/Videoblogs at Cisco

Videoblogs at Cisco

Cisco is probably the “old” company that is doing the most interesting things in the field of social media. I recently read this article in Fast Company describing the big change that Cisco is going through. What shocked me the most is the use of videoblogs inside the firewall as communication tools.

The project is called C-Vision and most of the videos are “short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates”. One of the main videobloggers of the company is CEO John Chambers, who prefers video to text because of his dyslexy. Cisco also has an open vlog for its Cisco Live event and four open blogs.

I love this quote from one of Cisco’s managers: “We are always looking for the applications that help people really have water-cooler talk”. And also this one from vice president Jim Grubb: “Collaboration this way helps a world community solve big problems”. This explains why the company has created a crowdsourcing contest iPrize in order to find new business ideas.

At the same time, Cisco is moving from a hardware-only sales company to a consultancy company. Mainly in the leadership and enterprise 2.0 areas. This explains why it has bought social networking firms Tribe.net and Five Across, besides investing in Xobni, a social tool for corporate e-mail. What’s more, Cisco’s slogan is now “the human network effect“. See it on this video:

You can also watch John Chambers explaining his view on Enterprise 2.0 on this video (saw at FastForwardblog):

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