After experiencing my first earthquake on the west coast many years ago, there was nothing anyone could do to convince me that an earthquake could be a good thing.  However, there is one group that is doing just that. The Tech Museum in San Jose has introduced a simulated quake that is a life-changing platform for children to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Since January, The Tech Challenge has provided 1,400 students with ongoing STEM learning, culminating on Saturday, April 21. The annual team competition introduces the engineering design process to fifth through twelfth graders by solving a real-world problem through hands-on learning. The assignment for this 25^th anniversary year – “Shake, Rattle, and Rescue” – asks students to create a solution to help earthquake survivors cross a damaged bridge.

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Tags: Cisco CSR, communities, preparing students for the future, stem

Online communities have started to play a large role in business as companies realize they’re a significant channel to stay connected with customers and partners. Community managers now have big shoes to fill while keeping up with all the online communications that occur on these fast-growing and engaging platforms. We’re also seeing how customer communities will increasingly become a new measure of success in the corporate world.

Communities are influencing us to change the way we do business in diverse ways, and we wanted to hear what advanced social media practitioners Dave Gutelius (@gutelius), Chief Social Scientist at JIVE, and Becky Brown (@beckyannbrown), Social Media Marketing Director at Intel, had to say about this topic. Here’s a short video (just over 2 minutes) which relays a few of their key points. Hope you enjoy! Read More »

Tags: best practices, business, communities, community management, Intel, JIVE, lessons learned

Part 1 of this blog series established that community administrators and owners need a way to assess and manage their respective community gardens and prune away communities that are no longer useful; see http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscoit/pruning-your-community-garden-an-approach-to-community-lifecycle-management-part-1/).  This blog describes the primary tool that will be leveraged by community administrators and owners within Cisco’s Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) to view and tend to their respective community gardens.  The tool is called the Community Lifecycle Management Portlet (LCMP).  The LCMP represents one of several components that have been developed – in a partnership between Cisco IT and the Collaboration Business Technologies organization – as an extension of Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform (Quad) to maintain the overall health of our community ecosystem.
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Tags: Cisco, coc-collaboration, collaboration, communities, iwe, quad

Today was the first day of our Pre-conference Social Media Summit hosted here at Cisco headquarters in San Jose, CA. The day was packed full with interactive and engaging sessions. The attendees at the conference were full of energy, asked lots of great questions and shared excellent best practices.

Thanks to one of today’s speakers, Pete Codella (@codella), we were able to generate this word cloud which contains top keywords tweeted from our @CiscoSocial twitter handle. The larger the font size, the more often the word was used. Try it out by visiting http://wordle.net.

Here are some of the highlights from today’s workshops:

It was all about Video in the workshop lead by Deanna Govoni, Social Media Manager at Cisco Systems (@deanna24) and Alex Romano, Social Media Specialist (@Arom1000). Deanna and Alex shared how Cisco uses video to communicate externally to customers and internally to employees.  They shared tips on how to easily produce video (with minimal equipment) and how to use video to tell a story. Here are the top tips presented:

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Tags: #ragancisco, communities, mobile, Mobile Apps, social media, Social Media Summit, video

Welcome to Cisco Communities!

You may have noticed that My Cisco Community has undergone a serious face-lift. Starting April 15^th we launched the new and improved program now called Cisco Communities.

Before:

Currently:

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Tags: collaboration, communities, JIVE, redesign, social media