Social Networking Conference Case Study: Marius Ciortea on Oracle Social Networking Initiatives

Case Study: Marius Ciortea on Oracle Social Networking Initiatives focused on Oracle’s enterprise social networking projects.

Marius leads some of Oracle’s social networking initiatives, and he shared some of the company’s challenges and learnings with initiatives “beyond the firewall.”

• Some of Oracle’s social networking-like initiatives are: Oracle Mix, Oracle Partner Network and Oracle University.
• Oracle Mix is a major initiative in which we are asking customers and prospects to help us with product and service ideas. We connect customers and employees and customers with each other. We know that we can do better, and we are asking people outside and inside Oracle for help.
• We admire Dell Ideastorm and Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea.
• We launched Oracle Mix at OpenWorld 2008, and today it has 45,000 members. How do we take it to 100,000?
• Some of Mix’s features are the user profile, friending, messaging and forums (like LinkedIn Answers). Oracle employees are designated by an “O” by their names, but otherwise they are the same.
• It’s run by four core people; one of the major communities is J Ruby Red.
• What really works is tying your social network with physical and other events. It helps with lead generation; for example, we have 2,000 E-Business Suite members.
• We get ideas from YouTube and Slideshare.
• Our key goals for Oracle Mix are understanding social presence, sharing experience, promoting trust and understanding who is going to events.
• Expose user-generated content anywhere.

The Social Networking Conference took place June 24-26 in Beverly Hills. Between leading the pre-conference workshop on Enterprise Social Networking and leading the final panel, I scribbled these notes.

Enjoy and watch for the final report within a few days!