Successful Social Networking, Social Media Product Launch: Cisco’s Web 2.0 Marketing Case Study

As a small or midsize business owner or marketer, you can always use a good example of successful business-to-business social media marketing.  Small business CEOs tell me they find how-to social media marketing examples helpful.  In case you missed this insightful Cisco high-tech 2008 Web 2.0 product launch case study (like I did) here’s a quick review.

Cisco’s LaSandra Brill does an excellent job of explaining the social media launch of their Aggregation Edge Service Router in  “Building a Community with Social Media and Web 2.0 – A Cisco Product Launch Case Study” on her blog.

LaSandra shares the marketing program takeaways, best practices and what she wouldn’t do again in a comprehensive PowerPoint.

I like the key points La Sandra makes about ‘Marketing in a Web 2.0 World’ in her PowerPoint. My favs:

Create a relationship.  Not an event. Cisco strived for more than a successful product launch. They worked on building relationships with suspects, prospects and customers all along the way.

Build communities.  Not just websites. They worked to engage customers on many online sites.  They built a page on Facebook and other social networking sites popular with their target audience. (Facebook page, Cisco Support Group of Uber User Internet Addicts here.)

Two-way communication (not one-way).   The team’s goal was to engage customers.  Encourage them to share opinions, preferences and ask questions.  Engage customers in conversations.  They went way beyond the traditional press release, brochure and trade show.

Being everywhere online that your customers are. Publish and distribute your rich content online at as many sites as possible.  The product marketing team did the pick and shovel work to determine where the Aggregation Edge Service Router’s audience hangs out online.   They discovered some of their prospects were on Second Life, so Cisco was too.  (Who knew?)

Use web 2.0  to create a community that is passionate about your products. Cisco did. The marketers knew they needed rich content in more places than Cisco.com

Looks like they built the customer community in 3 months, prior to the product launch date.  While this is certainly a big company with a similar budget, the case includes lots of ideas that you can adapt for your small businesses or startup.    Next post, I’ll suggest social media marketing strategies and tactics that you can adopt from Cisco.

Here is LeSandra Brill’s webcast covering the Social Media Product Launch on her Marketing in a Web 2.0 World blog.

Enjoy! (Take notes… there will be a pop-quiz.)