Cisco - Best Social Media Focused Campaign

Company: Cisco, San Jose, CA
Company Description: Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT and networking. We help companies of all sizes transform 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: WeAreCisco TikTok Pilot for Employer Branding

Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: June 2020

Cisco’s Employee/r Brand’s social media strategy for @WeAreCisco is to build the best community by creating real connections with future employees by deepening engagement with current employees. We do this with our approach of EGC (employee-generated content) of real stories about what it’s like to work at Cisco – the “social proof” of our brand message. In partnership with employees, all of our recruitment marketing content and social media channels stand out because they feature actual people and their authentic stories.

2020 resulted in certain things that became more of a “thing” due to the pandemic. TikTok was never on our radar because of security concerns and the nature of the platform prior to this year. When the whole world was “bored in the house bored in the house bored” (a TikTok phenomenon) we realized that employees – and candidates – had adopted the platform as their own. It’s important to tell our stories where and how our audiences like to view them.

We were thoughtful and purposeful in our plan (especially in light of the platform’s security concerns and how most brands were still shying away) and committed to our employee-ambassador strategy.

Also happening at the same time: Interns being told that their internships would either be canceled (60% of them) or taken virtual (how Cisco did it.) The perfect TikTok storm was brewing for the WeAreCisco team.

Our social media audience consists of two personas: current employees and potential candidates. We regularly engage both audiences, but we wanted to activate our virtual summer interns to become content creators on TikTok. The goal was simple: to create advocates through motivating them to be a part of something new/exclusive, while allowing them to be creative. We wanted to reach their social networks to share first-hand what it’s like to work at Cisco.

We created a pilot program – the first of its kind at Cisco – and activated interns to share their #LoveWhereYouWork story through a variety ofTikTok“challenges” that the #WeAreCisco team issued weekly throughout the summer.

To reach the active TikTok audience, we worked with our University Recruiting team to pre-identify interns who may be interested in participating. We created an initial group of intern & employee ambassadors (so that we could highlight how the intern experience was integrated into the employee experience) and introduced them to the program using Webex Teams technology. Everyone wanted to have fun and let their creative juices flow, while helping to share the #WeAreCisco story of what it’s like to work virtually.

The Employer Brand team created a fluid editorial calendar of topics that we issued to ambassadors. Knowing the fast-paced nature of TikTok, we adjusted if there was a trending dance/game/song that we deemed relevant and fun for our ambassadors to participate in (like the Dolly Parton 9-5 challenge, the Electricity Game or the What I’d Wear challenge.)

Throughout the pilot, we were in constant communication with our ambassadors, getting their feedback and learning what types of challenges they liked participating in.

At the beginning of each week, we announced the week’s challenge and asked that interns and employees share their TikTok posts using #WeAreCisco with other appropriate hashtags. Then, we’d share links to the TikToks in our Webex Teams room, to inspire each other. This resulted in a fun community built within Cisco where we could share our learnings along the way (because let’s be honest, no one knew exactly how TikTok worked in the early days.)

We also created a @WeAreCisco TikTok account — a test of the tolerance for our brand on the channel, but also as a place to amplify more of our ambassador content.

At the time, there wasn’t an option to get in-depth metrics without a TikTok For Business account, and with a two-prong approach of creating original content on the @WeAreCisco page plus employee-generated content (EGC), we got creative in how we captured metrics. Through a Smartsheet form, we asked all ambassadors to fill in the form each week so that we could have insight into how their content was performing and learn from it.

Through evaluating metrics and testing different types of challenges, we learned that quickly capitalizing on TikTok trends generated more views and engagement and using relevant hashtags and sound bites allowed the #WeAreCisco content to show up in search and reach a larger audience.

-265K views on ambassador content; 19K views on @WeAreCisco content
-@WeAreCisco TikTok using trending sound and concept resulted in over 14x more views than average content on our page https://www.tiktok.com/@wearecisco/video/6859772050014260486
-Resulted in long form content, like the #WeAreCisco blog post https://blogs.cisco.com/wearecisco/from-grace-hopper-to-cisco-intern
-One TikTok-famous dad with 14K followers duetted his daughter on the WeAreCisco account!

We even had aprospectiveemployee message us on Instagram, telling us they found @WeAreCisco through an internTikTokand wanted to learn more about what it takes to work at Cisco.
Please see supplementals for full metrics report.