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BEE SP0910

Cisco: Social Media/Web 2.0


By mid-2010, Cisco Systems, Inc., a worldwide leader in networking and related IT gear,
was also emerging as a leader in the use of social media/Web 2.0 technologies. Over the past half
decade the company had implemented a series of programs to leverage multiple tools, such as
blogging, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - to promote engagement with external stakeholders,
and it also had developed a set of innovative technologies and products to improve internal
communication and collaboration among employees and teams. The enhanced ability to
collaborate virtually and remotely was a key enabler of a new management system that CEO John
Chambers instituted in 2002. That system, in turn, allowed Cisco to be the largest company in
the world with a single P&L and with centralized functions, a structure that promoted efficiency
and produced substantial savings. Senior leadership envisioned that expanded collaboration,
enabled by both technology and cultural adaptations, would create the opportunity for
transformational change in how Cisco employees interacted, engaged in teams and performed
work. How such change, however, might impact Cisco’s efficient operations and, ultimately, its
market leadership remained unclear.

While Social media/Web 2.0 created significant opportunity, its rapid expansion also
triggered serious concerns about how employees were using the tools. Numerous companies
were confronting instances of employees posting inappropriate material that put both employees
and their firms at risk. Cisco’s Amy Paquette, senior manager of a new group in corporate
marketing responsible for social media strategy and governance, described the concern:

For this organization, training and governance are a major focus. If you can’t train
your workforce to know how to behave in an online world, then you’re setting up the
employee, as well as the company, for trouble. But do we need to make training
mandatory for the entire workforce? And how are we going to police the thousands of
posts that go up each day?

Company Overview

Cisco Systems was founded in 1984 by a group of Stanford University colleagues who
wanted to send emails between departments with different local area protocols. Their
development of a multi-protocol router set the enduring corporate philosophy of finding solutions
to address customer challenges. Early products were sold to universities and government offices
but expanded to large corporations as the demand for network routers grew rapidly in the late

Sam Perkins prepared this case under the direction of Professors PJ Guinan and Sal Parise.
It is intended as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective management.

Copyright © Babson Executive Education 2010. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise – without the permission of copyright holders.
Cisco: Social Media

1980s. With sales reaching $28 million, Cisco went public in 1990 and within a few years started
acquiring associated network technology firms. Revenues hit $1 billion in 1994 and the
following year John Chambers was promoted from EVP to president and CEO. Acquiring
companies to gain technology or entry to new markets evolved into a full-scale strategy as Cisco
developed a system of policies and practices for successfully integrating entrepreneurial firms
into the corporate fold with minimal loss of talent.

Cisco became one of the “four horsemen” of the first Internet boom (along with Sun,
EMC and Oracle), and in 2000 it boasted a market capitalization of more than $500 billion,
making it the world’s most valuable company. That valuation declined sharply as industry
demand for protocol-based telecommunications equipment dried up in 2001. Chambers led a
major rebuilding and diversification effort through acquisitions in related technology segments,
and Cisco also pushed significant internal product development. In recent years, acquisitions and
internal development focused on video technologies and entry into software segments such as e-
mail security, policy management, and cloud-based email software. Expansion into multiple
adjacent markets significantly broadened Cisco’s slate of competitors, which grew to include
Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Motorola, HP and IBM and Microsoft.

By 2010, Cisco had annual sales of $40 billion (Exhibit 1), and, fueled by more than 120
acquisitions, it dominated multiple segments of the networking equipment and related markets
(Exhibit 2). Observers credited Cisco’s success to its strategy of anticipating and catching
market transitions and to its strong culture, many of whose attributes were embodied in the work
practices of CEO Chambers, whose office was no larger than that most managers (Exhibit 3). A
core feature of the culture was employee empowerment, manifested in the freedom to speak
candidly and to experiment with technology, both of which promoted grassroots innovation.
Cisco’s commitment to empower employees to use technology as they saw fit extended to
allowing people to use non-corporate IT-supported hardware - such as Apple Mac computers and
iPhones - a rare practice in large organizations.

Social Media/Web 2.0 Foundations

The foundation for Cisco’s embrace of social media rested on the company’s Web 1.0
expertise, its culture, its evolving management philosophy and structure, and on its interest in
promoting use of its own technologies. Cisco had extensive experience leveraging an array of
Web 1.0 solutions, first introduced in 1995, to improve its performance, generating savings of
$3.7 billion in FY 2008 from automating transactions and sharing information. Cultural qualities
such as empowerment, innovation and collaboration served as enablers, catalysts, and goals in the
adoption, development and use of social media/Web 2.0 tools. 1 Similarly, a new management
model instituted in 2002 both facilitated and required social media-driven collaboration. By the
early 2000s Chambers recognized that too many major decisions were landing on his desk. This
centralized system potentially hindered timely decision-making, and it encouraged a growing
tendency, according to one executive, for some decisions to face “pocket vetoes…where people
would essentially disregard decisions out of a belief that ‘John didn’t have all the right
information,’ and they would do things anyway.”

In an effort to decentralize decisions and leverage the power of collaboration to move


more rapidly, Chambers established a structure of councils and boards, empowered to make
decisions about growth opportunities in market adjacencies. The boards were comprised of
1
Social Media/Web 2.0. Although not all Web 2.0 tools strictly qualified as “social media,” the case uses
these terms interchangeably.

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Cisco: Social Media

representatives of each function and operated by consensus. The model was markedly different
than the one it replaced, and not all executives were able to adapt, but the collaborative approach
was well-suited to leverage emerging social media and Web 2.0 tools, and it became firmly
embedded in the organizational culture. In addition to culture and structure, Cisco’s explicit
objective to have employees use the communication products that it sold to enterprise customers
also played a played a major role in driving social media use, especially as the company increased
its focus on video technologies.

Early Social Media Activities

Corporate Communications (CC aka PR) initiated the precursor of social media in 1999
when it launched News@Cisco, the brainchild of a senior executive who had a vision that
everything related to communications was going to move online. Initially, News@Cisco was the
hub for global distribution of online press releases and other news stories, but it quickly
transitioned from text-based to multimedia-rich material, introducing in 2000 the Cisco Video
Portal. In a conscious effort to promote video, the portal became a major component of the site,
centralizing customer testimonials and videos from across the company. A major focus of this
activity was changing the type of video that PR produced. In place of longer, costly, “video news
releases,” which were distributed to broadcasters, the group pioneered short-form videos that
were high production quality but featured a two-minute news-style format more conducive to on-
line mass down load – a model that other companies started to imitate.

In February of 2005, under the guidance of CC, the Government Affairs team launched
Cisco’s first corporate blog - High Tech Policy (HTP). At the time, there were major issues, such
as Net neutrality and stock option expensing, that impacted the technology industry, and Cisco
wanted to use a vehicle, outside standard PR, to engage people and have its voice heard on these
issues. More specifically, the goal was to reach influencers and key decision makers in
Washington, D.C. and have a limited number of quality conversations rather than a mass
audience. For Cisco, like other early corporate bloggers, the High Tech Policy blog was an
experiment, with little sense of the level, type of following, or responses it might generate.

New Media Group: Institutionalizing/Expanding Blogging and Formalizing Policy

In spite of the HTP blog and News@Cisco’s initial groundbreaking activities, Cisco
recognized that it had not been keeping up with emergent activities in the on-line world, and in
mid-2005 it formed the New Media Group (NMG) under the leadership of Amy Paquette and
Jeannette Gibson, both from PR. In addition to overseeing News@Cisco and HTP, NMG was
charged with reviewing and assessing new Web2.0 communication tools and functions and their
potential expanded roles at Cisco. Over the following year, Paquette and Gibson studied the
growing blogging universe, identified additional corporate topics and began to develop policies to
broaden and formalize the use of blogs in external strategy with three blogging goals:

 Create conversations with customers, partners, employees, and the public.

 Provide a platform to discuss Cisco’s strategy and its technology vision, including the
objective of increasing visibility and connection with consumers. Although Cisco’s
business was almost entirely B2B, its long-term strategic vision included consumers, and
in 2005 Cisco launched the Human Network campaign.

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Cisco: Social Media

 Foster thought leadership by publishing subject matter experts on behalf of the company,
expanding the notion of company spokespeople beyond those trained in PR techniques to
include anyone with something of interest and value to contribute.

As the High Tech Policy blog gained traction, in 2006 it served as a seminal point in
social media evolution. Cisco, Google, and Yahoo! were accused of modifying their products for
the Chinese government, and, in addition to a PR response, Cisco used the blog to disseminate its
message, including the entire transcript of general counsel Congressional testimony. The Wall
Street Journal wrote a story on the issue based entirely on Cisco’s blogs - the first time a major
publication used a blog, rather than a PR department, as the source for a news article. The fact
that the blog owner was listed in the article along with senior leadership conveyed the new power
of bloggers and blogging, as Gibson described:

That was a defining moment in corporate blogs, and helped people realize that
information is out there for anyone to use and grab, and you don’t need those traditional
methods of calling up the PR department just to speak to an executive -- you can find
them on the blog.

The period between 2005 and 2007 was one of experimentation in an effort to determine
what generated the greatest value for the company. Eager to “dabble” in new communications
technologies and be on cutting edge from a leadership perspective, in late 2006 NMG developed a
Second Life presence.2 The first version had 10 (Cisco-related?) avatars, and a later iteration,
which involved Chambers, drew 150 – small numbers by standard marketing metrics but
considered a success as an experiment in a new social media forum that often involved a
substantial degree of engagement. Also in the fall of 2006, NMG launched technology-focused
blogs on three corporate priorities: Mobility, Collaboration and Application-Oriented
Networking. The China privacy issue and WSJ story provided a major boost both to the visibility
of Cisco’s blogs and to the company’s credibility and transparency, and the blogs gained a small
but solid following. Cisco sought to encourage additional blogs aligned with twenty defined
business priorities that advanced overall corporate strategy. The goal was to articulate Cisco’s
position and technology solutions around these priorities, and there was particular focus on areas
related to market transitions and on issues that were generating significant on-line discussion.

To help the corporate blog program get up and running, New Media proactively recruited
subject matter experts and executives from functional areas who were aligned with the priorities,
and it managed a rigorous education and training process to prepare them for launching their
blogs. At the outset, blogging was viewed by many to be extra work of uncertain value, and, as
Paquette described, “it was twisting arms to get people to do these.” To encourage participation,
NMG recommended that teams of three to eight people share the workload and the voice on each
topic.

The blogs chugged along with weekly posts and few comments until a seminal point
occurred in January 2007 when Cisco sued Apple over the iPhone trademark rights. With the PR
department unable to handle the influx of calls and emails on the issue, it convinced Cisco’s
senior counsel, who had a decidedly disapproving view of the entire blog phenomenon, to put out
an objective, factual statement that laid out the company’s position on the merits of the suit.
Within 24 hours the blog had 77,000 views and 350 comments, evenly split for and against. It
was the first time Cisco had used a blog at such a senior level, and Paquette described the impact:
2
Second Life was a virtual world on the Internet in which participants, called Residents, interacted with
one another through avatars – socializing, creating and trading properties and services, and engaging in a
variety of activities.

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Cisco: Social Media

What that said to us was, “if you have something to say, people will listen, and also
comment.” That was a huge awakening, a real key turning point because people saw
that it wasn’t just about “blogging,” it was really about engagement. After that we
really saw an uptick on the whole blogging program because people saw the power of
the blog. They started thinking, “how can we use the blogs to communicate our
messages?”

The Cisco/Apple blog incident persuaded more executives to contribute to the blogs, and
NMG began publishing monthly blog metrics reports. Then Chambers added a competitive
element, challenging the senior staff to blog about critical issues. The monthly metrics soon
started to attract considerable attention as executives vied for blogging bragging rights. To avoid
the blogs sounding too institutional, there was a strict policy that blogs (and subsequently Tweets)
had to be composed by the named executive - no “ghost-writing” permitted.

Between 2005 and 2007, News@Cisco continued to hum along as a public forum for
presenting, primarily in video, press releases and customer stories. As with blogging, Chambers
challenged the executive team to contribute to podcasts for the site, creating a robust podcast
series. Quarterly metrics tracked the downloads, and PR presented the executives with “silly
trophies” to honor the quarterly winner. In late 2007, NMG launched a new version of the site
that facilitated the use of Web 2.0 technologies, such as Flickr. Twitter feeds started in 2008 and
in mid-2009, the first Facebook page was launched. The new site evolved into the social media
hub, enabling NMG to implement and formalize Cisco’s brand presence across multiple sites.
The hub, which provided access to all social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and
Flickr, and had a live blog feed, was the focal point of engagement, as Gibson described:

That was where we focused on adding more interactivity, creating more engagement with
our audiences, looking to understand the importance of sites that are outside of our
domain. People search Google and find you from multiple orientations, so you’d better
have your contacts optimized, and you better be thinking about your presence across
multiple sites on the social web.

Governance

As Web2.0 technology use expanded, the New Media group managed the platform and
focused considerable attention on developing governance policy. Cisco’s legal department was
“very uncomfortable” when blogging started in 2005, and policy became a critical priority to
protect Cisco and its employees. Policy focused initially on blogging but then extended into
areas such as Second Life and eventually into a broad social networking policy that developed
guidelines for educating the workforce about all aspects of on-line behavior. In addition to
overseeing activities on corporate-sponsored platforms, governance policy had a role in the many
“personal” blogs, Tweets and FB posts, where employees often commented on Cisco-related
issues. Such commentary was allowed, provided the sites displayed a company-provided
disclaimer. Some policies had to evolve to respond to the activities and developing “norms” of
the on-line world. One example was the use of LinkedIn to offer employment-related comments
about associates and friends. Providing such references was against Cisco’s HR policy, and was
part of the Cisco Code of Business Conduct that every employee was asked to sign. Unable to
ignore that the practice on Linked-In was becoming pervasive, and also faced with growing
numbers of employees, 39,000 of whom were on Linked-In, indicating that they had a conflict
with the Code, Cisco made an adjustment, allowing references on third-party sites with
appropriate disclaimers. As one executive described: “We can’t ignore that people are on
LinkedIn and such sites making recommendations, so we needed to adjust from a leadership

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Cisco: Social Media

perspective to show that we’re not in the Dark Ages.” Although leadership believed that
“generally, employees genuinely want to do the right thing,” there were an increasing number of
instances in which lack of knowledge about appropriate use of social media was creating
potentially troublesome situations. Mindful of the growing risks to Cisco, in mid-2010 the
compliance team recommended required social media training for all employees.

Marketing with Social Media

The Data Center Marketing team first experimented in a significant way with social
media in 2007, when it used blogging as part of its communications effort to launch a new
product. Historically, Cisco’s marketing efforts placed significant emphasis on product launches,
which were classified as Tier 1 or Tier 2 depending on the projected business impact and market
reach of the new product or product line. 3 When the Data Center product launch occurred in
2007, Marketing recruited established Cisco bloggers to describe and engage customers and
industry observers in conversations about the new product and its capabilities. Measurements of
blog pick-ups, reach and impressions were calculated to be worth $250,000, based on the cost of
achieving those metrics through traditional marketing activities.

The success of the Data Center launch led other marketing groups to experiment with the
power of social media. In March 2008, when Suraj Shetty, vice president of Marketing for
Cisco's worldwide service provider marketing group, challenged his team to do things
differently in launching the ASR 1000 series routers, they turned to social media.
Conventional launches of such major products typically involved flying in more than 100
executives, media and industry partners from around the world, distributing product info to press
and customers, and running ads in business and trade publications. The messages and ads were
static, the engagement uncertain and the cost substantial. Moreover there was little engagement
with stakeholders before or after the event; as one marketer described: “We just moved on to the
next thing.” The goal was to use social media to make the launch dynamic, interactive and
engaging - involving the Human Network - while consuming fewer resources. There was some
pushback, however, from senior leadership on taking such a radical departure from standard
practice, especially on a major launch, and some executives argued for a less ambitious approach
– retaining the physical event and using social media simply to promote it. The Data Center
launch and other smaller successes gave the marketing team and its VP sufficient confidence to
“put their necks on the line,” and “jump in with both feet.”

The ASR-1000 launch spanned a three-month timeframe, including pre and post launch
activities. Leveraging the full box of social media tools, Cisco built a community and collected
registrations before the event, conducted a virtual launch and maintained engagement over the
following months (Figure 1). Cisco retained some traditional marketing activities, such as email
campaigns and press releases, but most were eliminated, resulting in substantial savings of senior
executive time. Complementing the different launch process, the marketing team used lighter,
more humorous content and style in its videos - Santa Claus, Cupid and Unicorns talking about
the network challenges they were facing - than was typical of Cisco’s customary approach:

3
On average there were three-to-four Tier 2 launches a quarter and three-to-four Tier 1 launches per year,
most occurring during the fall (October-November) and spring (February – May) seasons. Additionally
there were numerous product “announcements” to herald new features or enhanced functionality for
existing products.

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Cisco: Social Media

The results of Figure 1: ASR-1000 Launch (this could be moved to an Exhibit)


the launch provided
compelling evidence
of the value of social
media. Nine
thousand people
attended the virtual
event, 90 times the
usual audience size; Social Media Widget
there were more than Interactive 3D Game
1,000 blog posts and
40 million online
impressions, and it
generated three times
the usual number of
press articles. Noted
as one of the top five
launches in Cisco history and winner of the Leading Lights award for Best Marketing, the ASR-
1000 launch cost one-sixth that of a conventional event, and, additionally, saved an estimated 42
thousand gallons of gasoline. Following the success of ASR-1000, all launches adopted the three
phase approach (pre-launch, launch and post-launch), using social media to build and foster
relationships. LaSandra Brill, senior social media marketing manager described the change:

ASR-1000 was a huge testament to the power of social media, and it was another
milestone for Cisco. It persuaded all the other teams to adopt the process we used, and it
fundamentally changed the way we do launches. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
became part of the basic plan. Instead of bumps and valleys we began nurturing
sustained conversations. It was no longer just launch something and move on.

For several years Cisco measured its virtual launches against the traditional model, but as
the pervasive use of social media expanded throughout the organization, that former model lost it
validity as a point of comparison. Based on interviews with internal stakeholders, in mid-2010
the Cisco Social Media Marketing team developed and introduced a new measurement
framework to allow apples-to-apples comparisons of the impact of social media across the
company, with metrics mapped to internal tools (Exhibit 4) –

Broadening the Scope

By 2010, Cisco’s external social media activities were extensive, including more than 79
Cisco Facebook groups and 150 thousand Second Life visitors (Exhibit 5). There were 100
active Twitter feeds, and CTO Padmasree Warrior had more than a million followers (one of the
largest followings inside or outside technology), attesting to the power of such tools to engage
stakeholders and generate feedback. Twitter was also used for such activities as hosting events
(“Tweetups”) and conducting polls to secure immediate feedback during events such as Cisco
Live. In addition to the core blogs that espoused and explained strategic corporate topics, use of
blogs, many in video, expanded to increase engagement with channel partners and other groups.
Cisco tracked the “conversation prism” created by all the social media/Web 2.0 tools on multiple
dimensions: topics (e.g., cloud, collaboration), product area (consumer, mobility), network (e.g.,
Twitter, Facebook), and network category (e.g., blog, video), and articulated the role of those
conversations explicitly as a social media strategy (Figure 2).

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Cisco: Social Media

Although the New Media Group


Figure 2: Social Media Strategy
oversaw company-wide social media
Participation is the Currency of the New
governance and training, its organizational
Economy
heritage and relationship to PR limited its
purview to a communications perspective.
The accelerating growth of Web 2.0 activity
ENGAGE and LISTEN to
and the recognition that it extended beyond
apply the
the domain of “communications” argued for
learning conversation
a change in organizational stature and
mission. In early 2010, the focus of social Meaningful
Participation
media activity migrated to the corporate
marketing organization with the formation of
a new unit – Global Social Media Marketing, PREPARE:
led by Gibson The former New Media Business
Group, which was re-titled Social process
Communications, and which managed the change
News@Cisco site, was responsible for social
media that related directly to communications, especially those activities that targeted industry
analysts, observers and influencers.

The broader charter of Global Social Media Marketing provided an opportunity both to
centralize oversight of all other social media activities and to expand their use and application. It
undertook responsibility for Web 2.0/SM strategy, tools, governance, training, and measurement
across the company. Paquette described:

It was really a milestone for Cisco that put a real wrapper and a central organization
around social media, acknowledging that we needed a central point for strategy and
governance. Social media started as a communications tool but now involves practically
every functional area of the business, and we had lots of people communicating
externally with multiple audiences. We needed a single organization that was empowered
to drive this and set governance and to put training requirements on our employees and
really help them succeed in this Web 2.0 world. Otherwise we risked becoming very
fragmented and siloed with people thinking they were doing the right things but actually
ending up “running wild”. Governance really prompted a lot of this.

Internal Social Media


The official focus of social media started externally for strategic reasons, but also because
it was easier to control and focus a number of external blogs than to deploy tools internally for
65,000 employees. Internal application of social media tools – wikis, blogs, YouTube, etc.,
started in 2006-2007 with a range of disparate, “stealth initiatives,” leveraging a culture that
fostered innovation and experimentation. Cisco employees, encouraged to use whatever
technology they needed to do their jobs, began to employ social media tools at the workgroup and
functional level. As one person described: “For a while it was the Wild West. People had servers
under their desks running private networks that corporate IT didn’t know anything about.”

Within a short period these independent efforts created multiple silos of social networks –
sales, engineering, sub-groups in engineering - that were not interconnected and which began to
detract from broader enterprise collaboration. As one manager described, “We were losing the
power of the social graph. It was getting divvied up into all these isolated fragments.” Senior
leadership determined the need to put guidelines around the use of these tools and actively

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Cisco: Social Media

support them, and in late-2007, corporate management developed a plan to standardize and
centralize the separate Web 2.0 activities and add new social network functionality to several
platforms. Collaboration Business Services (CBS), a Board that reported to Corporate
Communications and partnered closely with IT, was set up as the centralized business sponsor for
social media. It provided centralized tools that departments were encouraged to use, but it did not
take a “dictatorial approach,” according to its Director Mike Mitchell

We needed to create a process and harness our people’s efforts without constraining
their creativity. We’ve been able to create a strategy to promote alignment, consistency,
and proper governance - and to enable innovation.

CBS (which evolved to be called C&C – Communications and Collaboration Board)


created a group - Communication Center of Excellence (CCoE)- that served as the hub for
collaboration and external social media knowledge. One of the first initiatives was to import the
various local wikipedias created by functions (Salespedia, CEO-pedia) onto a standard platform
to create Ciscopedia, a compendium of information about the company. Another early effort was
upgrading the on-line corporate directory to enhance its value with functionality such as an
expertise locator. Wiki capability in the directory structure enabled employees to import their
internal blogs from the corporate blogging infrastructure or import videos created for internal
purposes. Boosting the directory, which was the most-used internal web-based application,
significantly increased its use and helped to drive critical mass onto the corporate-sponsored
social media site. CCoE evolved to serve as a repository of knowledge, best practices and tools
which Cisco organizations could tap to learn how to build a community or website using
discussion forums, blogs, formal and informal content. With more than 30 tools - everything
from WebEx to unified communications to wikis and blogs – and extensive information, the
CCoE site played a critical role is expanding the use of social media internally, with a focus on
the use of SM tools to solve defined business problems – not simply for their own sake.

The transition to centralized SM services was relatively smooth, and within a year, there
was 90% compliance. Although mainstream Web 2.0 tools - wikis, blogs, video sharing,
collaborative workspaces – were all supported by corporate IT, centralized social media was not
intended to entirely eliminate independent activities. Individuals and groups continued to
experiment with novel functionality, though policy strongly discouraged autonomous initiatives
that duplicated corporate sponsored functionality, as Mike described: “when somebody puts up a
wiki server, now there’s got to be a good reason for it, because they can have access to the
corporate wiki infrastructure for free and everything’s connected.” That funding model, in
addition to corporate IT support, helped ensure compliance at “about 90%.” Independent
initiatives required separate departmental funding, while corporate systems were free. Moreover,
access to the corporate systems was relatively open: anyone could have an account and set up
their own blog, with the requirement that every blog be owned by an individual - no anonymous
blogging.

Many social media elements, however, continued to be developed by innovators outside


the centralized unit. An engineering team in Europe developed Cisco-Vision, Cisco’s internal
YouTube. And a TAC (Technical Assistance Center) team in Belgium initiated Cisco’s presence
in Second Life after a team member, who was exploring the virtual site, was approached by a real
Cisco customer who said: “Hey, I didn’t know Cisco was in Second Life. Can you give me a
demo of this new product I heard you just announced?”

Integrated Workforce Experience

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Cisco: Social Media

Internal social media/Web 2.0 crystallized in the development of the Integrated


Workforce Experience (IWE), a platform developed by CCoE that created a dynamic experience
for employees, enabling them to connect, communicate and collaborate in innovative ways. IWE
had three components: people, information, and communities (PIC) (Figure 3). Although aspects
of those components had been in place for several years, the full IWE vision was launched in
2009. One metric of its use: by the end of 2009 there were 20,000 internal blogs.

Figure 3: IWE Components

People: The revamped Employee Directory 3.0, modeled after a Facebook homepage, provided
access to the continually evolving store of Knowledge embodied in Cisco employees, who could
be searched by expertise, school affiliation, interest or other parameter. The Directory recorded
and displayed individuals’ expertise as revealed and captured in blogs, videos, PowerPoint
presentations and other materials. Any information posted into a community or otherwise
uploaded into the internal social graph was linked by default to an employee’s directory page
(though one could elect to opt out). The tool enabled rapid connection to the global workforce to
identify subject matter experts, to staff a formal project team or to track down others interested in
non-work related activities.
Figure 3: Example of Value of
Information: “Ciscopedia” an editable site where employees could findInformal companyContent:
information or
articles with links to SMEs. Projected in 2007 to have 20,000 pages,
Formal marketing
the internal
content: wiki page
had a
million pages by 2009 and had become Cisco’s “ultimate collaboration tool.” information
with product
Informal: discussion around that
Communities: personal and professional communities with shared affinities,
particular product responsibilities
and its use inorthe
tasks, ranging from avocational interests e.g., (mountain biking)field
to work-focused (e.g., Women’s
and how a particular engineer
Action Network) topics. A community might include a set of allfound Directors, all managers
an especially good working
use for it.
on a particular account, or a team that is working on the project. Community members share
content through discussion boards, blogs and other tools.

IWE emerged from the evolution of Cisco’s corporate intranet which had been under
development since 2000 and offered a robust site that provided employees with a range of
services, from HR forms to product information. The Intranet homepage became a
communications vehicle for global distribution of company news and highlights on everything
from product innovations to culture-forming activities, such as Cisco-wide giving campaigns and
the company’s perspective on social responsibility. The second phase of the Intranet started in
2007, when it began to “bolt-on” piecemeal social media tools and applications - Chamber’s
monthly blog, discussion forums, wikis, messaging, WebEx Connect - in response to the
corporate mandate to centralized the disparate SM activities emerging around the company.

With the rapidly expanding internal use of social media came an explosion of informal
content, much of which had value worth capturing, with the associated challenge of being “almost
impossible to make sense of and keep up with all that information.” Cisco wanted to encourage
and tap the generation of informal content, which could
significantly enhance the formal information about a specific Figure 4: Example of Value of
issue. (Figure 4) Ciscopedia and the Directory were vehicles Informal Content:
for linking into the wisdom of the organization to capture and Formal content: marketing page
with product information
share the informal knowledge. They provided a people-
Informal: discussion around that
centric view and an information-centric view into the mass of particular product and its use in the
content that people were generating. field and how a particular engineer
found an especially good use for it.

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Cisco: Social Media

The CCoE team developed a user interface for IWE, called MyView, to facilitate
organization and management of personal data and provide a “heads up view of the day in
context” for an employee. MyView, developed and rolled out in 2009-2010, functioned much
like a Facebook “wall” on which a real-time news feed updated the status and activities of all PCI
components related to an individual: communities involved in, topics followed and people of
interest. Additionally, all corporate communications on the CCoE homepage streamed onto
MyView and could be customized to suit an individual’s position and organization. The page had
links into visual voice mail, email and calendar and also featured an environment to import
widgets, portlets and gadgets. MyView provided an aggregated, personalized view into
everything that each employee was doing.

Because the quantity of generated content defied traditional hierarchical organization,


Cisco was engaged in a massive fundamental shift to dynamic tagging to make sense of the
information. All formal and informal data were semantically tagged based on social interactions
and algorithms relevant to each individual and then entered into the IWE system. The tagging,
which occurred both automatically through Cisco’s Pulse product and through self-definition and
self-tagging, allowed data to be streamed to each person’s MyView, providing updates on
communities, people and information. One manager likened it to “Amazon – how it makes
recommendations based on what you are doing, the role you are in and the choices of other
people like you – we are taking that to the enterprise level and basically allowing appropriate
information to find you.”

Into the contextual aggregation of information, people, communities, MyView


technology integrated rich communications. Hovering over a person on a “buddy list,” one could
click to dial up, IM, email or schedule of meeting. The people in the “buddy list” could change
dynamically based on the context. The default list might be direct reports but would change to
the people on a project team when the individual was engaged in project-related work. In mid-
2010 Cisco launched a commercial product called Quad based on the IWE platform.

All of Cisco’s external and internal social media and collaboration activities made
extensive use of the company’s video products and technologies, and Cisco sought to be the
global leader in internal use of video for communication and business collaboration. Major
company meetings were primarily virtual, with a few hundred in attendance and proceedings
broadcast to remote locations via TelePresence, streamed to desktops and saved for video on
demand. CEO Chambers had a regular video blog as well as a monthly “birthday breakfast” - an
interactive video conference and streaming webcast where he answered questions for two hours.
In 2009 Cisco purchased the maker of the Flip video camera, Pure Digital, and provided
thousands of cameras to employees, who used them for such activities as creating updates for
globally dispersed teams and product updates for rolling out training or for new software.

Communication and Collaboration

A core objective of the internal social media/Web 2.0 technologies embedded in IWE
was to enhance communication and collaboration – a need magnified by Cisco’s size and globally
dispersed workforce: With 24,000 people at San Jose HQ and 42,000 around the world, it was
common to have project teams comprised of members located on multiple continents and across
myriad time zones. Cisco’s vision was to optimize collaboration to achieve business benefits by
aligning “Technology, Culture and Processes.” In addition to the IWE platform, which served as
the core technology component for collaboration, another key technology element to maximize
the effectiveness of collaboration was Cisco’s use of a hierarchy of technologies based on a “time
to trust” (TtT) paradigm. Recognizing that face-to-face meetings were the most powerful way to

11
Cisco: Social Media

build trust between individuals but were not always possible, Cisco developed TelePresence, a
life-size, high-definition, surround-sound, video conferencing environment that was a near-analog
to face-to-face meetings. Employees used TelePresence to accelerate time-to-trust on occasions
such as the initial meetings of new geographically-dispersed teams. After a sufficient level of
trust had been established, the next level in the TtT paradigm was desktop video conferencing,
using the company’s WebEx system. Audio calls and text-based communications comprised the
lowest level and were used when a high degree of trust was in place.

The historic openness of Cisco’s culture provided fertile ground for promoting
collaboration. The Culture component of the collaboration framework included fostering social
media-oriented behaviors, such as participation in blogs and wikis as well as major changes to
corporate compensation and reward systems. Chambers set a high-level example of active
blogging: by 2010 he was in his fourth year of monthly blogs, which had transitioned to video
format in 2007.4 In 2010 Cisco was engaged in a multi-year effort, Workforce 2020, to review
and develop a holistic approach to compensation and performance management to incent people
to behave collaboratively. In fundamental ways, a collaborative environment, in which people
worked on multiple projects in cross-functional teams, required very different systems than a
work environment primarily based on hierarchy and function – Cisco’s traditional structure.

In mid-2010, the vision of the collaboration framework had been solidified with the three
components - Technology, Culture, Process - at different stages of progress and encountering
various execution challenges. Technology – IWE – was two-thirds developed: the Directory and
Ciscopedia were fully functional on a shared platform, and MyView was being developed on a
second platform. The goal was to consolidate the platforms in 2010 and build out the
communications infrastructure. The conceptual shift from hierarchical organization of data to
relational tagging was a significant mindshift. Bridging technology and culture was the challenge
of weaning people away from the habit of using email as the primary mechanism for
communication and information sharing, especially with multiple parties. Though not intended to
replace email, which was originally developed and is optimally suited for one-to-one
communication, MyView provided better, more efficient tools for collaborating within a
community. As one manager stated: “This is big move - a cultural shift that will take time.”

Business/Company Impacts

Ultimately, the value of collaboration and social media lay in its tangible impact on
improving business operations. To that end business Cisco was also engaged in a comprehensive
enterprise-wide initiative to map and analyze its business processes, looking at work flow,
activities, internal interactions, and communications. The effort then identified capabilities
available through IWE and related technologies, such as TelePresence, that could be employed to
change processes to improve efficiency or effectiveness. The deep analysis was combined with
an experimental approach in some departments in which people jumped in and tried out Web2.0
tools to assess potential for process change.

4
According to one executive, Chambers initially “wanted no part” of video blogging, convinced that no
one would pay attention. But the hundreds of comments generated by his first video blog provided an
“eye-opening experience,” that led him to become a major proponent of the technology and use video for
virtually all his internal communications. “He lives by his Flip.”

12
Cisco: Social Media

A core concept used in the business Figure 5: Dimensions of Interaction


process analysis to improve collaboration was that Source: Cisco
of human latency: the idea that Web 1.0 tools had
enabled the acceleration of transactions to the point Reach: Capability to identify, access and
where business processes were no longer employ internal and external resources to
influence better business results.
constrained by transactional processing speed but
macro-processes were constrained by human Richness: Capability to effectively and
latency – the slowness of applying expertise to a efficiently foster the development and
given situation. Human latency, in turn, was communication of new ideas, concepts and
correlated with tacit knowledge, the storehouse of strategies to make decisions and take
information people carried that has historically actions.
been difficult to share and access. Cisco identified Openness: Capacity of individuals, teams
collaboration impact zones – places where and organizations to have visibility into and
information, expertise, or interactions occurred – capability to contribute to the results of a
as high value collaboration targets constrained by work effort.
human latency. The ability to use social media
tools to access the necessary information or Speed: extent to which new collaboration
expertise offered the potential for reducing that processes can increase the speed get
latency and accelerating macro-processes, such as things done and respond to changes.
time to sell, time to market for a new product, or
time to resolve a customer issue. To help define the potential scope of collaboration, Cisco
considered four dimensions of interaction - reach, richness, openness and speed – that impact
access to tacit knowledge and reduction in human latency. (Figure 5).

Cisco published a report in 2009 that described the business impact of social media and
calculated $691 million in fiscal year 2008 savings - a 900 percent return on invest - due to
collaboration and Web 2.0 activities (Exhibit 6). Savings resulted from a range of efficiency,
cost reduction and performance enhancing drivers (Exhibit 7) enabled by TelePresence and Web
Ex, and other technologies. There were also examples of revenue gains, such as Linksys division
sales increases generated by Twitter.

Examples of specific social media/Web 2.0-enabled savings included:

 Sales support: Social media tools enabled a team to virtualize its sales support
activities. In place of being assigned specific customers, staff worked from home or
local offices and functioned as a pool, using WebEx, TelePresence and other tools to
respond to customer queries. In spite of initial anxiety about loss of direct relationships,
the team found that customer contact increased 40%, and customer satisfaction
improved 30%: the results of increased and more timely communication.

 Source Program: The Source program was responsible for sending product experts
to customer sites and was constrained by the challenges of scheduling and travel,
creating a trade-off between relevant expertise and timely response. By virtualizing the
experts and using TelePresence, the program was able to deliver a richer experience for
the customer by providing the most appropriate expertise more quickly. It also
significantly improved the work life of the experts. By early 2010 the program was
producing annualized benefits of $100 million.

As social media/Web 2.0 tools gained traction, they played a key role in the governance
restructuring and new management model that Chambers launched in 2002. By 2010, more than
750 leaders served on boards, councils and working groups responsible for 33 market

13
Cisco: Social Media

adjacencies. The boards reported to nine councils which reported into the operating committee.
Board members were typically located in geographically diverse sites around the world and relied
on social media tools to conduct business day-to-day. Cisco’s goal was to increase participation
in the governance system to 2500 employees

Innovation

In addition to enabling innovation through enhanced collaboration, Cisco used social


media to drive dedicated innovation initiatives. One was I-Zone, an internal wiki where anyone
could submit ideas for Cisco products for review by a group of “professional innovators” within
the company. Basic ideas, such as tweaks to functionality of existing products, were passed on to
the respective product group. New product ideas went through a more rigorous vetting process
internally, and the best were submitted for use by an executive training program, Accelerated
Learning Forum (ALF). Cross-functional ALF teams developed full-fledged business plans and
presented them to a review panel. Ideas that passed the review were incubated, with investment
based on milestone performance. A similar process I-Prize, was established for externally-
generated ideas. Winners were offered a cash award and jobs at Cisco with an opportunity to take
their idea through the incubation and development process. By late 2009 a number of ideas had
made it through to the market, including TelePresence, digital media system (DMS) streaming
products, and Pulse. When sales reached a threshold scale, products were pulled out the emerging
technology group and integrated into mainstream corporate Cisco.

Social Media/web 2.0 Collaboration Nirvana – Organization Transformation

Cisco saw social media-driven collaboration ultimately as enabling a fundamental


transformation of the company’s structure and way of operating. It viewed that transformation
process as widely applicable to organizations and developed a model, the Cisco Collaboration
Framework, which formed the basis of a pan-industry effort, the Collaboration Consortium. The
model posited three phases of an evolution in the use of social media: investigative, performance
and transformation. Exhibit 8 describes how various Cisco social media/Webs.2.0 technologies
and initiatives map against this model.

Investigative: experimenting with social media tools and applications to accelerate existing
processes. This phase, dubbed “single tool, single task,” typically involved use of social
media/Web 2.0 tools to increase individual productivity or enhance isolated processes.
Cisco’s initial internal use of social media internally was a prime example of this phase, as
was the C-vision technology, originally made available inside the firewall without a defined
strategic goal. Cisco articulated a series of activities within the CPT realm to help ensure
optimal gain in this initial phase (Exhibit 9)

Performance: leveraging collaboration as an organized, supported platform to start


fundamentally changing processes instead of just accelerating existing processes. While the
investigative phase focused primarily on adoption of new Technology, achieving
Performance gains required progress in the People and Process aspects of collaboration. It
also required a formal establishment of a collaboration strategy. Cisco was in the midst of
this phase in 2010 and was looking at leveraging and transferring examples such as the
virtualized sales support team.

Transformation: using collaboration to transform the organization by reinventing work flow,


structure and processes. In an advanced form, such a transformed organization might have
employees function in a “digital swarm,” responding or recruited to engage on work streams

14
Cisco: Social Media

that flowed from the council and board system. Such streams would function on a 24-hour
schedule with virtual, global teams, and any employee with availability, ability, and
accountability could work on one of the streams, either full time or part time on multiple
streams. Social media tools would enable the identification of the most appropriate people
based on expertise, experience, relationships and context and enable location-blind
collaboration.

15
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 1: Cisco Selected Financials (1995 – 2009)


2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2003 2001 1999 1997 1995
Sales ($Bs) 36.1 39.5 34.9 28.5 24.8 18.9 22.3 12.2 6.4 2.2
Net Income ($Bs) 6.1 8.1 7.3 5.6* 5.7 3.6 (1.0) 2.0 1.0 .4
Emplys (Total-Ks) 65.5 66.1 61.5 49.9 38.4 34 38 21 11 4
Emplys( Int’l-Ks) 28.5 28.7 26.5 19.6 11 9 11 4.4 2 .6
*included non-cash stock compensation charge of $836 million

Exhibit 2: Cisco Technology Segment Presence and Market Share

100%
Security 100%
Digital Video: 100%
Switching:
80% Cisco/SAIPTV
80%
65 80% Modular/Fixed
Cisco/SA
60% 35 60% 60% 70
Cisco
40% 40%
% 40% %
20%
% 20% 20%
0% 0% 0%

100%
Voice 100%
Wireless: LAN 100%
Storage: Area
Networks
80%
60%
80%
60%
Cisco 54 80%
60%
40%
Cisco
28 40%
% 40%
24
20% % 20% 20%Cisco
0% 0% 0% %

100%
Routing: 100%
Networked 100%
Web
80% Edge/Core/Access 80% Home 80% Conferencing
60%
Cisco
57 60%
Linksys
45 60% 50
40%
% 40%
% 40%
Cisco/WebEx %
20% 20% 20%
0% 0% 0%
Source: Cisco Corporate Overview

16
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 3: Cisco Value and Culture

Company Vision
Changing the Way We Work, Live, Play and Learn
Company Mission
Shape the future of the Internet by creating
unprecedented value and opportunity for our
customers, employees, investors and ecosystem
partners.

Aspirational Goal
Best in the world. Best for the world

Cisco Culture
Continuous Improvement/
Innovation Quality Team
Stretch Goals
No Technology Profit Contribution Giving Back / Trust /
Religion (Frugality) Fairness / Integrity
Collaboration
Market Transitions Fun Inclusion
Teamwork
Open
Drive Change Empowerment
Communication

Customer Success

17
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 4: Social Media Measurement Framework

18
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 5: Social Media External Engagement

Social Media Activity Metrics


900+ videos; 700k views
Top video: TP demo (226k
views)
350+ podcasts
200k streams
Rated 5 stars on iTunes!

20 external blog
350k views/qtr
# comments up 164%

79 Cisco groups with 85k


fans, up 29%
16k employees on Cisco
group
23 Cisco feeds with 47k
followers, up 60%
Top exec: P. Warrior 1M+
followers

300+ photos
400k views, up 100%
Top set: Cisco Live (2k views)

150k visitors
50+ events
4.5+ CSAT rating

Source: How Cisco uses Social Media (09/09)

19
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 6: Collaboration Initiatives: FY08 Costs and Savings

Initiative FY08 Benefits, $ Million FY08 Costs, $ Million


Remote Collaboration $378 $75
(TP/WebEx/UC
Telecommuting $277 Included in Remote
Collaboration
Specialist Optimization $62 $1
(SOAR)
Sales Productivity (NEW) $26 $3
Connected Workplace $13 $2
Deal/Order Acceleration via $2 <$0.1
UC
Mac Wiki $4 <$0.1
C-Vision and Video Blogs $10 $0.5
Total $772 $82
Source: Economics of Cisco Collaboration Story

Exhibit 7: Drivers of Collaboration Value

Initiative FY08 Benefits, $ Million


Reduce costs to improve $239
profitability
Save time $380
to increase efficiency
Speed process to increase $92
agility
Transform business to $61
increase growth
Total $772
Source: Economics of Cisco Collaboration Story

20
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 8: Collaboration Initiatives

Focus Enhance existing collaboration activities Establish new ways of collaborating Transform
the
organization
Description Personal Remote Process Expert Knowledg Communities Boards
Productivit Collaboratio Acceleration Access e Sharing
y n
Remote
Collaboration ****
Telecommutin
g **** ****
Specialist
Optimization **** **** **** **** ****
Sales
Productivity **** *
Connected
Workplace **** ** **
Deal/order
Acceleration **** *
Mac Wiki
** **** ****
C-Vision &
Video Blogs **** ****
Collaborative
Management **** **** ****
(26 initiatives)

Source: Economics of Cisco Collaboration Story

21
Cisco: Social Media

Exhibit 9: Steps for Optimizing Collaboration Framework Phases

Investigative Performance Transformation


People  Define collaboration  Focus on  Define collaboration
 Help ensure collaboration  Help ensure
executive lead the readiness executive lead the
way  Reward cross- way
 Establish code of functional teaming  Establish code of
conduct  Reward information conduct
 Create IP and ND sharing and
policies discourage
 Develop information hoarding
collaborative
decision-making
processes

Processes  Develop community  Focus on  Define collaboration


of experts collaboration impact  Help ensure
zones executive lead the
way
 Establish code of
conduct

Technology  Develop technology  Build team  Define collaboration


sandbox for workspaces and  Help ensure
experimentation processes executive lead the
 Consider virtual  Create open way
teaming and technology  Establish code of
collaborative architecture conduct
processes

22

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