Primary Job Title Board Vice President / Board Member Primary Organization Unity Care
Location Pleasanton, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
Website markyolton.com LinkedIn View on LinkedIn X (Twitter) View on X
Mark Yolton is a digital and marketing business executive with more than 30 years of broad and deep experience across many facets of business management, digital leadership, social networking and online communities, online commerce, and field + corporate marketing.
He has experience in field, regional, division, and headquarters roles;
primarily at global F500 companies in the high tech (hardware, software, services, networking infrastructure) and financial services (insurance) industries. His responsibilities have often been global in scope, while he worked from the U.S. east coast (PA, NJ) and west coast (CA) locations, with global team members (U.S., Canada, Germany, U.K., Israel, India, China) and global responsibilities.
Mark's strengths include digital, marketing, social media, online communities, websites, e-commerce, business operations, events, mobile, and video. He has managed P&L with a budget of >€35 million and ~175 FTEs to produce > €100M financial return, and a budget of $70M and 120 FTEs + 300 contractors to drive global digital refresh and operations for Global 250 brand.
He has a passion for leading teams through change and rapid innovation cycles in order to achieve significant gains.
Mark is the past Vice President of Digital for Cisco Systems. He was Cisco's first integrated, holistic Digital leader responsible for all things web, mobile, social media, and video at the global networking giant.
At Cisco he formed and led the first-ever consolidated digital team. He brought together the web, mobile, social media, and video to a single team with a common purpose across multiple channels, established a three-year strategy, initiated global platform modernization, focused top-line growth, reliance on metrics / digital analytics / big data, led steering and operating committees for cross-functional companywide governance for digital alignment, and renewed digital / design / customer experience for key journeys.
The global scope of the Cisco digital team included: cisco.com and 85 country websites in 40 languages, the employee intranet and collaboration platforms / programs, managing the top 50 of Cisco’s public social media channels and accounts, blogs, online customer / partner / developer community management, customer-facing mobile apps, mobile responsive web transformation, video production of 300+ events / programs per month, and management of 12 Cisco TV studios and 7 event centers worldwide.
Prior to Cisco, Mark was the Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, Social Media, and Online Communities at SAP. This responsibility included managing and leading:
• SAP.com and its 70+ country websites in >40 languages.
• SAP’s brand-level presence on public social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, and others
• The hosted social network for SAP professionals: the SAP Community Network (SCN) at http://scn.sap.com
• Events that serve this community, specifically global SAP TechEd conferences and the SAP Technology Forum series
• The enabling tools, training, metrics and analytics, internal consulting, playbooks, governance, operating model, and strategies for SAP business units to lead with and leverage social media in their operations
Mark Yolton led the SAP Community Network and related SAP TechEd conferences for all of his 8+ years at SAP, at times also managed SAP’s standards and open source team, helped found SAP EcoHub (now SAP Store) online commerce site, events operations, an IT build/run team, and later added broader responsibility to lead SAP’s social media properties, social business strategy and execution, and SAP's digital / web presence.
Mark joined SAP by way of Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Unisys, and The Prudential. His background includes field, regional, and headquarters roles in marketing, communications, global ecosystems, the web, and eBusiness.
Mark has degrees from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania (Communications / Journalism / Marketing), he completed MBA coursework at LaSalle University (Philadelphia, PA), and continued his executive education at INSEAD (France), at Stanford University (California), and at Kellogg School of Business, part of Northwestern University (Chicago, IL area).
Mark was a Board Observer with InnoCentive, which operates a crowd-sourced innovation marketplace.
He is a volunteer Board Member (Board Vice President) of the Unity Care Group, a non-profit agency serving foster children and at-risk youth and families in the Silicon Valley. He is also a volunteer Mentor for the non-profit Students Rising Above.
A Philadelphia native, Mark lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and travels globally as he works with customers, partners, and colleagues around the world.
Mark is married to Karen Yolton (of Kaiser-Permanente), has three adult children (Kim, Kendrick, Daniel) and two grandsons.
