Most 'Liked' Silicon Valley Companies

By Ryan Flinn

Cisco Systems (CSCO) is getting less love from investors these days, following five straight disappointing quarters. And yet it's the darling of social-media users, who praise its networking gear and customer service.

The company was one of Silicon Valley's most loved businesses in a report by NetBase Solutions Inc., a social-media analysis firm that looked at 18 billion postings on sites such as blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter over the past 12 months.

Cisco ranked second on the list, just below Salesforce.com (CRM) and one notch above Netflix (NFLX). NetBase created the ranking by analyzing the biggest publicly held technology companies in and around Silicon Valley, scouring online chatter for words such as love, like, dislike, and hate. Electronic Arts (ERTS), Yahoo (YHOO) and Apple (AAPL) had some of the lowest scores.

Monitoring and responding to online chatter is becoming more important as customers take to the Internet to voice praise and complaints, says Sandra Fathi, founder and president of Affect, a New York-based public-relations and social-media firm. Companies spent more than $600 million last year for social software to support sales and marketing and customer service, according to Gartner (IT). That figure will top $1 billion by 2013, the research firm estimates.

"Today, for almost any company, online sentiment is absolutely critical," Fathi says. "It affects their sales, it affects their employee morale, and it definitely affects their customer and prospect base."

To assign a score, NetBase calculated the difference between each company's positive and negative remarks, divided by the overall number of those comments. That generated a "net sentiment" score. Companies that had fewer than 10,000 mentions were excluded.

Salesforce, based in San Francisco, has an edge in social media because it helps companies do their own social outreach, part of its role as the biggest seller of Internet-based customer-management software.

Last year, Salesforce began selling Chatter, a Facebook-like approach to dealing with customers. It's now used by 80,000 companies. Salesforce bolstered its social-media lineup in March, when it announced the purchase of Radian6 Technologies for $340 million. That company sells software for staying abreast of contents on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other websites.

According to NetBase's survey, Salesforce users complimented the company's software, saying it let them collaborate internally and listen to customers on social media.

"The way your brand is perceived isn't so much coming from the messages that you're pushing out of the company, but the conversation about your brand," says Marcel LeBrun, chief executive officer of Radian6. "Every brand now has to listen, put in right processes and technology, to respond where the customer is."

Cisco, the largest maker of networking gear, won praise for its wireless Internet routers, as well as responsive customer service. Positive comments for the San Jose-based company outnumbered complaints 3-to-1.

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