“Social Media is not just a fun trend, it’s something that can really help drive business value.” – Jeanette Gibson, Director of Social Media Marketing, Cisco
Cisco has been using online social media listening as a way to inform business decisions for some time. An early example of this was the Cisco Unifed Computing System solution launch where the use of Social Media tools began three months prior to launch. Through social media monitoring, Cisco learned what messages resonated with the market resulting in a shortened sales cycle, increased engagement and lower cost.
Stephanie Marx manages centralized Listening efforts at Cisco and has mapped the stages of the Cisco Social Media Listening Journey along the 5-stage Social Engagement Journey that we recently introduced. Cisco’s Journey is a great example of the evolution of Enterprise Social Media Monitoring within an organization.
Stage 1 of the social media listening journey is traditional command and control. One-way communication is dominant and there is no effort to listen to online social mentions as a form of insight. Any social listening would be focused on numbers and not insights from what is being said.
Stage 2 describes some use of listening platforms to report on the basic conversation landscape (who, what, how much) but the efforts are siloed. Teams are genuinely trying to understand what is being said. There may be multiple platforms being used across different teams that are disconnected to one another.
Cisco has teams in Stage 3 where the data from listening has turned into actionable business insights. The process has become operational, where workflows for engagement have been created and the insights are shared broadly across the team. The Cisco Small Business team has an efficient listening and engagement operation that is a “key part of their strategy and contributed to a 200% increase in community growth in Cisco’s Small Business external social channels.” – Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators
In Stage 4, listening begins to deliver real business results. Executive support is broad, and engagement efforts are built into forecasts and annual plans. Listening data has been matched with traditional data for a real-time understanding of the overall health of the brand.
Stage 5 is the ideal use of listening in the organization, where the data informs decision-making. All teams are trained and empowered to engage online, just as seamlessly as they would pick up the phone when it rings. There is consistent measurement across the company that is shared with senior executives.
Cisco is still on this Journey and they have found that different teams within the enterprise can be plotted in different stages. While the Social Engagement Journey describes the stages of an enterprise as a whole, it is flexible enough to apply to business units within the organization. This is a great example of how the Social Engagement Journey can be applied to a specific activity within your organization. Thank you to the Cisco team for letting us share this.
ll be speaking at two executive events in India, spreading the word about social engagement and its implications with search marketing. Proceeds from both events go to the Akshaya Patra Foundation, an NGO that feeds more than one million children every single day.