Favorite Tidbits from the Ragan-Cisco Social Media Summit

Last week's Social Media Summit featured a variety of interesting speakers and topics. I wish I could have attended each presentation! While it was hard to pick only a few quotes, here are my favorite top 1-2 tidbits from the presenters I had the opportunity to see live.

Pete Codella (@codella), Codella Marketing
Reminder: a list of all web 2.0 tools: www.go2web20.net.

If you have a Facebook fan page, you need to come up with ways to treat them differently so they stay engaged (e.g, different discounts).

Jeanette Gibson (@JeanetteG), Cisco
Cisco & video. THEN: video blogs, video data sheets, web video.
NOW: Cisco is using video for meaningful engagement: Public Q&A using a combination of video, Twitter and blog.

Instead of a 30-page white paper, consider 10 or so blog posts. Have employees use Flip to save money on video production.

Reverse mentoring at Cisco means that Gen Yers show execs how to use social media.

Yann Gourvennec (@ygourven), Orange Business Services
3 pillars of social media for businesses: communicate, collaborate, cooperate. It all starts internally.

9 tips from Orange for implementing social media: http://bit.ly/9uN8ak.

Orange didn't use YouTube due to progressive download. They use Streamlike which is not seen by firewalls, does the same as YouTube.

Len Devanna (@LenDevanna), EMC
Etiquette in social is key and must be learned because your reach is bigger than you think it is.

Forcing behaviors won't work. Educate, enable and scale. TRUST is an inherent part of the equation. Don't be overly prescriptive in policy or concept. Leverage the power of the masses.

David B. Thomas (@DavidBThomas), SAS
How to build your strategy? 1/define success. Social media is not a strategy, it's a set of tools. Decide what success looks like. 2/Map social media to goals 3/Give ur people the tools (for monitoring; best practices sharing, analytics) 4/use what you have: repurpose content for multiple platforms, create editorial calendar. Use your blog analytics to understand what's bringing people to your site and focus there.

To build awareness, you'll need to find the right people. Involve practicioners & rulemakers, skeptics & evangelists. (SAS created mktg 2.0 council)

Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki), Garage Technology Ventures
Discussed in detail how he uses social media with special focus on Twitter. Here are some ideas on specific business goals social media can help you achieve: 1/selling (Dell, kogibbq) 2/informing (Canadian border control informs about wait times) 3/support (Comcast) 4/sales prospecting (advanced search).

Tools, tips and tricks from @GuyKawasaki for online marketing: http://bit.ly/99OHLQ

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), Altimeter Group
In order to do social CRM, you have to do 5M's: monitoring, mapping, management, middleware, measurement.

To get started in social CRM: inventory current social assets, create new fields in current CRM system, populate fields manually, train employees

If you want to be relevant and trusted, you have to allow customers to have real conversations on your site. Your site will have customer voices on it whether you allow it or not due to SideWiki.

A team of 4 panelists shared their views on the battle between PR and marketing and who really owns social media:

Ken Kaplan (@kenekaplan), Intel
Listen, smile, join, participate, ask questions and don't be afraid to give advice. Customers want to talk to someone who can help them, doesn't matter what group they are in: Social Media, PR, etc.

Alex Teplitxky pointed out that you can't control conversation but you can help drive it. Be yourself. He added that social media should be a very open and conscious experience from the get-go regardless if people are in marketing, PR or customer service.

Autumn Truong (@autumntt), Cisco said follow through is key: if you start pursuing a lead, you need to stay on top of what happens regardless of where you are in the organization.

LaSandra Brill (@LaSandraBrill), Cisco shared a similar viewpoint. Later, she spent a few minutes talking about social media education at Cisco and revealed that Cisco's education and certificate programs help tremendously increase the company's knowledge base.


Robert Duffy (@bobduffy), Intel continued the event with "The P. Diddy method for community manager success"
Community managers should be like P. Diddy: 1/Build a posse (leverage influencers), throw great parties (plan engaging community activities), go on road trips (extend to events & other forums).

As a brand participating in forums and communities, go in with attitude of being humble & helpful from.

Carlos Dominguez (@carlosdominguez), Cisco closed the Summit with the conclusion that they hype is real and social media is here to stay

When starting social media, go underground and limit sharing in the early stages to avoid red tape.

Understand your company culture, then develop your social media strategy.

@carlosdominguez shared with the audience that the life span of a Fortune 500 company is 40 years. If you want to increase your company's life span, you'll need to 1/be sensitive to the environment (adopt to change), 2/have a strong sense of identity, 3/decentralize and 4/be financially conservative. So...embrace change, experiment, learn, leverage.

And if I could have one wish for next time, it would be fantastic if the presenters' Twitter IDs could be listed in the program and on the big screen in the conference room. It would just make live tweeting so much easier.

What tidbits captured your attention at the event and why?