Last evening Jeremiah Owyang,  (earlier a Senior Analyst at Forrester)  Partner Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group, delivered the Keynote address to Silicon Valley Chapter, AMA Group, hosted by Cisco in its  Telepresence Suites, Santa Clara.

The topic “How to approach social media across the entire enterprise” evoked response across the spectrum as the audience grappled with the  increasing impact of social media on businesses and how the phenomena is growing like a tsunami everyday, sweeping off  barriers everywhere.

Jeremiah kicked off  the discussions by drawing attention to the following

1.    The social phenomena  we are experiencing now is just the beginning. It is here, not only to stay, but grow, and businesses need to start thinking a long term strategy.
2.    Developing a plan for listening hard to people on the social media
3.    Companies need to become enablers and not try to obstruct social media access to its employees

With these three premises Jeremiah outlined the far reaching changes (often disruptive) happening within different wings inside organizations. These  transformations are affecting  today PR, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Product Development, Legal to name a few. He then invited the three panelists to share their experiences.

Jeanette K. Gibson, Director, New Media, Corporate Communications, Cisco Systems, Inc. started off with how Cisco has enable social media strategy by creating a Group tasked with developing and implementing policies focused on employee use of  Social Media. Far from outlawing its use, Cisco has  created orientation programs for guidance of individuals.  This has become important, as Jeanette puts it, because the old paradigm of balance between work and home life has largely disappeared, replaced by workplace-home integration.

Gaurav Kapoor, CFO & GM MetricStream, described how social community led to lead generation, product development and helped bridged the gap and leveled the field with competition.

Tony Welch, Lead Social Media Strategist, Hewlett-Packard, brought out HP success in leveraging social media for Customer Support and outlined some of the experiments HP is actively conducting in social media arena.

Jeremiah asked for opinion on ROI from social media. Gaurav, citing example of  ComplianceOnline, pointed out that with the right strategy, social community led programs can generate significant revenues by themselves.  The general opinion was that the channel is too new for any  meaningful ROI calculation. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the  cost of not managing social media could be very high.  Someone quoted Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak’s Chief Marketing’s opinion, that not engaging in social media  could generate harmful  Return On Ignorance.

Apple did stand out as one company that has let its products speak for the company.

Is social media really for smaller businesses? The general consensus was that the size does not matter.

Cost? Affordability?
Here at Regalix we think that Smart tools and business intelligent processes can make this happen without bursting the budget.