Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.
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.”
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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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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) –
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
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.
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.
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.
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Cisco: Social Media
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.
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.
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
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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.”
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Cisco: Social Media
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.
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
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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
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)
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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
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
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
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Cisco: Social Media
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Cisco: Social Media
20 external blog
350k views/qtr
# comments up 164%
300+ photos
400k views, up 100%
Top set: Cisco Live (2k views)
150k visitors
50+ events
4.5+ CSAT rating
19
Cisco: Social Media
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Cisco: Social Media
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)
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Cisco: Social Media
22