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Cisco, San Jose, CA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Cisco, San Jose, CA
Entry Submitted By: GolinHarris
Company Description: Cisco is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment. Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Social Media Focused

Nomination Title: Cisco's Network Convergence System Launch Campaign

Tell the story about this nominated campaign since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

To promote one of its biggest new product launches in the last five years, Cisco took a unique and creative approach to humanize the new megarouter called the Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS). NCS was designed to meet the demands of the Internet of Everything (IoE), Cisco’s flagship campaign defined as connecting people, processes, data and things. Although IoE is a well-known topic in the industry, up until this point, no one demonstrated how a solution can actually make IoE come to life. Many industry analysts grew tired of hearing about IoE’s vision and even verbalized their doubts. NCS responded strongly by providing a tangible solution, and through social media, Cisco told a story that provided both the vision and the answer to IoE. Social graphics ran for almost two months to highlight NCS’ capabilities in everyday life—how a traffic signal can alert your alarm clock of traffic congestion--- as well as three months of trivia graphics to engage the audience so they could better understand how Cisco enables some of the most common household electronics.

During big announcements in the telecom industry, competitors talk mostly about product specs, but Cisco did more than that. Cisco made the product relatable and practical to even the non-technical audience. Through a series of humorous videos that illustrated major fail scenarios, Cisco demonstrated that a solution was needed. That’s where Cisco entered their key messages. The videos brought an entertainment and shareability value. Cisco also partnered with Vine celebrities to develop artistic interpretations of the benefits of the NCS on the consumer level to showcase when IoE is done right, service providers can impact even the smallest aspects of the consumers’ lives. Although they were abstract, all four Vines took a unique perspective on the prompt “Cisco NCS can support trillions of transactions.” One common theme came up in each Vine, that the IoE requires a system pretty substantial to withhold the ability to connect everything from ambulance to phone to even a banana. This fresh content from Cisco was eye-catching, buzz worthy and helped establish Cisco as a creative thought leader in an innovative new field.

This campaign was the first time the team tried a variety of new promotions for a Service Provider launch through both format (Vine) and content (humorous videos). In addition to the new creative channels, Cisco also made sure all content was easy to globalize. The graphics and trivia were translated and localized in 18 different countries on various regions’ social channels and even had customized imagery for specific regions when needed.

To date, this has been the most successful social media campaign for Cisco’s Service Provider team, particularly because the team had limited funding. The campaign generated 14 million impressions and 6,300+ online conversations. Additionally, the Vines received more than 11,000 revines, 1,400+ “likes” and 1,600+ comments combined. Social promotions around these humorous videos garnered more than 5,000 total video views. And when compared to similar launches by our three main competitors, Cisco had more than seven times the social media response of their launches combined, outperforming their social media activations by a ratio of seven to one.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

 

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that carried out this campaign:

Ying Shen is the Service Provider Social Media Marketing Lead at Cisco. She oversees more than 15 Cisco Service Provider social media properties, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Vine and more. She manages strategy, execution, and metrics analysis for high profile product launches, major announcements, top tier industry events, lead generation efforts, and other one-off digital projects.