As the “Gold Medal” winner in Cisco’s internal London 2012 Olympic Video Contest, Systems Engineer Steve Cramer won a trip of a lifetime—six nights in London during the 2012 London Olympic Games. Before learning about his notable participation using video, let’s start off by watching his award-winning video that answers the question, “What do YOU make possible in your daily life for your family, friends, and community—or at work?” Read More »
In today’s SME Champion blog post, we meet the so-called “Queen of Cisco WebEx Social for IT.” WebEx Social (WxS), previously known as IWE (Integrated Workforce Experience), is the company’s internal collaboration platform that exhibits social networking, content creation and real-time communication features. A Program Manager within the IT Customer Strategy & Success (CS&S) group, Shannon is quite involved with the Client Experience, Governance and Adoption of WxS within IT.
Shannon Practices and Preaches Internal Social Media Usage
Shannon started using WxS when she first joined the company three years ago. Since then, she has been an active member of the WxS for IT program team while leading projects as well as providing consulting & support to IT employees and other functional teams. Her efforts have the ultimate goal of demonstrating business value and telling the Cisco on Cisco story in order to accelerate internal adoption and increase sales of WxS with external customers.
Shannon is a change agent responsible for evangelizing WxS and fostering collaboration within IT by helping her “customers” (IT employees) find relevant ways to utilize WxS in their everyday work lives. She does this internally by hosting brown bags, creating viral campaigns like “I love IWE” and blogging internally to share her best practices. What’s more, if someone approaches her with a question regarding WxS or needs help finding information, she is always willing to help and is just a click away.
Not only is Shannon an active on this internal platform herself, but she also acts as a fantastic advocate to enable and encourage others at Cisco to excel on WxS as much as she does. She preaches that this internal platform is a great tool for project management and practices what she preaches by using WxS communities and Posts to manage all of her projects. Such dedication and hard work has been awarded more than once by others at the company. Lance Perry, VP of IT CS&S at Cisco, recognized her with the “IT CS&S Above & Beyond Award”: “You are one of Cisco’s most valued partners, and we love working with you. Your tireless efforts championing IWE, decommissioning CEC sites, training, consulting and advocating the use of WxS—not just within IT but across the enterprise—has proved to be valuable.”
Who is running digital marketing in your company? Your company’s social media team? The web marketing team? The product marketing team? Your bloggers?
Truth is, everybody in your marketing organization should be engaged in digital marketing today; the marketing message, vision and goals of your company should be reflected in everything your employees do that is related to the product and your customer.
With that being said, wouldn’t it make sense for your marketers pertain to understand how these digital channels come to life? Wouldn’t an educated and able internal workforce help you build integrated marketing programs and break down silos?
Here at Cisco, our answer was yes. And with that the Digital Marketing Forum was born. The Forum provides a communal place where we can demonstrate, educate and enable our internal workforce to use digital marketing, while encouraging best practices and the opportunity to share learnings.
After successfully pulling off our first Forum, we want to share 10 tips which will help you plan yours:
Get executive commitment. Work with your executive team on topics and get their support for the forum.
Make it count. Research the groups that should be invited, gather email alias and names and send out a save the date ahead of time. Be aware of global teams and their time zones.
Plan for success. Treat this internal event as you would any external event and plan ahead of time with firm deadlines.
Pick one topic or message. Don’t overwhelm your audience, keep it to one simple message or topic of great importance.
Be flexible. Have a back up plan in case a speaker or topic falls through.
Be mindful of the event length, date and time. Try to limit your event to 2 hours maximum and pick a day and time of the week that is not crazy busy (don’t try to get people Monday morning… )
Put on your teacher hat. How can you present your learnings and best practices so people can easily follow and remember? What worked for us was 10-minute case studies.
Use digital channels. Make sure mobile and onsite workers can attend through online channels.
Get an outside speaker. Share industry thoughts and knowledge from a different perspective; define topics beforehand.
Evaluate and adjust. After the event solicit feedback trough surveys, polls, chats, comments on your community sites; ask people for ideas and new topics.
One of the challenges of a globally distributed event such as GSX is tapping into audience emotion and engaging attendees regardless of how they are experiencing the event.
To level set, the GSX format is a unique hybrid experience. Some of the key format challenges of the event are:
Distributed over four days with three waves (one wave per region)
In 88 locations and 400+ Cisco conference rooms
75% of the audience attending via remote viewing locations (i.e. watching a projection of the live broadcast)
20% of the audience attending virtually (i.e. via their desktop)
5% of the audience in main broadcast locations (i.e. watching live speakers on stages in one of the four broadcast hubs)
As mentioned, every year we just scratch the surface on the possibilities of the GSX format, and each year we work to fine tune the experience. This year, a variety of tactics were deployed to tackle the opportunities our audience was looking for. They wanted peer networking, the ability to recognize team contributions, inspirational content, and insight into the larger, global audience conversation and activities.
In this post I will talk about the specific tactics deployed during GSX FY13 (calendar 2012) to listen to the audience and leverage the vast amounts of data coming in from the event to showcase real time what the audience was talking about and doing. Let’s dive into the examples… Read More »
Did you know that at least a quarter of the entire Cisco IT group’s engagement metrics on Twitter come from our SME Champion Brett? An IT Mobility Services Senior Manager at Cisco, he is constantly creating worthwhile, interesting buzz about Cisco IT for company fans and followers.
Brett’s Twitter Engagement
Brett is an excellent external social media proponent for the entire IT team. Particularly notable is his engagement on Twitter as he fills up his personal Twitter feed with fresh new content and always keeps the conversations with his fans going. Just by browsing through his Twitter feed, you will realize that this SME really knows how to use the platform properly and what to write in order to get people engaged. Moreover, Brett exercises many Twitter best practices besides publishing compelling contents and interesting tidbits such as including hash tags and RT-ing his fan’s tweets. Brett’s involvement on Twitter has effectively increased his personal as well as his team’s brand on the web by way of his social media communications.
Leveraging Social to Develop Meaningful Relationships with Customers
Because Brett is in charge of the Cisco IT group’s BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiative, he often conducts Executive and customer briefings focused on this expertise topic. What happens after the customers leave the briefing? Brett ensures that the relationships he has initiated with those individuals live on by utilizing various social sites including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Recently, Brett hosted a Twitter Chat session on BYOD on the social platform Storify. In these ways and more, he has established himself as a trust advisor role representing Cisco with whom customers and partners desire to socially connect with.
What business value do you see that results from participating on Twitter and other social media sites?
In today’s SME Champion blog post, we meet the so-called “Queen of Cisco WebEx Social for IT.” WebEx Social (WxS), previously known as IWE (Integrated Workforce Experience), is the company’s internal collaboration platform that exhibits social networking, content creation and real-time communication features. A Program Manager within the IT Customer Strategy & Success (CS&S) group, Shannon is quite involved with the Client Experience, Governance and Adoption of WxS within IT. 
