What do CEOS, market makers and Lady Gaga all have in common? The wisdom to know that to get ahead, or stand out, you need to drop any instincts of being reactive in favor of innovation.
In the world of technology, that means getting creative about how you use the network. Not just to keep business humming, but to create experiences. Take Lady Gaga, for instance. As Forbes reported this past week—and the New York Times reported recently—Lady Gaga is using the network to create a seamless and compelling experience for her fan base from online to offline, wherever they are. In fact, as Lisa Arthur reports in Forbes, “ Lady Gaga was the first artist to reach 1 billion views on YouTube. She has about 35 million Facebook fans. And, most recently, she made headlines as the first Twitter user ever to reach 10 million followers.” And the impact? According to Arthur’s article, Gaga sold 1,108,000 copies of her latest album in the US in its first week; 60 percent of those first week sales were digital downloads.
When you consider, as I mentioned in a recent blog, that the number of devices connecting to the Internet will climb to 25 billion by 2015, that’s a lot of potential fans or customers.
It’s Friday! What’s everyone’s plans for the weekend? Here are some of our top news stories of the week that include an interview with one of Cisco’s first employees, a feature on how email’s days are numbered and a webcast on how customers are investing in the network as an innovation engine.
Check out Network Trailblazers, a new series that highlights the creators and visionaries of the Internet network. Our first trailblazer is Kirk Lougheed, the company’s first engineer and also a Cisco Fellow. Learn more as Kirk discusses how IOS developed and the future of the network.
In this week’s Cyber Risk Report we briefly discussed the fact that millions of individuals are victims of their own carelessness by freely posting information such as vacation plans and family photos on social networks and by storing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as medical records and financial information, on mobile devices. Users are sometimes not properly educated when it comes to what types of information should be shared, and with whom they should be sharing this information. This lack of education and subsequent “overposting” of personal details is now trickling down to our youth, some of whom are under the legal age to even utilize some of these social network sites. Read More »
There are many social media sites that have turned out to have been fads, but it’s hard to imagine the greater social media movement grinding to a halt. Author Erik Qualman says social media is here to stay, and companies must embrace it. Where do you see social media going? Do you think it’s a fad? Read More »
Who knew that there are 74 job openings for Elvis tribute artists and 1 opening as a “martini whisperer” on LinkedIn? True confession: I was (maybe still am) tempted…
Isn’t that a wonderful truth about online networking and sharing sites like this? It is here where we can discover, learn and engage in “virtual watering holes” and “online town squares” that fit our interests.
via LinkedIn Blog Infographic
LinkedIn now has over 100 million members and averaging one new member every second. Through a very clever infographic, the online networking site celebrates this milestone by giving us a view into what this networked community is made of…
- 73 of the Fortune 100 with Cisco listed as one of 6 most represented companies
- 56 million members residing outside of the US
- 1 “invest in cheese” group (huh?)
- 17.8 million groups
At Cisco, we are still learning, and like so many companies it is through active participation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Through these conversations and with tools like Cisco SocialMiner we pick up new knowledge, listen and share. It’s real-time marketing and it just makes sense for our bottom-line and in allowing us to expand reach beyond where traditional marketing and conversations can take us.
LinkedIn has grown in large part due to its focus – the professional community. It dovetails nicely with our efforts on Facebook, for example, and is where we can engage with affinity groups, actively recruit, and connect with those in way really is the equivalent of swapping a virtual business card and expanding that connection. Certainly, the rising knowledge workers of today have a soul-mate in LinkedIn.
And, today I engage in multiple ways both as a part of Cisco and as an individual as do thousands of my peers. Yet, like so many others I wonder how long we can sustain the proliferation of experiences and things. The post-PC era is upon us. Yet the number of screens that we have is still expanding and we have social sites for our professional friends, sites for our personal/professional friends, etc. This is not a new question and the next wave of innovation in social media will likely be through intelligent aggregation that allows us to traverse across devices and applications in the way we want and that adapts to our interest. Technology will still matter as it will require intelligence, bandwidth and a “playing well with others.” But, in reality it should increasingly become invisible.
So, congratulations LinkedIn! What’s next? I can’t wait.
And, I wonder what some of you think.. How do you think the way we collaborate and connect will change? How do you use certain social sharing sites either together or apart?
