Channels November 2009 Archives

The Eight Social Media Commandments

Yes, social media is new, funky, and exciting, but how do we leverage it in a meaningful way for business? (And measure the results, too?) Will McInnes, Managing Director at social media strategy firm NixonMcInnes, helps clients answer those very questions every day.

McInnes chatted with me about the eight social media commandments, why immediacy equals success online, the OODA loop, how to get started with social media, and the importance of listening.

If you haven’t gotten started with social media, perhaps it’s at the end of your to-do list behind walking the dog and doing the laundry. By the way, “Start now” is one of the key commandments. Find out what other commandments are on his list in this video interview:

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 06:32PM PST

Grow, Grow, Grow

While Partner Velocity was all about helping partners like you harness new opportunities through marketing, it was also about grabbing opportunities to increase revenue in a recovering market.

At the event last week, we announced an update to the Navigate to Accelerate program (to help you navigate the economic downturn and, now, accelerate in the upturn) which included the new 0% financing program EasyLease.

In an interview with channel blogger The VAR Guy, Cisco Senior VP of WW Channels’ Go-To Market group Edison Peres offered four Navigate to Accelerate growth tips for channel partners.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 05:02PM PST

Align Your Marketing to the Way Businesses Buy

In this latest video from last week’s Partner Velocity event, I talk to speaker Hugh Macfarlane, author of “The Leaky Funnel.” He shares insights about the way businesses buy and important steps for moving customers through the sales cycle more quickly.

As he points out, we have a fixed view of the way we’d like to sell—a set of steps we take—and it’s all about what we want. What about the buyer? What’s their process? And, more importantly, how can we help them move through it more quickly? Watch this interview to find out.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 04:58PM PST

Idea Guy Marc Lewis Shares Formula for Creativity

Continuing our Partner Velocity video interview series, I talk to Marc Lewis—Dean of the School of Communication Arts, successful entrepreneur, and all-around Idea Guy. Lewis led an engaging session “The Creative Formula” at Partner Velocity in Paris that helped attendees harness creativity and think in new ways.

Lewis uses unconventional, but very effective, ways to brainstorm; he taught attendees how to do the same. By generating many ideas at the beginning of a project, rather than hitting the delete key or listening to your inner critic, he says you’ll get one or two golden ideas that you can then develop further. There are many other enemies of creative thinking, which Lewis highlights in this video interview that was captured at the event.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 10:06PM PST

B2B Marketing is Boring, but Doesn’t Have to Be

This week in Paris, more than 150 Cisco partners from around the world convened at Partner Velocity where they learned marketing tips, tricks, and proven techniques. At the event, a list of renowned speakers and experts talked on topics ranging from B2B marketing, generating new ideas, the eight commandments of social media, to personal branding, the sales funnel, and video.

Many of the talks and break out sessions will be posted on the Velocity web site in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back. I’ll also be posting interviews with the speakers here on the blog so you’ll get the key takeaways from these sessions.

In the first interview, I talk to Martin Lindstrom, author of the book “Buyology.” He’s known for his work and research around buying habits and what drives B2B spending. In this interview, he talks about B2B marketing and the fact that so many companies turn it into “boring-to-boring” marketing. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 12:02AM PST

What Partners Are Saying About the New Collaboration Solutions

Cisco’s new collaboration solutions announced yesterday hold the promise of collaborating and communicating in new ways. Given the broad scope of the tools—from WebEx Mail, a hosted email solution, to the InterCompany Media Engine, a a solution that offers business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities—the possibilities (and differentiation) are endless.

To find out what partners are saying about the new solutions, we grabbed our trusty Flip camera and talked to a couple of partners, Derek Downs of VocalMash, and Kevin DeMers of CDW, in the halls at the Collaboration Partner Summit in San Francisco.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:39PM PST

New Collaboration Tools Mean New Ways to Work

A multitude of new collaboration tools announced today, simply put, will help improve communications and bring us closer to an easy one-button approach. TelePresence, Unified Communications, and WebEx solutions have all been updated with new capabilities—for instance, a new feature called TelePresence WebEx Engage is a one-button solution that integrates video between TelePresence and WebEx conferencing.

A new enterprise social software program lets groups of participants create and manage video communities—videos can be shared, tagged, and delivered through RSS feeds. That tool might prove especially useful when communicating with those in disparate locations. Those are just a few of the new solutions.

Richard McLeod, Senior Director of Collaboration Solutions at Cisco, walks us through some of the other new solutions, new ways to differentiate as partners, and new ways to work.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 02:38PM PST

Global Economic Recovery on the Horizon?

While there are some signs pointing to a global economic recovery, some news articles and pundits are “cautiously optomistic” while others are doom and gloom saying that the global economy is not yet bouncing back.

Rather than postulate on what could be, I decided to talk with some of Cisco’s Europe and Emerging Market partners at the recent Partner Operations Advisory Board Meeting in Madrid to get their take on the economy in their regions. From France to Lebanon, partners had different insights to share about the current climate and whether an upturn is imminent.

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 11:19AM PST

Transforming IT with the Virtual Computing Environment

At Cisco, we are our partners. Which is why today’s Virtual Computing Environment Coalition announcement is about you and how we can forge ahead together in a new collaborative world.

Cloud computing and virtualization have transformed the way we do IT. Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion, or 20% of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015.

Today Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, are transforming the way we help accelerate migration. The VBlock Infrastructure Package, which you’ll learn more about in this video, will create a market disruption and a tremendous opportunity for our partners.

What are the key elements of today’s announcement?

Read More.

Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 07:24AM PST