Cisco empowers its employees to serve as brand advocates
The Challenge
Cisco Systems, Inc. is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate, and collaborate.
As an innovator in the communications and information technology industry, Cisco designs, manufactures, and sells hardware, software, and services to businesses, governments, service providers, and consumers. While its technology helps to connect and inspire the world, Cisco leaders believe their real edge comes from their people. Recently, they sought a technology solution that would empower their more-than 70,000 employees to leverage their own social accounts to amplify the company’s brand messaging.
In 2021, Sabah Kadir, Cisco’s community and social media manager, was tasked with finding a new tool for the company’s employee advocacy program. She went looking for a solution that would enable them to:
- Harness their employees’ social networks to amplify Cisco product messaging, brand campaigns, initiatives, news, and other topics important to employees
- Enable marketers and field sellers to reach more leads
- Increase participation and engagement among employees with an easy-to-use program, including the ability to schedule posts across channels
- Use data and analytics to help measure the impact and create gamification to drive engagement and share of voice
The Solution
Cisco implemented Advocacy from Sprinklr Social. With Advocacy, Cisco leverages employees’ social influence to expand the reach of the company’s brand messaging and create new avenues for engagement.
We loved that Sprinklr Advocacy integrates our social publishing and listening solution — and that the platform is one that our social professionals here at Cisco are already very familiar with. So we were excited to move forward and saw that it had a lot of the functionality that we were missing before.”
Community and Social Media Manager, Cisco
Employees can now choose from a curated library of branded content to share out on their personal social accounts across LinkedIn, Instagram, X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook. With Advocacy optimized for both desktop and mobile, employees can do this from their desks or while on the go. Governance features and approval processes ensure that the messaging is always on brand and has a consistent voice.
Employee advocates aren’t limited to the content available in the content library: a suggestion feature allows them to submit content for approval prior to sharing, which mitigates any risk to brand by ensuring 100% brand compliance. Advocates can also suggest content they think others might be interested in. This type of interaction ensures that employees feel they have a seat at the table and stay engaged in the program.
“I use Sprinklr Advocacy to spread awareness of our networking blogs,” says Cisco Social Media Manager Erika Brown. “I automatically create posts for my stakeholders, and this helps our team amplify our content before our social posts go out.” Brown says the solution is more user-friendly than what her team used previously. “I like that we’re able to see everything that is being shared within a category."
For Global Digital Marketing Specialist Macy Henson, visibility into employee engagement across the organization helps her understand Advocacy participation rates by department and region— as well as engagement rates on content that’s shared.
“We always want to make sure that the content we're publishing is relevant and engaging,” says Henson. “The insights we get from the Advocacy reporting dashboards allow my team to understand which content is used the most and how that content performs once published.” This information then informs future content added to the library for employees to share.
The Outcome
Within just four months of implementation, Cisco had more than 3,000 active Advocacy users creating an estimated market value of nearly $200,000 – with 48% of employees sharing an average of 10 posts per month.
Henson credits a robust onboarding strategy for the program’s success — one that includes education and awareness campaigns as well as leadership support.
"Word of mouth has been huge,” she says. “Also, getting it out in our company newsletter, having it on our Cisco employee pages, and just trying to really spread awareness of the program.” The majority of users come from the company’s sales team, who use it to enhance their social selling efforts. Henson’s goal is to have 12,000 employees up and running on Advocacy within the year.