San Francisco—Digital marketers from Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems and SAP shared case studies of successful digital marketing programs at BtoB's NetMarketing Breakfast here Wednesday.

Petra Neiger, senior manager-digital and social media marketing at Cisco, presented a case study of a recent content marketing program using social media that garnered 7.5 million impressions after one week.

“Our PR team was not involved—this was all social,” Neiger said. “Our ultimate goal is to increase share of voice using social reach.”

Alex Flagg, manager of social media and digital content enablement for HP enterprise segment marketing, shared HP's “Make a Star” program, created with Doremus San Francisco, in which HP thought leaders received “social media makeovers” to help them reach b2b influencers.

One resulted in an 84% increase in blog views and an almost 300% increase in retweets over the previous year.

Sharon Crost, integrated marketing and social media manager at Hitachi Data Systems, presented a case study from the company's recent social media week in October, which featured such external events as a website, mobile site and blogs, and internal activities including an employee contest, an internal website and posters.

“The challenge is proving ROI on social media,” Crost said. “If we can tie objectives to business results, such as proving that Twitter enables a sale, it will help us get the budgets we need.”

Scott Schenker, VP-global events at SAP, shared social media results from SAP's 2012 Sapphire Now annual conference in July, which generated more than 40,000 mentions on social media, up 91% from the previous year, and garnered more than 100 million social media impressions, up 170%.