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Social Media Marketing Adoption In Tech Companies

David C. Churbuck is Vice-President of Global Web Marketing at Lenovo, he wrote an interesting post called, “Rag-tag band of merry men: making Social Media Marketing official,” in it he describes his view of corporate blogging, and ask three thoughtful questions.

1. Can SMM survive as a function crossing internal organizational lines?
2. Is SMM a strategic function that innovates new revenue opportunities?
3. Is SMM a service/utility like IT that every department needs?

I agree with some of David’s analysis, especially on the broader market.

However, if we look at corporate blogging, adoption is going to be slow in communities where blogging has been slow to take off. The tech community has already jumped into the mature market because their customers have been there a long time.

Macromedia and Microsoft were very early with blogging and using some forms of social media.

David suggested two forms of social media adoption, narrow and broad. Yet, I think there is a third form of company adoption model, the hybrid.

Macromedia, or Adobe fits this model, blogging was widely adopted across the company at the encouragement of Jeremy Allaire around 2002, however only certain people were encouraged to blog; product managers, leaders and top developers. Macromedia started at where David suggests the industry is leading.

I also think that with the tech early adopters, and one company slightly late to the pack, dell*, are ahead of most consultants, and provide the models for the rest of the industry. That's not to say they cannot learn from industry watchers. But most of what I've learned about corporate blogging, despite having run three corporate blogs myself has come from the early adopters. (*Though Dell had a blog for its Linux division at least back in 2004. The main blog launched in 2006.)

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