New #SocialRoundup: #CiscoChat Heats Up

Welcome to our latest #SocialRoundup blog series about new social media efforts and best practices. Today, we want to highlight #CiscoChat, our new social media chat program that has been picking up steam recently. The concept was simple: create a standard method for our customers, partners, influencers and employees to engage with Cisco and each other in real time through a single hashtag.

We’ve held three chats to-date, involving hundreds of participants and resulting in nearly 20 million impressions. And we’ve only just begun. Check out highlights from recent #CiscoChat events below.

What Empowers You To Be Fearless?

This #CiscoChat was hosted by the Women of Impact team and joined together Catalina Kowal from Cisco’s Empowered Women’s Network, Cindy Cooley from Cisco’s Men for Inclusion, and Barbara Koch from the Passion Project to discuss how being fearless isn’t really about eliminating fear from our everyday lives completely, but more about finding ways to make our fears not hinder us from being adventurous, from taking risks, from getting up after we fall down, or from being our own advocates. See the full #CiscoChat recap on Storify.

How Do You Stay Inspired to Be Fearless?

Following the Women in Impact Conference, the team hosted a second “Be Fearless” #CiscoChat to discuss highlights from the conference and how women can remain fearless while pursuing career passions. Chat participants shared their real-life solutions, from paying closer attention to personal health to the reliable practice of just trusting their instincts. See the full #CiscoChat recap on Storify.

Collaboration Disruption

Hosted by the Cisco Collaboration team live from the SXSW Interactive Festival, this #CiscoChat asked conference attendees how they work to increase productivity and disrupt traditional collaboration methods for real-time flexibility on the go in advance of the announcement around our new collaboration service, Cisco Spark. We also leveraged innovative new social platforms, such as Meerkat, to extend the conversation. #CiscoChat broke through the sheer amount of online buzz during SXSW, trending locally in Austin on Twitter during the event. See the full #CiscoChat recap on Storify.

What’s Next?

Mark your calendars for some exciting chats coming up:

• Tuesday, April 14 – Why the World Needs More Girls in Tech
• Tuesday, April 21 – Incident Response in a Complex Threat Environment
• Wednesday, May 13 – Powering the Internet Transformation: Getting Broadband Where it Needs to Be

Bookmark cisco.com/go/ciscochat for the latest list of #CiscoChat events. What are you looking forward to hearing about during our next #CiscoChat? Submit your ideas via email to ciscochat@cisco.com or share on Twitter using the hashtag #CiscoChat.

Stay tuned for our next #SocialRoundup, where I’ll be discussing some of the new digital platforms coming onto the market and providing a sneak peak on how Cisco might be using.