How Cisco uses social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Cisco Sys­tems, the Sil­i­con Val­ley pow­er­house, has become the poster child for how to use video in the enter­prise. Recently I caught up with two of the key play­ers who made it happen.

• Jeanette Gib­son (above), direc­tor of new media in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions group, talks about how Cisco uses video and social media to drive inno­va­tion around how the com­pany does both exter­nal and inter­nal communications.

• John Earn­hardt (below), Cisco’s blogger-in-chief and senior man­ager of media rela­tions, describes how video pro­duc­tion has been dis­trib­uted through­out the com­pany. “See­ing some­one and hear­ing them is much more impact­ful than the writ­ten word,” he says. (I appeared on a panel with John last year at the Tech Pol­icy Summit.)

Cisco: ‘Why vlog­ging is bet­ter than blog­ging’ from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

In these two 6-minute clips, Gib­son and Earn­hardt lay out a pow­er­ful vision for “why vlog­ging [blog­ging with video] is bet­ter than blog­ging,” as Earn­hardt said. Trans­parency, authen­tic­ity and cred­i­bil­ity are three major com­po­nents: When users see CEO John Cham­bers talk about what’s hap­pen­ing at the com­pany, they know it’s com­ing straight from the top.

“Video is the killer app. It’s not just a press release or a ghost-written blog post — it’s proof that it’s me talk­ing,” Gib­son said. “It has authen­tic­ity and credibility.”

What it takes to do video in the enterprise

Both Gib­son and Earn­hardt start out by acknowl­edg­ing that Cisco has a finan­cial motive to drive adop­tion of Inter­net video: The more we use video, the more we rely on the wires and servers that carry it. Too, ear­lier this year Cisco acquired Pure Dig­i­tal, maker of the now wildly pop­u­lar Flip hand­held cam­corder. Use of video is a huge dri­ver of “the net­work,” as Cisco calls it. I read one study that pre­dicted 90 per­cent of all Inter­net traf­fic will be video by 2013.

“Our per­spec­tive is, the net­work is impact­ing our lives every day, and being able to take a video and put that on your com­puter or send that over a social media net­work or email it to some­one is really pow­er­ful,” Gib­son said.

The cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions group bought $1,000 cam­corders for the PR team and other inter­nal orga­ni­za­tions and bought a few Flip cam­corders for Gibson’s team ear­lier this year so they’d have a video device in their pock­ets for on-the-go sit­u­a­tions. Gib­son said they want to encour­age “sim­plic­ity in video pro­duc­tion,” so that the mem­bers of the pub­lic don’t feel they need to learn how to use edit­ing pro­grams like Apple’s iMovie or Adobe’s Final Cut. That applies to com­pa­nies as well: You don’t need to devote hours and hours to train­ing staffers in the use of video edit­ing soft­ware. Cisco is a PC-centric com­pany, so staffers use Win­dows Movie Maker, which is sim­ple to use.

“We don’t want to spend a lot of time edit­ing videos that will get 500 to 10,000 views,” Earn­hardt said. But cumu­la­tively, the return on invest­ment for using video is “a no-brainer,” he added. If you fac­tor in the cost of the cam­corders and train­ing time, the ROI is 4 cents per video view and dropping.

“The real hur­dle is just start­ing [the process]: get­ting the cam­era, teach­ing peo­ple how to get the video up on the Web,” Earn­hardt said. “The real mes­sage is to just go out there and do it.”

The most effec­tive videos are not talking-head inter­views but “the demon­stra­tion of tech­nol­ogy or the walk-through of a lab that peo­ple wouldn’t nor­mally have access to,” he said. Peo­ple also pre­fer hear­ing from the CEO or CFO rather than lower-level worker bees.

On Cisco’s inter­nal net­work, CEO Cham­bers has a video blog, and he pre­fer to com­mu­ni­cate with Cisco’s employ­ees by video. The ongo­ing chal­lenge, Earn­hardt said, is to get employ­ees on board and get exec­u­tives to under­stand why it’s impor­tant to carve out a few min­utes to com­mu­ni­cate directly with an audi­ence, openly and transparently.

Gib­son echoed that. “We have an ongo­ing effort to edu­cate employ­ees so they can be our brand champions.”

While other major com­pa­nies are just climb­ing on the social media band­wagon, Cisco has been a true believer for some time now. But 2009 has been the year Cisco rolled out a Face­book page and Twit­ter pres­ence. “Twit­ter and Face­book have have been two of the lead­ing ways we drive traf­fic to our videos and blogs,” Earn­hardt told me.

“Social media is not just a fun trend, it’s some­thing that can really help drive busi­ness value,” Gib­son said. “Social media has absolutely shifted the way we do campaigns.”

Jeanette Gib­son: How Cisco uses social media (watch, down­load or embed on Vimeo)
John Earn­hardt: Why vlog­ging is bet­ter than blog­ging (watch, down­load or embed on Vimeo)

A lit­tle while after these inter­views were con­ducted, I heard about a “reverse men­tor­ing” pro­gram at Cisco, where young, social media-savvy staffers were train­ing more senior Cisco man­agers on how to use social net­work­ing sites. Brilliant.

Key social media urls at Cisco Systems

Cisco blogs: http://blogs.cisco.com
Cisco’s Twit­ter ID: http://twitter.com/ciscosystems/ (new in 2009: 19K+ fol­low­ers)
Cisco’s YouTube chan­nel: http://www.youtube.com/cscopr
Cisco’s Face­book page: http://www.facebook.com/Cisco (new in 2009: ~25K fans)
Cisco CTO Pad­mas­ree War­rior on Twit­ter: http://twitter.com/padmasree (1.3 mil­lion fol­low­ers)
Cisco in Sec­ond Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%204/133/123/25 (mostly past events)
Cisco Live! event page: http://www.cisco-live.com/

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JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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