PR Squared: Billion-Dollar Social Media Pioneers!

In case anyone doubted the prospect of billion-dollar corporations embracing PR 2.0 tactics, witness today's announcement by Novell. The company has launched a major league initiative with the debut of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 --- it's the first enterprise-grade desktop-to-datacenter Linux suite, and just 10 days post-launch some element of this product line has been downloaded every 5 seconds, on average.

Novell is a new client of SHIFT Communications, and we're obviously excited by the media reception gained by the SUSE products thus far. We created a del.icio.us page to keep tabs of "the good stuff" and were delighted when Novell CMO John Dragoon opted to include a link to the del.icio.us site in today's announcement. We'll continue to post articles about SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 from Novell on an on-going basis: fans of this exciting product line can use the del.icio.us page (or its RSS feed) to keep tabs on Novell's progress ...

In fact, I envision a day when an IT director uses this site as part of the research they'll need to motivate a large-scale Linux migration. They'll print out articles like this, and this, that they find on the del.icio.us site, as fodder for a "Linux Adoption Proposal" to their CIO.
I envision a day when the CMOs of every major company turn to their PR team and ask, "Is it possible to tag all of the articles about our company and industry, to make it easy for the Sales team to mix, match & customize their research for a proposal?"
I envision a day when "PR 2.0" is "business as usual," and --- you can call me a suck-up if you want to --- I sincerely applaud Novell for having the guts to pave the way.

It would have been all too easy for Novell to suggest that we only post the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 coverage to the corporate website: that's the kind of Big Company thinking we'd expected. Instead, Novell's marketing team said something like this; we said something like this ... and they still decided to put their trust in Social Media.

That's how change happens.

Tags: novell, social+media, pr+2.0, public+relations, marketing, SHIFT+communications