Cisco - Achievement in the Use of Facebook

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: Web Achievement - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Achievement in the Use of Facebook

Nomination Title: WeAreCisco Facebook Live Culture Correspondents

Provide an essay of up to 525 words describing the nominated achievements. Make sure that your essay focuses on your Facebook-related accomplishments since the beginning of 2018, or the judges won't rate your nomination highly:

Our @WeAreCisco mission leads what we do. We make personal connections with future talent by telling stories of current employees in order show externally we are a great place to work.

In a world where it’s hard to know who to trust, first-hand employee stories offer authenticity that is unmatched by a “brand.” (Edelman Trust Barometer in 2017 said that employee voices were more trusted than a CEO by 16 points,)

Even before the latest apocalypse of Facebook’s algorithm, we knew we had to get great content into the newsfeed that would work with the LAST algorithm apocalypse, and the way to do that was with Facebook Live.

The team had previously “cut our teeth” on employee takeovers with Snapchat, when we launched the WeAreCisco Snapchat channel as an unscripted employee takeover every day in the fall of 2016. We thought THAT was the scariest thing we’d ever do. We underestimated the fear factor. Unscripted employee LIVE videos were scarier. Anything can happen live, and it does, but you know what? It makes it more real. And more successful.

We knew we needed to train these ambassadors. We created PDFs and guidance, and scared the *poo emoji out of the first group of employees when we got them on a Webex conference call and told them what we hoped they’d help us with. But at Cisco, we excel at doing innovative, scary things across our organization.

With no script, and no Talent Brand person on site with them, we were taking a big leap of faith, and the employees were taking a big leap out of their comfort zones, and ran a pilot in 2017.

We gave these select employees contributor access to our page using Facebook’s Live Contributor page role first, and then admin rights. We were even more selective with this group of ambassadors because they needed to have on-camera personalities.

We saw success in the pilot, and went “all-in” in 2018. Facebook has refined the metrics, and doesn’t prioritize Live video as much as when it first launched, but it still outperforms all of our other Facebook content. We pay under $50 for each live to boost it for more views, but organically it’s even the best performing content for us.

-16 Livestreams – ALL employee takeovers
-Over 145K views
-More than 46K minutes watched
-They play silent in the feed, so the yearly average for 2018 saw 48% watching with sound-on – that is an excellent “attention” metric against a benchmark of 10-20%!
-Almost 200 engagements per post (views = primary metric)
-Low cost of engagement/cost per view with paid boosts

The best 2018 Facebook Live was in November with an employee takeover at the Women in Cyber Security luncheon at Cisco’s annual Security Conference. It had the highest views of the year (over 34K), almost 800 total engagements, 10K 10-second views (a higher standard than a view, which Facebook counts as 3 seconds) and 8K minutes watched. 72% watched with the sound on!
The second-best Facebook Live was from an all-employee meeting in February with 20K views, 7592 10-second views, and 5400 minutes of watch time.

Optionally you may list the creative and production credits for your nominated Facebook achievements - the people who helped to bring them to life. You may list here their names and titles:

Kudos to our employee ambassadors who do the live takeovers!