Last Friday, I had the privilege of speaking to several groups of college seniors on the Cisco campus. They came to get a better understanding of Cisco and some of our technologies, and we get the chance to speak with them about their role in potentially changing the world. As the “speaker”, I approached it as a wonderful opportunity to be a student of this captive audience of soon-to-be colleagues or future customers. Read More »

Here’s something you might not notice at first on cisco.com, but will surely appreciate once you discover it: Automatic print friendliness. Read More »

Over this past weekend, the Cisco.com Support area adopted a new navigation model we call “Task Based Navigation.” We think this is an easier way to get around the support area, and this model is well suited for an audience that performs discreet tasks regularly as part of their jobs. We’ve been testing it over the last few months with lots of our support customers, and some of you saw it in person at our booth at Networkers. Read More »

On the Cisco.com team, we’re often asked by colleagues in other companies “what are you doing with Web 2.0?” The answer depends in part on how you define Web 2.0. At Cisco, we include a wide range of elements, like user participation, engagement, user-generated content, short-form videos, and a mobile platform. We’ve made a concerted effort to include these in Cisco.com over the last year. Some of the efforts have been quite successful, and we’ve learned a lot in the process. One key thing we’ve learned about Web 2.0 features is that it’s important to integrate them into the total experience. Cisco.com is a large corporate website that serves many purposes for many different audiences--customers seeking pre-sales information, others looking for post-sales support, analysts seeking financial data, and/or press seeking the latest news ASAP. It’s a site that inherently has many purposes. I think about it as a manifestation of the entire company online, communicating to and with the market. So, when we can use 2.0 devices to improve communication, integrated within the overall experience, we’re going to be all over it. Here are some of the more popular 2.0 elements we’ve integrated into our pages: Read More »

465,003,915 That is how many aggregate subscribers are claimed by 44 of the top self-proclaimed virtual worlds.443,230,979That is the entire population of Mexico, the United States and Canada.We are all accustomed to the early stages of any technology when individual companies attempt to set the rules and language that will be used for the ensuing battles. There have been expensive fights over simple things like rather to call the aggregation of ISDN B-channels ‘MLPP’ or ‘Bonding’, IP telephony vs IP-PBXs, and so on. There are very tangible benefits to defining the market you are going to compete in. This is Law 5, the Law of Focus, in the classic marketing work The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.”This is still going on in the virtual world sector, as every platform with an avatar calls themselves a ‘virtual world’, and attempts to define the rest of the market around their paradigm. What typically follows this Cambrian explosion of platforms and competing technologies (and semantics) is that there is a ‘great rationalization’ (a ‘KT Period‘, to mix my periods/eras/eons/epochs). This space is rapidly becoming ripe for it’s own. Read More »