About a year ago, Cisco Systems’ Amy Paquette and her team saw a lot going on among the company’s various groups setting up social media accounts — they had more than 155 YouTube channels. Her team stepped back and decided to guide departments toward asking not whether they could set up a Facebook fan page, YouTube channel or Twitter account – but whether they should.
In her BlogWell case study, Paquette explained how Cisco is bringing such diverse groups together for a cohesive, aligned social strategy. A few of her big ideas:
- Get leadership’s buy-in. Cisco’s marketing chief helped promote the effort by reinforcing the importance of a consistent, unified voice across the brand.
- Have a dedicated community manager. All teams thought they were doing a good job simply by posting content, but Paquette and her team wanted to move toward true community. They found someone who could focus on leading a genuine conversation.
- Help teams understand better metrics. When every team had a social account, most were simply watching basic trends such as page view or follower count. But through this project, Cisco added numbers that more directly related to conversation about its content, such as comments, mentions in blogs and traffic from social networks.
Watch Paquette’s case study.