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HIRE ME TO SPEAK

EMC Corporation and social media marketing

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Marketing  |  Brand Journalism  |  Best Practices  |  Corporate blogging

Every week I encounter people working for large organizations with huge marketing and PR budgets who are resistant to the ideas of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

They're used to the things that worked in an exclusively offline world (TV ads, tradeshows and events, media and analyst relations, Yellow Page ads, direct mail, and the like) and they don't want to experiment. Or there might be an individual who wants to jump into new marketing, but the bosses are resistant. Or the PR department is scared of "losing control of the message."

Emclog

EMC is a big company (revenues in the USD$10 Billion plus range) and is jumping into social media marketing. Unlike other large organizations that are good at making excuses, EMC is good at experimenting.

For example, at the EMC World Conference 2008 (which brings together 9,000 people), EMC set up a social media newsroom, an EMC Twitter feed and other ways that people could stay in touch online while the physical event was happening. In fact, Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, talked about these things in his presentation at the event. I find this compelling because most large company CEOs don’t even know what Flickr is, let alone would be willing to talk about it from the podium.

EMC also has a stable of employee bloggers. You can find a directory of them here.

Dan Schawbel is a blogger and EMC social media marketing machine. He spends a lot of time figuring out, experimenting and executing social media programs at EMC Corporation, where he is a social media specialist. Dan is also the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success a new book which will be released in early 2009 from Kaplan. Dan’s Personal Branding Blog is read by tens of thousands. Not your typical big company employee, Dan is stirring it up and making it happen.

Barry Burke, is another blogger who works at EMC, writing The Storage Anarchist. Barry is a technologist who's spent most of his career in product marketing and management of products and services for enterprise IT and MIS.

I like the disclaimer on Barry's blog. It reads: "The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. I am a blogger who works at EMC, not an EMC blogger. This is my blog, and not EMC’s. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC."

Great stuff. Isn’t it great that EMC encourages bloggers in this way.

As much as I like what EMC is doing, I wonder how much the company is paying attention to it's buyers and the search terms that buyers use? Some time ago, I wrote a post on this blog What are the search terms your buyers use to find products and services like yours? Where does your company rank on Google for those terms?

I still don’t see EMC at the top of these results…