CISCO - Blog# 6

           Enterprise 2.0 is the use of social networking sites and software by business organizations to boost interaction between companies and their clients. The emerging trend shows that companies are adopting the new technique for communication and advertising (Cook, 2008). CISCO, a multinational corporation dealing in networking equipment, has largely employed social networking sites in launching products and popularizing them. By initiating a proper framework of social networking, an organization would enjoy great financial benefits.

Since its involvement with social networking sites in 2008, CISCO opened what researchers called virtual offices; blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, YouTube Video broadcasting channels, Flickr and Second Life. Within 4 years, the corporation was able to attract more prospective clients which made the launch of their products less costly. Particularly, more than 9000 people attended their product launch after launching it on social media which experts argued it was 90 times the previous attendance, generated great attention from article writers, attracted more than 40 million online viewers and led to the awarding of CISCO as the Best Marketing organization. In addition, the total cost of these operations was a sixth of the total costs incurred when using traditional methods. The company mobilized its management personnel and crafted the policies that were distributed across its branches (Hibbard, 2010).

             CISCO’s use of social technologies helped them to save over $100,000 on each product launch. These ROI stats result from pre-launch of products on social sites and enhanced interactions. Through these social networks, an organization could increase sales by more than 27% each month and in a span of 3 months sales could be up by more than 100% compared to old methods of product marketing (Fisher, 2014). One of the greatest challenges of this project is getting people to engage in the new emergent social networks but the financial gains are phenomenal.

 

 References

Cook, N. (2008). Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work. New York, NY: Gower Publishing, Ltd.

Fisher, L. (2014). The ROI of Social Media: 10 Case Studies. Retrieved 12 September 2014 from http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/07/16/the-roi-of-social-media-10-case-studies/

Hibbard, C. (2010). How Social Media Helped Cisco Shave $100,000+ Off a Product Launch Retrieved 12 September 2014 from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/cisco-social-media product-launch/