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October 31, 2007
Phone alerts from Cisco.com
We've just launched Cisco's first SMS services -- short alerts available to be sent to your mobile phone.
Visit cisco.com/sms and you can choose to have text messages sent to your phone and truly stay connected with Cisco information anywhere, anytime!
The following categories are available, and you can get 'em instantly or opt for a daily digest:
- Press Releases
- Feature Stories
- Field Notices
- Security News
- Security Advisories / Responses
Enjoy!
Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:55 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 23, 2007
Play Ball!
I am pretty jealous of my wife, who is hanging out in Boston this week, field producing the World Series for Fox TV in Denver (here is a picture she shot outside Boston's Fenway Park, where the Series starts).
I wish I had tickets. But since I don't, I'll be watching on TV and via the Human Network (and following the action on the excellent Major League Baseball site). And between innings, I'll be checking out the Human Network sports subsite.
Cisco's sports-focused Human Network subsite is chock full of ideas from you about ways to make sporting events more exciting and engaging via the Human Network. A few ideas include:
- Showing stats about each batter on your mobile phone in real time as they approach the plate
- Interactive entertainment with the fans between innings
- Highlights from the game delivered to your seat back
- Holographic replays on the field
Me, I would like a networked notification on my seatback when the line for Rocky Dogs at Coors Field or Tofu Tacos in San Francisco has been reduced to only three deep.
Whare are your ideas? What would you add to the stadium of the future?
Technorati: 
World Series 
Baseball
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:21 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Twitter in the Center of the Action
It is interesting to see the Los Angeles Fire Department using the mobile service Twitter to report minute by minute updates on the Southern California USA fires.
And, KCBS TV doing the same.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 04:41 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 19, 2007
Simpler Web 2.0
Thanks to this week's Web 2.0 Conference, much of the buzz in the Valley this week has been about increasingly clever ways to participate in or leverage the social graph.
Well, actually, many of the articles this week talk cryptically about "opening APIs" and competition for your profile and online participation from various online juggernauts, with a dash of Semantic Web thrown in for good meaure -- all of which is probably difficult for most mortals to follow. You probably need a vacation.
If you indeed need a respite from the API mayhem, I suggest two readings:
Cisco's Scott Brown posted a nice overview of how Web 2.0 fits into your world of entertainment and other non-techie stuff in a posting about the "We/Me Movement".
My friend Max Gadney at the BBC pointed me to this vintage posting about the essence of social software by Matt Webb. It's a very nice primer on how to think about interactions of people within groups online, and it's from 2004 -- which is almost century ago in Web 2.0 years!
Enjoy!
Posted by Martin Hardee at 09:58 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 12, 2007
Searching Wisdom from our Search Guru
"Every day in the world of search can be unique and different," our search guru Kara Jariwala told me recently. "It all depends on the latest changes the search engines like Google, YAHOO! and the others make to their algorithms."
For instance, earlier this year, Google announced it would list news, images, videos and groups in the same list—Google Universal Search. This is great for us Web surfers, but definitely has implications for those of us running Web sites.
For instance, a year ago a query about Cisco's John Chambers would yield a list of plain old web pages. Now results include news articles and even thumbnails of YouTube videos. Here's an example of a recent search that shows a YouTube result in the list:
There are lots of implications in these new results lists for people running Web sites, and here are some of Kara's big tips:
1. Research what key words your customers are using.
2. Write for your customers using their words, not yours.
3. Tag your images, podcasts, and videos with these words. This has become very important.
4. Place your key word in the title tag.
5. Ask for external links to your pages and make sure partners use your key words associated landing pages.
Spend some time learning about search so you can grow your online outreach to those customers who want what you have to offer. A great place to start learning is this list of top Search Engine Optimization blogs.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:54 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 08, 2007
Automatic Print Friendliness
Here's something you might not notice at first on cisco.com, but will surely appreciate once you discover it: Automatic print friendliness.
Since we specify print styles in our style sheets, when you print a wide page that looks like this on the screen...
It actually prints out on paper in a nice narrower format like this (without all of the navigation elements that you don't need on a printout)...
A little thing, perhaps, but much nicer than those many sites you go to where the sides of pages are cropped on your printouts because the browser is trying to print the width of the page as seen on screen.
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:43 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 01, 2007
New Design for Cisco.com’s Support Area
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.
Here's how it works: Say you are starting with a specific task, such as downloading software. First you click on our download icon, and then an interactive chooser appears allowing you to zero in on the specific product you need the download for. The same model works for troubleshooting, maintenance or configuration. The idea is to ask support visitors for two pieces of information, their intent/task and the product, then show all relevant resources. There's a neat Flash demo showing everything, and here's a picture of the page:
By contrast, what is support navigation like when it isn't tasked based? Think of a patient going to the doctor’s office and being asked as the first question: "What would you like, a tablet, a syringe or physical therapy?" Of course, a typical patient's answer would be “I have no idea!” But on many support sites, the navigation isn't exactly oriented to tasks and products, and users start trying different random actions hoping for the best. The new Task Based Navigation mitigates this guessing game by showing all relevant resources for a task by product combination and therefore narrowing the choices to a manageable set.
By the way, the system is a bit "smart" in that it remembers your settings throughout the session: The task and the product selection variables are set globally so that that the rest of your experience during the current session defaults to them -- that is, we don't have to keep asking the same questions over and over. Other models built based on asking users to select an info type -- which often times don’t correspond to an intent -- lead to frustration because users end up trying different types and each time having to specify the product repeatedly.
Based on all our user research and analysis we feel this approach will serve our customers well, but we will discover how well we are hitting the mark in the next few weeks.
Please send us your comments as you try the new system.
- Abdul Halabieh (posted by Martin Hardee since Abdul is on a well-deserved vacation!)
Posted by Martin Hardee at 09:26 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Web 2.0 Beyond the Hype
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:
- Short-form videos. These are 2-4 minutes long -- we call them "Video Datasheets" --on many of the Product pages. Visitors seem to love them--they're usually among the most clicked modules on their page.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/phones/ps379/index.html?pcontent=youinc_us.
We've learned some interesting things about video and how it increases visitors' engagement. I'll write about that in a future post.
- Customer conversations. On key pages, we're now providing an active window into topical NetPro discussions by lifting those discussions out of the community and placing them in the Product pages, increasing participation dramatically.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/index.html
- Mobile Web. We have a nifty mobile site, accessible via most mobile browsers--the traffic is booming, driven by smartphone sales, iphone mania, and new mobile apps and widgets. We're proud that our mobile site was a 2007 Webby Award nominee. Check out www.cisco.com on your device.
- Click-to-chat. The "let us help" boxes on many pages include the ability to immediately IM with Cisco representatives anytime during business hours. This has been a great source of sales leads and I'll definitely be talking about this also in a future post.
This first wave of 2.0 has been exciting, but the future looks even hotter. The latest trends we're exploring include personalization, online collaboration, and adaptivity--changing the online experience to reflect the visitor's interests and behaviors. We're only at the beginning of this new Internet era, and as John Chambers says, it's going to be as big and revolutionary as the first one, if not more so.
Posted by Michael Metz at 09:15 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
