Is This The Most Expensive Use Of LinkedIn As A Marketing Tool Yet?

We’re all for companies and groups using social media sites differently and trying out new things  but Cisco’s latest LinkedIn campaign has basically ignored these principles, instead spending a vast amount of money on what’s effectively an email campaign.

The company launched a targeted campaign called the ‘Human Network’ which, alongside homepage takeovers on the sites of CNBC and The Financial Times, involved contacting 140,000 chief experience officers through InMail. While LinkedIn allows users to search for people with specific job titles, their method in getting in touch with them if you’re not connected is through InMail.

Those familiar with LinkedIn InMail would realise that this method of communication costs roughly $10 dollars per message, a hefty sum just to get in touch with someone through social media. Since Cisco is a multinational corporation, we imagine it hasn’t left a dent in their finances, but assuming that LinkedIn didn’t give them a discount deal (why would they?), and taking into consideration that the best account (Executive) only allows you to send 25 InMail’s for free worth $250, it would mean that Cisco has spent roughly $1.4 million on InMail alone.

While Cisco’s VP of corporate marketing and branding said that while its too early to provide results from the effort and that there was a huge increase in the number of people interacting with their LinkedIn page, it’s still a considerable amount of funds to dedicate to the simple act of mailing.

While they’re perfectly entitled to do this and will probably reap the benefits from such a targeted campaign, it’s a budget that could have easily go into creating a more elaborate or inspiring campaign to capture their imaginations. Sending only the video below feels like a waste considering the resources invested into this one aspect.

Ultimately, the real winners from all of this is LinkedIn for earning so much from this, but we’ve a feeling that unless they achieve an incredibly high success rate, Cisco will be both the first and last company to try this out.