CASE STUDY
How Cisco uses EGC to amplify culture narrative, engage employees, & attract new talent
Industry
Cisco’s Employee/Employer Brand team communicates its culture by using #WeAreCisco – both internally and externally to amplify the culture narrative, engage employees and attract new talent.
Through ’employee voice’ driven EGC, the team’s goal is to highlight Cisco as a great place to work while inspiring prospective talent to “Be you, with us” sharing unique stories from existing employees. From highlighting the impactful projects that Cisco employees work on to why they love where they work, the @WeAreCisco channels are all about storytelling. After all, Cisco believes that if a candidate “can see it, you can be it.” They thrive on building personal connections between Cisco employees, the cool projects they work on, and using this employee advocacy to reach the external world of potential top talent.
As the world changed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it became even more important to Cisco that their employee stories remain at the heart of everything they do. To expand the #WeAreCisco initiative, Cisco leveraged TINT to repurpose employee-generated content on their blog and website.
SHIFTING A CONTENT STRATEGY FOR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
While employees transitioned to working from home, their social media posts created new content opportunities for the #WeAreCisco team. The team recognized the shift and began revisiting their planned content on a consistent basis to ensure that posts for each channel had been reviewed with a new and updated lens. They remained in constant contact with the corporate team to stay on top of advised posting schedules, approved verbiage, and more. The change to working from home meant that content shifted from highlighting the global offices, to showcasing a long-standing aspect of their remote work culture and the ability to work from anywhere with Cisco’s technology. This content strategy transformation and emphasis on real-time storytelling resulted in a 28% increase in blog views and a 42% jump in new visitors to the #WeAreCisco blog.
COLLECTING EMPLOYEE-GENERATED CONTENT
Cisco leveraged TINT to repurpose EGC on their blog and website to build on the connection among their current and prospective employees. In the past, the process of leveraging user-generated content was very manual. But by using the TINT platform and a focus on content from the hashtags #WeAreCisco and #LoveWhereYouWork, the team was able to quickly collect content and obtain legal rights from posts on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Cisco Webex. TINT also provided the team with more options to participate and submit content directly, even if they did not want to post on public social media channels.
“Employee-generated content is what has put the @WeAreCisco team on its path to success, with the metrics to prove its value. Running our yearly campaign with employees to get this content has always been a struggle, but bringing the TINT team on opened up new avenues that would’ve been impossible before.”
— Carmen Collins – Cisco Employee/r Brand & Social Media Lead
STORYTELLING THROUGH THE VOICE OF THE EMPLOYEE
Cisco focused on content that reflected how their employees were safely working from home and avoided using office photos or group shots, given the nature of the conversations happening on social. However, the team began utilizing those photos as “Throwback Thursday” posts that focused on what Cisco employees missed the most. These posts resulted in extremely high engagement rates.
Cisco also shared fun moments where employees referenced their kids and pets as their “new co-workers,” which helped them engage in an entertaining, relevant way while being sensitive and acknowledging current events. When parents began naturally sharing creative ways to entertain, educate, and engage their children through experiences like the Kids and Coffee Chat and Cisco coloring book – @WeAreCisco helped to amplify the stories even further.
“Maintaining an employee-generated content (EGC) repository can be difficult without the right platform in place to ensure proper permissions, tagging and overall organization. With TINT, we don’t have to worry. We can quickly aggregate and leverage employee content to tell the story of what it’s like to work at Cisco.”
— Jen Burns – Social Media Manager @WeAreCisco
The Results
42%
increase in new visitors
28%
increased blog visits
2.6%
increased engagement rate
21,000+
organic impressions on Twitter
15,000+
organic impressions on Instagram
10,000+
EGC post submitted
#WeAreCisco in the spring and summer of 2020 resulted in 10K UGC/EGC entries, an increase of 28% in blog traffic, and 42% more new visitors. The success continues on their social media channels with over 15K+ impressions on Instagram and 21K+ impressions on Twitter.
Through their ’employee voice’ driven by EGC, the team’s goal is to highlight Cisco as a great place to work while inspiring prospective talent to “Be you, with us” through unique stories from existing employees. From the impactful projects Cisco employees work on to why they love where they work, the @WeAreCisco channels are all about storytelling, with employee-generated content as a core element to the story.
