• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, October 17, 2008

CMO Mike Mendenhall, SVP and CMo, hewlett-Packard says that digital social media is both a risk and an opportunity.  Nothing new there, but he showed how HP has done this.

Mendenhall, who left Disney a year ago to join HP as chief marketing officer says the change "Has given me great insight into where technology and content converge."

He says the, according to Forrester Research, GenY is spending 30% more time online than watching TV.  "This digital conversation never stops and we need to update organizations and operations accordingly. The questions are, when do you think you are going to see new syndication models. when do you think we will see the network environment change? As marketers we have the opporutnity to drive change within our comapnies because all public touch points impact our brands, reputation and revenue.  Brands arent defined by campaigns but by consumer econsystems."

Mendenhall made Twitter poster child for  how individuals can shape perception on a massive scale, and how that is shaping marketing.

"In less than two years using with just 140 characters, twitter has moved from a novel idea to global presence: CNN uses Twitter for hurricane updates, political campaigns use it to activate grass-roots support.  Think of that: we are living in a world where a 22-employee company is at the center of global media."

He notes that Facebook and MySpace  reach more than 200 million active users per month; YouTube, in 2007  consumed as much bandwidth as the entrie internet in 2000.

"The digital conversation is a global phenomenon," he says.  "Last quarter 70% of our revenue came from outside US with 10% from Brazil, India and China.  The global population is now 6.6 billion and only 1.3 billion have internet access.  That will grow fast, and as new users  come online they are leap-frogging into Web 2.0.  76% of Brazilian internet users are on social media 50% of then have their own blogs.  China is the largest blogging community in the world with 42 million bloggers.  The amount of digital info online is doubling every eighteen months," he says, adding that  the information is overwhelming for  customers.  "It's useless if you cant get right info to right person at the right time."