Last week Salesforce Marketing Cloud announced, in partnership with our amazing customer Cisco Systems, that they are seeing an incredible 281% annual ROI from their use of Salesforce Radian6.

How does Cisco see 281% annual ROI?

The powerful thing about social media listening with enterprise class technology like Radian6 is how broad the impact can be across an organization. Both JetBlue and Cisco see significant cost savings through streamlined use of internal and outside services.  By using Salesforce Marketing Cloud technology, Cisco sees a much greater benefit through alignment between customers and the business.

Many companies take an approach to social listening as a reporting mechanism. The approach that is often taken is simply to create daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports for sharing with the individual brand or product marketing teams that are executing on campaigns. While this helps to provide some clarity, it is fairly low fidelity and low impact.

What makes Cisco different is that they are using Radian6 to automatically tag over 5000 posts each day that are getting pushed to over 240 key product stakeholders and experts throughout their company. These are people in product, sales, service, or even legal teams, who are tasked with taking action on those posts.

Enterprise social media listening is so much more than a marketing function

What is powerful about social media listening is that there are so many people that can learn and take action from posts discovered on social media channels at companies like Cisco. Their customers, their partners, and their own people are constantly sharing content they find interesting or important. Effective social listening helps Cisco's teams get to the heart of what is causing discussions to happen. And once they have done this they can make intelligent decisions about what to do about it.

The ROI comes from this increase in social EQ across their organization. Cisco teams are able to truly get close to what their customers want and develop empathy for them. This is a powerful motivating force. Cisco employees are able to quickly see on a post-by-post level how a customer is seeing success or how they are having trouble with Cisco products. By doing this they can put themselves in the shoes of their buyers and become both analytically and emotionally engaged, at scale.

Check out the Nucleus report on Cisco today and watch the video on Cisco’s social listening center. And let us know: what does your company do to develop connectedness to your customers? Be sure to check out the Cisco Case Study in its entirety.

Check out my last post on the topic of ROI and how JetBlue drove 140% annual ROI through their investment in Salesforce Buddy Media.