Todd Forsythe | B2B | BtoB Magazine

Todd Forsythe

Story posted: June 11, 2012 - 6:01 am EDT

Title: VP-global marketing

Company: EMC Corp.

Time in current job: 6 months

Todd Forsythe, VP-global marketing at EMC Corp., takes the idea of social media seriously. Since joining EMC last year from Salesforce.com, Forsythe has been focused on embedding social into the fabric of the storage giant's day-to-day business.

For example, the company has blended its social marketing, traditional media and marketing sciences teams into one, enabling it to understand the impact social is having on marketing overall and adjust its efforts accordingly. “We're looking holistically at all media and understanding the effectiveness of all media on the business,” Forsythe said.

The appeal of social is its ability to extend the reach of a message and engage customers in a dialogue, he said. The company relies on it both internally (with 44,000 employees participating in an internal collaboration platform) and externally, with the EMC Community Network and a strong presence on social outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Spiceworks and Twitter.

Last year, the company moved from traditional, physical product-launch events to online-only virtual events, with the online community serving as a hub. Over the past three months, the company has had approximately 40 product-launch events within the community, attracting more than 90,000 participants, Forsythe said.

The company encourages customer participation with a program that recognizes members by awarding points and badges for their participation both online and offline at in-person events, such as EMC World.

While building the community has been important, Forsythe said, it's in engaging participants, listening to them and taking action that social can have its biggest impact. EMC uses a listening platform to identify users who might be interested in its products and routes them to a social selling team armed with content. From there, leads can be moved into the company's CRM environment for traditional lead flow, Forsythe said.