Cisco Social Media Manager Talks Facebook
Thu, May 20, 2010
Communications, Facebook, Interviews, Social Media 101, Social Networks
Autumn Truong is the Social Media Manager of Corporate Communications at Cisco Systems. Her role is continually evolving to reflect the ever-changing social media landscape but for now, she oversees the social media strategy and programs which includes social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and immersive virtual environments. The company has different groups focused on social media and her focus is on developing the strategy and working with different functional groups to execute social media plans within corporate communications. For more background on Autumn, please visit her bio page or you can follow her on Twitter at @autumntt.
facebook.com/Cisco now has over 54,000 people who like it.
What made you think there was a place for Cisco on Facebook?
While Cisco has had established pages and groups on Facebook for a couple years now, most of these pages are focused on one technology or business. In addition, there are Cisco Facebook group and fan pages that aren’t created by Cisco employees. We felt this was an opportunity for us to create a Facebook page that is a “one stop shop” for our community on Cisco news, events and information. Similar to how we have a corporate presence on our blogs and Twitter (@CiscoSystems), we thought it was a great opportunity to have a similar presence on Facebook.
It is certainly important for Cisco to be on Facebook because it is another channel we leverage to communicate to our customers, employees, influencers and to anyone who is interested in Cisco. We want to be wherever they are.
What kind of content do you publish on Facebook?
There are a lot of different features on Facebook that allow you to customize and aggregate content from other social sites such as Twitter and Flickr. Each tab we created represents a corporate social channel that feeds into our Facebook page. These include Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, our corporate blog and online newsroom. Essentially, we have created within Facebook, our own online community. You don’t have to leave the Facebook environment to get access to the content across all those Cisco channels. Those are the tabs that we link to, and if you look at our wall, it’s an area for us to spotlight content that we think is important to share with our Facebook community. It could be as simple as an important press release to a humorous video recorded on the Cisco Flip Camera. We’ve had tremendous success with the level of engagement that our community has on the content shared on our wall.
What is your biggest challenge using Facebook?
Initially, it was a dedicated resource. It takes time to build and nurture your community. You don’t just log on one day and have 1,000 fans. You have to take the time to listen and engage with your community. We knew that we had to put one person on this and make sure that person is engaged and understands our Facebook community. Our community manager’s role, which comprises about 5% of her time per day at this point, is not just to post content, but to read the posts, listen, monitor and keep our internal team informed of the level of engagement on the page. We want to be listening 24/7, or at least as much as we can. The role of our part-time community manager is to ensure that conversations are continuing, that we are maintaining our presence with the types of assets and news we share and to ensure we are keeping a pulse on not just the positive feedback, but also any negative comments. Due to limited resources, we are primarily focused on amplifying our content and monitoring responses for the time being and are looking to engage more in the near future.
What was the goal for the Cisco Facebook page?
Our goal initially was to create a Facebook page where people can get news and information about Cisco that is qualified and authentic. We also wanted our community to have access to other Cisco social channels such as our corporate blog, Flickr page, Youtube channel, etc. within the Facebook environment.
After a year, we currently have 54,000 people who like Cisco on Facebook. And looking at the level of engagement from them, as measured by their comments, we do feel that we were successful in accomplishing our goals. By creating this page, there is now a Cisco community on Facebook where interested people can engage with us. On average, each post on our Facebook wall gets about 35-45 hits or likes or comments.
What do you think about the issue of transparency on Facebook, as it relates to a personal face for a company, like many brands do on Twitter?
While we still see companies experimenting with this, and as social media continues to evolve, I think we’ll see more of an expectation for disclosure and authenticity. I have a personal Facebook profile, people know that I work for Cisco and if you search for me on Google, you’ll see my bio and you’ll see a link to my LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook page. I use Twitter more for work and Facebook more at a personal level, but regardless of where you find me on the social web, my connection to Cisco is apparent.
While we have placed a personal face to our corporate Twitter profile (@CiscoSystems), we haven’t done that on our Facebook page and mainly it’s because we haven’t set up an active engagement strategy. But once we do, I think we will also personalize our Facebook page as we’ve done with our Twitter profile.
Do you have some advice for B2B companies setting up Facebook pages?
1. Conduct an audit to determine whether or not you have an actively engaged audience on Facebook.
2. Determine your goals for establishing a presence. What are you looking to achieve?
3. Always think long term if you are creating a presence. What is the 12-month plan (at the very least) for being on Facebook? Do you have a plan for how you will share content, engage and interact with your community?
4) Determine what success will look like after the 12 months. Can you easily measure and track success?
Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen or on Google+.
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Not sure I understand what Autumn’s role is at Cisco. I don’t see Autumn publishing on Cisco’s blogs, or wrting content, or being the engaging personality that customers and partners will want to get to know and then meet at trade-shows and events. I don’t see her driving Cisco’s social media strategies – those seem to be grassroots and employee-driven, not controlled by a central communications group.
So you have a full-time job to maintain a facebook page? seriously?
What happened to the model Cisco’s Anne Plese talked about at Blogworld where the employees engaged actively and built these capabilities in a collaborative model themselves and it did not take additional headcount and funding and was not a centralized command and control environment?
@Cisco non-believer: Appreciate your feedback. I’ve been in my current role as one of many social media professionals at Cisco for a little over a year now. You are correct that our employees are actively engaged in leveraging social media to communicate with their respective audiences – whether they are customers, media, analysts or other employees, etc. My role specifically is focused on social media for our corporate communications organization and thus my perspective in this interview is based on best practices from my team’s efforts with facebook. And to clarify, it doesn’t represent all of Cisco’s efforts with Facebook (that would most likely take a few more interviews with different representatives across the company).
In my role, I’ve been very focused internally – working with various functional groups within my organization and across Cisco to understand how to effectively leverage social media to share information and communicate externally with our existing audience as well as a new set of influencers.
I am by no means a “social media expert” if by definition that is someone who has their own blog, a huge Twitter following, speak at conferences, has written books, etc. (although I do spend a lot of time as an internal consultant to many different organizations within Cisco and have been interviewed by different external pubs such as this one). I am however, a social media pro who is passionate about exploring ways that social media can be used to make a communications impact for a B2B company such as Cisco and hopefully share some best practices and lessons along the way. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve also been tapped by many of these self proclaimed social media experts to share Cisco’s social media best practices – perhaps for their own researh reports and books.
However, I do plan to be more transparent and open about some of the great work our communications team is doing moving forward so if you’re curious and still interested, let me know.
Good post, great challenge by Cisco Non-believer and nice response by Autumn. It’s a fair question about centralization and overhead, although my personal inclination is to believe that Cisco would be quite hard nosed about these kinds of positions, especially coming through the GFC, so this must have good business logic behind it.
I’m a graduate of the Social Media Academy, and use a methodology which includes a cross functional social media service team. What Autumn describes fits this model. Often these activities start out as roles, as part of someone’s job. But as things grow, and in large corporations, the roles get big enough to become jobs.
I wrote about this Comstar team model in the context of this conversation between Autumn and Cisco Non-believer on my blog:
http://www.walteradamson.com/2010/05/cisco-social-media-overhead.html
It’s a great debate. It’s also very informative and useful to hear from Autumn about these activities and their purpose.
Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com/walter
I really like the discussion, pros and cons. I appreciate the insight given by all sides in this new media for business. I started a new company 9 months ago http://www.totovr.com, it is a vacation rental and exchange website. I have a facebook page, twitter, linkedin and blog. This discussion is really helping me understand how this new media can help me in my business.
Thanks socialmediab2b.com
Ever since I started working on social media marketing initiatives, I am more and more convinced that social media is an integral component of marketing strategies.
Unfortunately, most company’s management team have very little appreciation or understanding of how social media works.
Indeed, social media has its own purpose and a powerful tool if used properly. To be effective, it must have the buy-in and support from the whole company, especially management.
First, you need to designate a social media champion for your company. That person’s job is to then come up with a plan with clearly defined goals and objectives. The champion should then share the plan with upper management and make sure he/she gets the necessary support from the management as well as other people in the company to effectively implement the social media strategies.
At flashbay.com, I’ve just started implementing our twitter presence. So far, I have gotten great successes with twitter. I am sharing the positive results with management on a continuous basis. Next, I plan to grow our facebook presence. Again, it’s important to secure the support of management to make this successful!