FIVE Years of Cisco Blogs!!
About.com tells me that the fifth anniversary gift is…wood. I’m not sure what to do with that, but what I do know is that five years ago this past February we posted our first external blog entry on our first external blog.
I’m proud to say I started the first blog at Cisco on the topic of High Tech Public Policy, and as Laura Ipsen, then the VP of Government Affairs (now SVP/GM of our Smart Grid Business Unit) stated in our first blog entry, entitled “Welcome,” the purpose of this medium was to interact and listen:
“Fundamentally, Cisco’s mission is to shape the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for our customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners.
(Government Affairs’) vision is to use this blog to share our staff’s knowledge and opinions about government policy, legislation and regulation and the environment in which it is created. Our global team members will be participating in this forum. We hope you find our blog useful and informative.
We invite you to post your feedback and questions. Above all, we hope that we can, in some small way, help you better understand the technology policies that are being talked about, debated and voted upon - whether that is through our own postings or from discussions that are created on this site.”
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.
So, while an early highlight for me was being mentioned by the Wall Street Journal in the same breath as Mark Cuban, Richard Edelman, Bob Lutz and Jonathan Schwartz a year after I started the first Cisco blog, the real highlight is interacting with tens of thousands of people a day using these social media. It started innocently enough five years ago and, I have no doubt, that it will only be more important over the next five years.
Here is that Wall Street Journal graphic from April 2006. 
Posted by John Earnhardt at 02:54PM PST
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