign can get your customers engaged and extend your message far beyond traditional marketing.

Overcoming Social Media Objections

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken

As Dr. Aiken discovered, knowing which direction to go doesn’t mean much if you can’t get your team to follow. Thankfully, unlike Dr. Aiken we don’t have to convince people to buy in on an idea as crazy as building a computer at a time when phones were considered state of the art. But knowing that doesn’t make our job any easier.

All marketing campaigns come down to getting time, money, or resources and to be done properly, your Social Media Marketing campaign will likely need a little of all three. For many of us, this means approval from one or more decision makers on a marketing campaign that may be fundamentally different from anything they’ve done before.

The people considering your idea are going to have a running list going of positives and negatives. If they’re like most humans, this list won’t be entirely rational and will likely end up coming down to one major factor either way. Whether choosing new cars, new houses, or even new presidential candidates – people can usually narrow down their decision making criteria to one or two factors, positive or negative.

There’s no way to know which factors will be most critical to the people in your audience but if they’re anything like the folks I’ve been working with, here’s a few that come up almost every time.

• “The devil we know IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING”. This is where many good ideas have gone to die. While it’s true that building a social media project likely won’t be as predictable as a more traditional campaign, there is a healthy amount of data out there already. Besides this blog, success stories and ROI can be found on sites such as Conversations Matter, WebGuild, Groundswell, The Social Organization, and Marshall Kirkpatrick.
• “We’re already doing social media marketing. We have a website, and it has a “talk to a sales rep” button – what else is there?” There is a common misconception amongst the uninitiated that if a company is online, it’s “connected”. As much hype as Web 2.0 receives, there are still many people who don’t get what it is, what it’s for, and more importantly where it might help. The only way to correct this is with education. In addition to collaborating on Web 2.0 projects enterprise-wide, I drive adoption through educational blog posts, workshops and webinars. I’ve found that most people, especially in marketing, have a remarkable capacity to learn about the bleeding edge but if they’re making a go/no go decision on your new project, it might be too late. The way to beat this one is early and often.
• “OK, even if we do it with social media, how would we know if it worked?” Unlike “direct response” or “click through” marketing, social media campaigns aren’t as easily measured. Oftentimes we’re counting things like “engagement” and “connections” that don’t have a correlation to existing marketing metrics programs. At first blush, this seems like a minor point that will get fixed in time. But if your team is compensated on traditional marketing MBO’s, they might not be as motivated to kick off a social media endeavor. Marketing runs on metrics, but somehow TV and print ads get approved every year – stick to your guns, metrics are important but there are other factors to consider.

These certainly are not the only objections that you’ll run up against in trying to get your social media campaign off the ground, but they seem to be pretty common. Feel free to share objections you’ve come up against and any ideas on how to work through them.

Conversations Matter - Field Guide to Social Media Marketing

At some point in the lifecycle of every new idea, somebody actually has to try it out. Soon after that, so the cliché goes, some brave, soot-covered soul emerges from a smoke filled lab with a beaker in one hand and charred lab results in the other. That brave soul is where the rubber hits the road. In the world of Social Media Marketing, there are a lot of these brave souls, and a few of us have decided to get together and report back on our findings in this blog, Conversations Matter.

Michael Brito and Kelly Feller from Intel, Tac Anderson from HP, Tom Diederich from Cadence Design Systems, and Marc Levin who is an independent marketing consultant - formerly at Yahoo!, and I will be participating.

It’s been said that when you get to a certain point in any discipline, the only way to learn more is by trying to share your experience with someone else. It’s our hope that by sharing our experiences in this blog, we’ll benefit by leveraging the same principles that make Social Media Marketing so effective in letting us connect with our customers. In other words, we’ll be eating our own dog food.

So check it out, let us know what you think and mention any topics you’d like us to cover. If things work out we may take this crazy idea to the next level and consider organizing workshops, webinars and networking events. Ok, one step at a time - check it out and if you like it add it to your feeds.

Pulse on the Blogosphere

Here are a few recent posts that I think are worth sharing:

• Matt Dickerson tells you everything you need to know about personas in his post "Developing Personas for Marketing Strategy" - Cisco's Martin Hardee's gives a inside look at Cisco's approach to personas in this post "How we Design for Cisco.com"
  Charlene Li has an awesome post that every company should read about how to transition your traditional marketing group to a social media marketing group in her post "Turning radicals into revolutionaries: the key to kick-starting your social strategy"
• Tamar Weinberg has a collection of upcoming web 2.0 events on a single post - very useful - "Mashable’s Guide to Upcoming Web 2.0 Conferences and Events" (BTW - I plan on attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 22-25)
• Greg Verdino has a nice post "An Orgy of Infographics" which great visuals and interesting stats worth checking out.
• Jeremiah Owyang tells outlines his 'Essential Twitter Tools" - a must read for any Twitterer.

Leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 in a Product Launch

Part of the reason I've been a lazy blogger lately is that I have been consumed with launching "the most powerful compact router every created" - the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers. It's been a fun launch and we pulled out all of the web 2.0 stops creating a Virual. Viral. Visual. launch. Here's a laundry list of how we leveraged Web 2.0:

• Pre-Launch Uber User Site - We leveraged light hearted videos on this site and posted them on YouTube to maximize visibility.
• Facebook Group - This was part of the pre-launch so I was able write about this one in an earlier post and even shared our process and tips here.
• Interactive 3-D Game - I would like to give kudos to the vendor - Somnio - who helped us create this very cool online game. "EDGE QUEST" offers our audience a fun and engaging way to learn about the product and interact with the Cisco brand - a no-brainer given the playing statistics of online games.
• Social Media Web Widget - Again kudos to Somnio here for the development of Cisco's first web widget that 'lets our content free' by allowing users to embed it on their site (as shown below).



• Social Media Release (SMR) - It's been nearly a year since I stumbled across and wrote about SMRs. What make them different from a traditional release? It's the approach and the fact that a SMR leverages and highlights all of the social aspects of the announcement.
• Second Life Presence - We were able to leverage Second Life pre-launch by hosting a countdown party and post launch by walking through a product demo.
  Other Stuff - We also leveraged sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, Reddit and StumbleUpon - we also have a focused blogger outreach program and a pretty cool looking launch page.

Want to know more about this launch? I'll be presenting on March 26 with Wilson Craig, PR Manager at Cisco for the Silcon Valley American Marketing Association to share processes, best practices and results.