The other day I was reading an article about “Cognitive Dissonance: Why Social Sharing Creates Employee Advocates”. Intuitively you would suspect that “employee sharing can influence your employees to love your company more” but I’m always thrilled to see research, data and science to support these theories. Thank you, Psychology!

If you’re still skeptical about why employee enablement in social media matters, consider these factoids:

(1)    41% of people believe conversations with company employees to be the most credible specialist sources of information.

(2)    There are over 10 million social mentions of the Fortune 100 each month…With Twitter generating the most amount of chatter.

(3)    56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored.

(4)    70% of brands ignore Read More »

Tags: activate, advocacy, ambassadors, amplification, authentic social media, employees, Executives, how to, marketing, scaling social media, social media, training, viral, WOM

On February 14th, it’s hard to keep your mind focused on work. If you’re like me, you were wondering if the flowers, candy, and teddy bear you ordered would get delivered to your wife on time, or if the butcher would have any steaks left by the time you made it to the market after work. Frankly the last thing on my mind was the possibilities enabled when we connect people, processes, data and things, also known as the Internet of Everything (#IoE).

This Valentine’s Day, Cisco’s Social Media Marketing team leveraged a broadly engaging topic that very few people would associate with the Internet of Everything through real-time marketing. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, content marketing, Internet of Everything, IoE, Real-time Marketing, social media, social media listening, Tomorrow Starts Here, Valentine's Day

What are you doing on April 18 & 19th, 2013? Mark your calendar for a social media event with Cisco! This event is titled Social Media for Savvy Marketers. You can join this event live or connect via our live webcast. Registration is required. Hurry because space is limited for this free event! Some of our featured sessions will include:

Driving Social into Business

Long gone are the days when social was only a marketing practice. Today, social impacts all corners of an organization -- legal, customer service, finance, client managers, crisis management and even product development. There are very real business implications in this socially connected world, and it means that companies must learn how to drive social into their business. This requires education, best practices and policies that many do not already possess. Read More »

Tags: ciscosmt, events, marketing, mobile, social media, social savvy, social search

Add this to your list of parties spoilt by the Internet revolution: national sovereignty.

We all know that the borderless nature of the Internet is stretching longstanding technical and legal definitions. But recently, my colleague Richard Aceves and I got to talking about the mish-mash that social media is making of culture, language, and national identity. It should come as no surprise that cultures and languages are being diluted by the global online discussion, in the same way that the advent of television and radio had a dampening effect on certain regional spoken colloquialisms and accents. Richard will examine some cultural questions in a forthcoming blog post, while I’ll be discussing the psychological impact on national sovereignty.

Judging by the proliferation of Internet policies and legislation, it is pretty clear that bureaucrats and politicians in capital cities around the world are worried that the Internet (with special thanks to social media) is simultaneously eroding both their authority and their national identity. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Security, internet policies and legislation, internet security, social media

Like many others in the Northeast US, I was personally affected by the impact of Hurricane Sandy this past November.  Aside from the lessons it taught me about disaster preparedness, it also highlighted some very salient ways that social collaboration can be used and why social is truly becoming the next wave of collaboration.  And while my story is one of a personal nature, these principles apply to the enterprise.  They re-inforce the ideas that social collaboration has real benefits.

Let me start with the numbers to paint the picture:

• Days without cell phone coverage: 4
• Days without electricity:  14
• Days without cable / internet:  17

For those 2+ weeks in November, I was operating in survival mode and my greatest source of interaction and information was through social collaboration tools -- primarily Facebook and Twitter -- when I was able to find a location with Internet access.  With my examples below, I hope to show how social collaboration was used to help in a number of ways during that difficult time and also attempt to draw the parallels to an enterprise setting.

Read More »

Tags: collaboration, social media, WebEx Social