The Evolution of Social at EMC

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog of late.. sorry for that. Chalk it up to a plethora of exciting changes - all of which I get to share here with you here. Most notably, Social Media @ EMC has taken another large step in it's evolution.

While simplifying the story a bit, our journey to become a socially savvy brand started in the Fall of 2007. Starting with the launch of EMC|ONE, we set out to develop a high degree of social proficiency among our global employees. Over time, we continued to extend our reach to the outside world, and can now be engaged in many places, including the EMC Community Network, our Facebook presence, and the like.

Truth be told, our amazing progress in this space has been largely organic. Our innovative culture combined with a small but passionate group of social practitioners are among the contributors to our success. While there have been people focused on evolving social, it's often been 'part of the job' as opposed to being 'the job'.

Things have changed, and I believe we've just taken our next big step in this journey.

Organizationally, the function of 'Social Engagement' has been aligned with our Corporate Communications team, and is now on par with the likes of Public Relations and Analyst Relations. In other words, social is now seen as a fundamental part of how we engage and communicate both inside and outside EMC.

What's this mean? Well, among other things, it reinforces the importance of Social Media in the business world as a legitimate channel of engagement.

For us, it also marks the intersection of traditional and emerging communications. The social web has taught us how to be more succinct with our message through tools like Twitter and Facebook. It's also helped us to become more engaging and transparent with our communications. It will be interesting to watch the lessons learned via the social web be applied to more traditional communications to realize a true best-of-breed approach that ultimately meets one goal - simplify the message for the audience.

I'll be sharing more about this transformation as we go through it so stay tuned. No doubt we have much to learn and explore as these teams come together and set the bar for industry communications.