Cupid has worked his magic and helped us bring together some awesome speakers for our February 14^th Social Enterprise Day at Social Media Week. Check out our full agenda and information on how to register.  All times are in Pacific Standard Time.

8:00 – 8:55 Networking Breakfast

8:55 – 9:00 Welcome

9:00 – 9:50 Executive Dialogue: Social Media through an Executive Lens
Cisco executives, Carlos Dominguez and Sheila Jordan will share their perspectives on social media adoption. Carlos will tell his story on how and why he has become an avid social media user and Sheila will take you behind the firewall. She will highlight how you can prepare your IT organization to help drive adoption of social media and collaboration technologies. This dialogue will focus on understanding how a company can embrace social media at the executive level while protecting its intellectual property.

Dialoguers: Carlos Dominguez (@carlosdominguez), SVP, “The Tech Nowist”, Cisco and Sheila Jordan (@CiscoSheila), SVP, Communication and Collaboration IT, Cisco
Moderator: Karen Snell (@kcsnell), Social Media Communications Manager, Cisco

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10:00 – 10:50 Cisco’s Social Media Journey
This presentation will give you a sneak peek into Cisco’s social media journey, best practices, innovations and lessons learned over the years. Jeanette will also give you some tips on how to set up and scale your social media center of excellence based on Cisco’s center of excellence model. 

Presenter: Jeanette Gibson (@JeanetteG), Senior Director, Global Social Media and Digital Marketing, Cisco

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11:00 – 11:50 Panel: The Road to Becoming a Social Business
This panel will explore the framework for becoming a social business and offer perspectives on social content strategy to create great stories. This session will address questions on how to scale your social efforts across your company and globally, and will leave you with some practical tips and lessons learned. 

Moderator: Michael Brito (@britopian), SVP, Social Business Planning, Edelman Digital
Panelists: Read More »

Tags: B2B, best practices, cxo, event, events, Executives, how to, jeremiah owyang, JIVE, linkedin, Listening, michael brito, radian6, salesforce, slideshare, Social Business, Social CRM, Social Media Week, twitter

As a follow-up to my last blog post, here is the Reader’s Digest version of how to create social media engagement.

Each step is a word:

Listen • Integrate • Share • Talk • Enable Talk • Nurture • Evaluate • Refine

If you have paid close attention, you’ve probably discovered that the first letter of each word put together spell the word LISTENER. Makes it easy to remember, right? It all starts and ends with listening!

LISTEN

If you don’t do anything else, just listen. If you’re new to social media, listen first, engage next. If you’ve been doing social for a while, keep listening. Always! Not just during your launch period or around your event. Listening can help you get an outside perspective on your company. It can help you gain real-time unfiltered feedback, uncover issues, pain points and new opportunities. It can also be used to gain an edge on your competition, and can even help you avoid or minimize a crisis situation. Hint: Read More »

Tags: best practices, customer, engagement, engaging, facebook, how to, KPIs, Listening, measurement, measuring, metrics, partner, slideshare, social media, strategy, twitter, youtube

According to Mashable, today is Social Media Day. Whether or not you think that social media should have its own day (#smday), a group of us, Silicon Valley practitioners thought we’d have some fun today anyway…social media style. We created 2 videos to celebrate the lessons we have learned over the years and remind ourselves of the effects social media has had on our lives….so far. I say “so far” because there’s more to come. If you’re new to social media, we hope you’ll walk away with some good conversation starters. If you’ve been doing this for a while, we hope to put a smile on your face – maybe because you recognize your own advice or maybe because you have a similar story.

Watch this video for some great social tips from Read More »

Tags: Alex Plant, Ariba, best practices, CA Technologies, Cisco, EMC, engagement, Gurmeet Dhaliwal, Jeanette Gibson, Justin Fogarty, Listening, Natalie Ajluni, Natascha Thomson, netapp, paypal, Perrine Crampton, SAP, social media, strategy, tips

I spoke at PubCon earlier this week on the topic of social media, press relations and brand management. Judging by the well attended conference and the flurry of activity, social media shows no sign of slowing down. It may evolve and we may call it something different, but the idea that everything is connected – a networked economy if you will – is here to stay. We’ve all heard of the great case studies of social media success for consumer brands (large and small) and certainly personal brands, but what about for small businesses?

I recently had a conversation with the Small Business Solutions Marketing Group at Cisco to understand how they used social media to gain mindshare and drive product development, and am pleased to hear their great progress and success. Since the group started incorporating social media into their marketing efforts targeted at resellers and small business owners last year, they’ve seen great return including an approximate 200% increase in community growth across their external social channels.

How was this achieved? Marketing Manager, Jeanne Quinn, outlined the following four crucial steps:

1)      Listening: Leveraging various social media listening tools, the group was able to identify their audience segment on Twitter and Facebook. In addition, they were able to assess the audience’s user behavior and information needs in these social networks.

2)      Content Development: Based on the audience profiles and user behavior, they developed content that met the needs of their audience including how-to tips, product reviews and basic technology explanations.

3)      Amplification: The content was then amplified across their Twitter and Facebook channels.

4)      Engagement: Through their social channels, the team responded to feedback from their community and also participated in existing conversations from third party blogs and social networks.

Read More »

Tags: Content Development, engagement, Listening, small business, social media