John Earnhardt noted on The Platform, the blog of Opinions and Insights from Cisco, that this is the 5th anniversary of Cisco's first blog post. This auspicious occasion was marked, today, with this tweet.

Click on the image above to read the entire post, but here's an excerpt.

This first blog entry started something of a trend at Cisco. We now have internal blogs “out the wazoo” (I believe is the technical term). And, we now have 16 “corporate blogs” that you can access on Blogs.Cisco.com. Topics range from High Tech Policy (our first blog), to corporate stuff (this one), to mobility, to collaboration, to Service Provider, to Security, etc.

Over the past five years, we have grown our social media presence, we have added a Cisco YouTube channel for the all-important medium of video, we have added a corporate @CiscoSystems Twitter account (actually MANY Cisco Twitter accounts), we have an active Cisco Facebook account and we are experimenting with other social media like Flickr, UStream and more. The net is that interacting with customers, investors, employees, partners and more is important to us. We want to be accessible. We want to talk….and, more importantly, we want to listen.

Congratulations, Cisco. We're following you.

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According to the Just a Patent Examiner Blog, USPTO Director David Kappos has started a blog. For the time being, it's only hosted on the internal USPTO servers. However, according to the blog, "we plan to make the blog available to the public in the coming weeks."

Once the blog is made public, hopefully, the United States Patent and Trademark Office will reach out to its followers via Twitter, as well, @USPTO thanks to the foresight of @jmattbuchanan at Promote the Progress, who continues to hold that username for the USPTO to utilize as soon as the leadership is ready to take full advantage of this new communication channel as has the President and so many other government departments and agencies.

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Padmasree Warrior is Cisco Systems' Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, she is responsible for helping drive the company's technological innovations and strategy, and works closely with its senior executive team and board of directors to align these efforts with Cisco's corporate goals. As an evangelist for what's possible, she pushes the organization to stretch beyond its current capabilities – not just in technology, but also in its strategic partnerships and new business models.

We @ipdotcom are among over a million followers of her on Twitter @Padmasree.

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Tom Colson, CEO of IP.com Inc., restated on Twitter @tomcolson a policy for public communications by employees in 140 characters permitted by Twitter for each tweet, as these postings are called by those who are following this emerging social interaction. Tom credits another lawyer, Jay Shepherd, @jayshep for the thoughtful and carefully drafted Twitter policy.

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

As noted by Tom in another tweet this week, he's not the first CEO to embrace Twitter as another effective way to communicate with those following similar interests in his work @ipdotcom and his other interests, which are outlined in his profile on Twitter. An increasing number of executives are now on Twitter. There's even a website called ExecTweets that aggregates their tweets.

Sun Microsystem's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has been blogging and twittering for well over a year. And this new policy for Twitter is really not new. It's simply a twitterable summary the Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse that Tom Colson adopted in his 2007 blog post about why we believe in business blogs. For all the same good reasons, we also believe in Twitter for business, and encourage employees of IP.com, if they're interested in social interaction on the internet, to join the conversation on Twitter, keeping in mind our policy, which is simply good advice for anyone.

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Patent Attorney J. Matthew Buchanan, founder and architect of the patent education portal Promote the Progress, which we follow on Twitter @ptp, was quick to catch this tweet @uspto, where an anonymous benefactor is offering to transfer the @uspto Twitter username to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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Jackie Hutter has over 13 years experience in advising innovation-driven corporations, investors and universities on how to maximize intangible asset value by developing and executing on IP and patent strategy. In a post on her IP Asset Maximizer Blog, she says,

I often facetiously refer to myself as a "recovering patent attorney." This somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase seems appropriate to my present professional state of mind because, after many years of drafting and prosecuting patents for clients of all sizes and degrees of sophistication, in the end, I became disillusioned with the way the patent business traditionally operates.

Too often, I found that the patents I worked so hard (and was paid handsomely) to obtain failed to serve my client's business needs. In searching for the source of the disconnect between my efforts, the client's expenditures and the ultimate value of the patent to my client's business, I realized that those responsible for the client's business often did not participate adequately in the patenting process. Instead, at many organizations, inventors and patent attorneys served as the gatekeepers for most patent decisions. While the relevant client business unit typically held some say in patenting decisions, at many companies, the process effectively operated within a R&D/patent attorney "silo."

Upon reflection, I found this situation akin to the proverbial "fox guarding the hen house" because those with the most riding on the patenting process i.e., R & D managers and patent attorneys, held de facto decision rights as to their company's patents. Patent decision-making at many corporations seemed therefore to often rest on the perceived scientific value of the invention covered by the patent, not whether a patent for that invention served to effectively execute on the client's business strategy. In short, many patents that I obtained covered cool ideas, but were nonetheless effectively worthless to serve the client's business needs.

Continue reading Confessions of a "Recovering Patent Attorney" and Why I Have Joined the Growing Ranks of IP Strategists on Jackie Hutter's IP Asset Maximizer Blog.

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In the brief time IP.com Inc. has been on Twitter @ipdotcom, we've attracted quite a diverse and interesting following. We notice among our followers on Twitter, the familiar, the famous, and some new bloggers.

• Dennis Crouch @patentlyo and Patently-O
• Stephen Albainy-Jenei @patentbaristas and Patent Baristas
• J. Matthew Buchanan @matt_buchanan and Promote the Progress
• Douglas Sorrocco @douglassorocco and PHOSITA
• Stephen M. Nipper @nipper and The Invent Blog
• R. David Donoghue @rdd and Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Victoria Pynchon @vpynchon and IP ADR Blog
• Scott R. Cleere @secleere and Wisconsin Lawyers Blog
• Michael Scott @LawProf and Singularity Law
• Brett Trout @BrettTrout and BlawgIT
• Patrick Reilly @ipsociety and The Intellectual Property Society
• Latoicha Givens @iplaw101 and IP Law 101
• Ron Coleman @RonColeman and Likelihood of Confusion
• Colin Samuels @colinsamuels and Infamy or Praise
• Kevin Heller @kevinhell and Tech Law Advisor
• Tom Petrocelli @tompetrocelli and Tom's Technology Take
• Rex Gradeless @Rex7 and Social Media Law Student
• Ryan Roberts @startuplawyer and The Startup Lawyer
• B.Nidever, UCLA Office of IP, @bnidever and ArtInScience Cafe
• Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak Chief Business Development Officer @JeffreyHayzlett
  
• Bill Pollak, CEO of Incisive Media, @wpollak
• Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, @kevinokeefe and Real Lawyers Have Blogs
• Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures and founder of Alltop.com,  @guykawasaki

We'd like to welcome these followers to this little corner of the blogosphere, IP.com's  corporate weblog, Securing Innovation.

If you're on Twitter and you'd like to join those who are already following IP.com Inc., turn your dial to @ipdotcom and click on the "Follow" button and see our growing number of followers there. If you're not yet on Twitter, join in and see what's going on.

We'll be updating this post, from time to time, so check back and see who else is among our followers on Twitter. And we'll be checking to see who's following our followers, and adding some of them to those we follow on Twitter, too. Yeah, it's a fun way to network among the leaders in the intellectual property community.

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Kodak's Chief Business Development Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, who's on Twitter @JeffreyHayzlett, shakes his head and wonders what vendors are thinking when they send him photo holiday cards NOT printed by Kodak. Makes you wonder.

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Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog, whose company works with IP.com in the design and development of our company weblog, Securing Innovation, has shown us how to incorporate new social media like Twitter into the company's digital communications.

Tonight, following Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter, we see him pointing to an interesting article in U.S. News and World Report about how companies use social media to be a part of the conversation.

The onslaught of blogs, discussion forums and user-generated media has changed the flow of information about people, products and brands forever. Anyone with a computer, a video camera or even a cell phone can post information, reviews and comments about you and your brand on dozens of highly visited online destinations.

It's no longer enough to create a website and assume that prospects will learn about your company solely from there. In today's online social media world, businesses of all shapes and sizes must actively participate in online reputation management.

Of course, the best way to manage your online reputation from a business standpoint is to put out great products, provide excellent customer service and honor all your commitments. That's certainly a great start, but you may still need to monitor and respond to what's being said about your organization.

In the end, writes John Jantsch, the only way to control what people say about your company is to be part of the conversation. We might add, even when the conversation isn't about your company but about another company with a very similar name.

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Click on the image above for a gift idea for women patent attorneys.

@ipdotcom recommends following @patentbaristas on Twitter.

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