Cisco's Social Media

I had a fascinating interview with Kevin Petschow,

He provided some excellent Cisco sources to reference for my interview.  Cisco has a whole website full of Social Media information.  It's very generously filled with blogs, links to their Twitter, Facebook, YouTube pages, but more importantly it also has quite a bit of information on social media itself.  Coming from a social media award winning company who has been engaged in this since 2007, the information is a treasure trove of tips and guidelines.

The underlying lesson is to keep the audience engaged, often, predictably, and in various mediums.  Listen to them, respond, provide worthwhile content, and stay in touch.   While they have a whole team of professional content developers, as well as executives that write some of the blogs, the important thing is that they are constantly engaged with their audience.  Not every business has the breadth of resources available to them, but they do have a few minutes throughout the day to tweet, touch base with someone on LinkedIn, "like" a posting on Facebook, dash off a few lines on a blog with a picture, and maybe a quick YouTube tip of the week.  Who knows?  Someone may be watching and feel compelled to engage the company even further, maybe buy something or refer business to them.  The important thing is to stay in touch on a regular basis.

I will keep checking on Cisco's social media page to see what lessons they have to share as social media becomes ever more important in the world of commerce.