Cisco Out To Lunch on Social Networking

Cisco’s social networking strategy is to help media companies connect with their customers. Cisco’s offerings will deliver multimedia content to online communities, help visitors find content through a recommendation and relevance engine that looks at a user's activity patterns and makes personalized suggestions, said Dan Scheinman, SVP Media Solutions. The strategy is predicated on the notion that due to information explosion:

1) Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for;

2) Finding anything in this world of infinite information is really going to be tricky; and

3) Cisco's network expertise and recent social-networking acquisitions uniquely equip it to solve this set of problems.

"We've become the only company that can do all of these three things together," Scheinman said.

Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for. Oh really! Do the millions of users on social networking sites not EVEN know what they want? Is that why they are spending so much time on social networks - because they don’t know what they want?

Users are finding it tricky to find content. Has Dan Scheinman not heard of Google? If not, let me quickly explain. Google is a web site where you can go and enter your search query, click the video link, and find exactly the video you are looking for. It will find the content you are looking for regardless of where it resides. The content does not have to be on your web site.

Cisco is the only company that can do all of these three things together. Wow! Have you NOT heard of YouTube? They do that and more, and they do it for free. Cisco recently acquired Five Across and Tribe.net, both dogs in the social media space. Five Across, was a blogging site founded by folks that did not blog but were looking to make a quick buck. Tribe.net was a site for burning man fans with good intentions but backed by evil doers (Mayfield) looking to make a quick buck. The evil doers finally gave up on the site after talks with NBC failed and an acquisition bid by burning man fans fell through. Finally, Cisco revealed that it had acquired the site for its cutting edge technology such as photo uploading and inviting friends.

If you are responsible for social media strategy for a major corporate web site or a small internet community you can save yourself a lot of money, time, and frustration by simply using YouTube. It is free and easy to use. You can easily upload your videos, integrate them into your web site, track subscriptions, get viewer analytics, and more. If you want to customize it, you can use their API and if you want to customize further, you can use their YouTube Director which has many more options for professional users such as logo customization and scheduling show times etc. In fact, UC Berkeley uses this service.

This is in no way an endorsement of YouTube's offering but information so that you don't end up blowing $250,000 when you can get the same thing for free.