Did you know the number of mobile-connected devices has broken the 1 billion mark? We have become more reliant on the Internet to get things done, take care of customers, and expand our businesses. This is a very important topic for partners, including small business partners.

Cisco’s newly expanded small business portfolio can help your customers better address their needs in this increasingly mobile world, where connectivity on a range of mobile devices is crucial. You already know that Cisco helps small businesses perform to their maximum potential through offerings that span security, connectivity, and collaboration. Cisco’s latest offerings continue that story, helping our partners fuel small business success and paving the way for future growth. To learn more about these recent announcements and how you can seize new market opportunities and add value to your customers, check out my recent post on the Small Business blog.

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Tags: Cisco, partner, portfolio, small business

STW Communications Group Limited is Australasia’s largest marketing content and communications services group. Within the STW group there are 75 individual operating companies which focus on advertising, design, digital, public and government relations, and specialist communications.

Being such a large group of companies operating under the same banner, naturally STW Group’s IT department faced the challenge of supporting, running and understanding the different IT needs of each organisation. Coming to grips with the idiosyncrasies of each company was time-consuming and labour intensive.

Enter Cisco and NetApp. STW were able to roll-out the joint FlexPod architecture to virtualise STW’s centralised computing platform.  STW reported that the virtualisation of its computing through FlexPod has led to extraordinary results. The once labour-intensive IT environment became a simple and easy to manage platform.

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Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the practice of building and maintaining social network profiles and activity in ways that are most likely to have a positive effect on one’s search engine rankings, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to web sites, and generate sales and leads. SMO starts with optimized profiles.

Public social network profiles tend to rank easily in search so they obviously are indexed by the search engines. At the most fundamental level, then, a well-optimized profile has the person’s or brand’s name in the manner in which people are most likely to search for that person or brand. Next in importance is including keywords for which one wants to be found in the description or biography part of the profile.

Finally, if the network allows links in the profile, the person or brand should link to their main properties on the web.  Note:  Links on some social profiles may be automatically tagged to as “NoFollow” for search engines. That means the search engines will not pass on any “link juice” from the social network to the linked-to site. However, these links can still be valuable for driving referral traffic.  There is growing evidence that search engines are experimenting with “co-citation,” where a relevant mention or link to a brand or other entity may carry some authority, even if there is no link or the link is no-followed.

How does  Search Engine Optimization differ from Social Media Optimization? 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO actually overlap in the area of strategy to positively affect search rankings. SMO seeks to do that more indirectly through building influence in social networks that will send positive signals about one’s site and brand to the search engines. As described above, SMO also has concerns that go beyond search into brand identity and direct traffic generation.

SEO is entirely focused on those things which seem to have the most direct effect on search rankings. It seeks to optimize both on-site (making it easy for search engines to crawl and index the site and identify what it is about) and off-site (building authoritative links from other sites to the targeted site).

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Tags: #smtraining, search engine optimization, seo, SMO, social media optimization, social profiles

My journey as a teleworking mom started almost ten years ago after I had my older son. I was coming back to work and in the process of changing roles at Cisco Systems. I live in North Carolina and had a job opportunity for a leader based in California. She knew that I wasn’t in a position to move and given we were already on opposite sides of the country, was supportive of my working from home. Thus my journey started as an individual contributor, working for a manager who based the decision to provide me flexibility on my track record of contribution at Cisco and her trust in my ability to do the job outside of an office.

Since then, I’ve been a part of the dramatic changes that have place in the workplace. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article on flexible work practices, the mobile worker population will be approximately 1.3 billion by 2015. At Cisco, almost 50% of our employees are collaborating with peers in other time zones and almost 90% telecommute at least one day per week. In many of our emerging countries, employees view flexibility as a right that is expected, versus a privilege that is earned.

My life has evolved as well. I’ve had another child and become a manager of a virtual team, with responsibility for a number of HR processes, including flexible work practices at Cisco. My experiences have offered me a few insights on how to be effective in our increasingly virtual world of work. Let me share these with you.

From an employee perspective, I have three tips that I think have been important toward my success. Read More »

Tags: collaboration, Flexibility, mobile worker, National Telework Week, telework, teleworker

This quarter, I had the privilege to work on a stretch assignment in the Education Marketing Team, to manage the Exhibit Booth and the dashboard for the Virtual Event Forum for Education Leaders, 2013.  It will be held on March 19 (Americas, and EMEA) and March 20 (Asia-Pacific), and will feature sessions with nineteen education thought leaders and innovators who  transforming education today.

I didn’t know what I was signing up for other than my colleague, Gary Serda, telling me it was going to be easy.  From bi-weekly, weekly, daily meetings, planning an event is anything but easy.  However, it’s been a very rewarding experience being able to work with colleagues in the Field, Sales, Events and so many others to learn about their passion and commitment to Education.  Read More »

Tags: #ciscoeduforum, byod, edreform, education, tomorrowstartshere