4 Things I Learned as a Cisco Culture Correspondent on Facebook Live

Wait, how did I end up as a Live correspondent for WeAreCisco?

A few months ago, I was minding my own business, doing my daily job as the Social Media Channel Manager for Cisco’s Collaboration team, when out of the blue I got a request.

Cisco’s Talent Brand team is always finding new ways to put employees front and center to help get the word out about why we love working here, and why other people should think of Cisco as a great place to grow a career. Have you seen the WeAreCisco Snapchat? It’s an employee takeover every day!

The team was launching a new pilot to bring that strategy to Facebook, using new functionality on Facebook pages. They had a crazy (like a fox?) idea to allow, no, ENCOURAGE, Cisco employees to go LIVE on behalf of the page. They called this pilot the Cisco Culture Correspondents, and they asked me to participate! I said YES!

My first assignment, Cisco Live!

If you’re going to do something, you might as well go big, right?

During our kickoff meeting of the Culture Correspondents, we were talking about ideas for events that would be good for the program. I spoke up and said that I was going to Cisco Live! – Cisco’s largest US event. I think I surprised the Talent Brand team – but they were all in!

Another correspondent and Cisco friend – Rehana R. – said she was going as well, and we partnered on this, the first LIVE of its kind. Both of us work in social media, but neither of us had done anything like this before. Truth be told, we may have gotten cold feet if we weren’t each other’s “lifeguard” for the first broadcast. We wanted to impress, and apparently, we did, because . . .

Wait, they want us to do another one?

After surviving the first one, a second opportunity arose!

During the summer, the San Jose campus (and other campuses as well) do employee “parties” called Party on the Patio. It just so happened that my team was sponsoring one of the parties, introducing employees to the awesome new Cisco Spark technology, teaching them how they can use it to do their jobs more effectively, and also FOOD! (Cisco employees love to eat.)

Good thing there was a lot going on, because our second LIVE was supposed to be longer than the first!

What I learned – about social and about working at Cisco.

Everyone is learning. I’m learning more about social. The Talent Brand team is learning how to use Facebook Live to tell their culture story. The important thing is that we never stop learning!

Be flexible. This goes for work as much as for social media and even life!
We had a few hiccups on the way. When you “check in” during a Facebook Live, apparently, you’re limiting the audience to that location (we won’t do that again.) So after frantic “START OVER!” comments, we stopped our first broadcast and restarted.
Stuff happens. You have to go with the flow. Turns out, the LIVE we restarted performed extremely well, and the feedback earned us another one!
Lesson: Cisco lets you try new things, adjust course and fly!

Be you! The feedback we got was that no matter if we made mistakes, our personality is what “sold” the audience!
I think Cisco is great like that. Your passions, your skills, your YOU-NESS is encouraged! My manager was very supportive of me trying something like this.

Have fun! Look, we work hard, but we play hard, too. It was important to the Talent Brand Team, and to the Culture Contributors that we not be reading a script and stoic and starched. Because that’s not how Cisco is! We had fun doing the Live, and we showed the fun atmosphere at Cisco.

Stay tuned to WeAreCisco’s Facebook page to see more of my face on the “big screen.”

And I hope my experience and my broadcasts will help you consider a career at Cisco! We’re hiring!