November 26, 2007

Privacy and Progress on the Web

There's a big controversy on the web these days, with Privacy advocates fighting with Facebook: http://civ.moveon.org/facebookprivacy/

Facebook, currently the most-talked-about Social Networking site on the web, is using member data in ads that appear on their site to drive business for their advertisers.

For example, if you just bought something on Overstock.com, Facebook places an ad on all your friends' pages, telling them what you bought, in hopes that your friends will then go to Overstock and buy something too. It's a questionable use of data, and it's causing a lot of noise in the blogosphere. Here's one example: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/24/diggingIntoTheLatestFacebo.html

It's an interesting discussion for the percentage of web users who care. And that percentage seems to be growing. Moveon.org seems to care. If you live in UK, where 25m citizens' private data has been "lost," more and more people are caring everyday. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/21/ncustoms221.xml

As we at Cisco develop the capability to use visitors' data to provide a more adaptive, personalized experience on Cisco.com, it behooves us to pay attention to the discussion. The purpose of providing such an experience must be to help visitors have a more successful online experience. Progress in web analytics and data mining have presented us this opportunity. Our success will depend on the way we use this capability to relate to our customers. Another way to think of it is how we're representing the Cisco brand. If we manage our customers' experience in a way that is consistent with our values and our culture, we'll be fine. If we make a mistake, which we may occasionally do, our customers will let us know, and we better pay attention if/when that happens.

Posted by Michael Metz at 09:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 21, 2007

New Cisco.com Feature: Related Popular Pages

We've introduced a neat new feature on some sections of Cisco.com that we hope makes it easy to discover relevant related information as you're browsing. Here's how it works.

When you're on some of our pages, you'll notice a "Related Popular Pages" box with a list of other pages. The list you see is a balanced aggregartion of the popular pages that readers of that page had an affinity to (i.e. visited) -- kind of like the "shoppers who bought The Fray also bought Mat Kearney" feature on Amazon.com, but with web pages. "Related popular pages" is a way to show items that are relevant to a specific item in question --aggregating user interactions with content, which we call "socially relevant gestures".

You can find RPP on the category, series and model pages of Switches and Routers under the Let us Help module.

Enjoy, and please send comments!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 02:05 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 13, 2007

Making Videos More Useful

One of my pet peeves on product areas of web sites is how the videos leave you hanging. That is, you've watched an interesting video about a subject (and some of them are actually pretty interesting)... but then, what next?

The person in the video may recite a URL, and a URL may even appear on the screen... but how do you get there quickly for more information?

On Cisco.com, we recently introduced a way to follow on to the next step on videos.

Here's how it works: When you're watching a video, such as the one on the Catalyst 4500 Series page, you'll see a "learn more" bar starting about 30 seconds into the talk. Click on it, and you'll get a link directly to the information being discussed.

Thanks to our video team and site producers for making this a reality!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 01:35 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 09, 2007

Sneak Preview: New Tool to Help You Find the Right Product

We've just launched a handy (beta) tool on Cisco.com to help you find the right router, switch, wireless, or security-related product, and we'd like your feedback.

This new beta Product Adviser allows you to specify a few parameters about the product (for instance, for routers: environment, LAN port density, and features) and then quickly shows a matching list of products and lets you compare them in an easy-to-read online table.

It's called "Product Adviser" and it's related to the previous tool by that name, but you'll notice the experience is now very intuitive. Here's the opening page, for routers: