Neo Radise- Africa Marcom Manager
I joined the Cisco family in April 2017. I’ve spent the last 12 years of my working life in an agency environment in the advertising space and later moved into corporate in telecommunications and financial industry.
I’ve always had a knack for all things crazy-and-creative and choosing marketing as a profession was a natural romantic match made in heaven.
Born and bred in South Africa, I love collecting passport stamps so travelling outside of South Africa is one of favourite things to do. Not only does this take me out of my comfort zone, it also opens up my mind to meeting so many wonderful people in different countries and making new friends along the way. Oh, ever so often I take naps, yes, it’s a great hobby of mine.
Usman Patel- SEO Specialist, Digital Marketing EMEAR
I recently joined Cisco in April. Responsible in generating natural search traffic (centre portion of the search engine results real-estate page) from users who use search engines in finding information, whether it is transactional (purchase led), informational (find, how to led) or navigational (brand led) terms.
My commercial experience includes working at various digital agencies in London. I then moved to the client-side working for various well-known companies which includes news publisher, TV Media, global consumer electronics and more recently Telecommunications.
Keen cyclist clocking up the miles in getting to Bedfont Lakes (and back)! I live in North Kent with my partner, daughter, rabbit, guinea pig and a dog! (I have my hands full!). I love my sports, participating and watching.
Marine Barbier- Internal Communication Manager
Who am I? I usually define myself as a multilingual communication expert in the making and global wanderer who can’t live without an e-reader, a teapot and a Tripadvisor app! Before joining Cisco, I worked in France and the USA for small and big companies mainly in the communication field. I do think I have a knack for writing compelling content and I am always looking for ways to improve.
Do not hesitate to get in touch so we can help each other out (or if you just want advice on the best spots to go on vacation).
Chris Mansbridge- EMEAR Digital Strategist
I joined Cisco in April, as an EMEAR Web Strategist. I have worked in digital for 12 years, both agency side and in-house.
Some of the companies I have previously worked for include J.P. Morgan, Vodafone, EE and Razorfish.
In my spare time, I enjoy eating, spending time with the family and rowing. Did I mention eating?
A BIG congratulations to Samantha Binns, Lucas Betes and the UKI team who won Gold at the Global Festival of Media in Best Use of Geo-Location for our National Geographic partnership.
In a nutshell:
Wild Cities was a unique partnership between Cisco and National Geographic to drive awareness of the Internet of Things and its capabilities in linking objects and data to create insights never available before. National Geographic and Cisco partnered together to deploy a true “internet of everything explorer’ to demonstrate why sustainable cities need wild spaces as well as smart technology. Dan (our National Geographic Explorer) walked across all of the UK’s 69 cities and 15 National Parks gathering data and looking at new ways in which technology can improve our quality of life. Throughout his epic journey, sensors recorded his brain activity and collected data to help illustrate how landscape influences our mood, health and happiness. National Geographic turned this data into a unique story using immersive digital, and social content and a great PR story.
A full detailed summary of the partnership is here.
Partnership - http://www.nationalgeographic.com/cisco/
Tweet - https://twitter.com/FestivalOfMedia/status/861671899771940865
We’ve been working on something exciting for Wolverine. While we can’t say much about it yet we wanted to share a sneak peek with the whole team. Look out for our next edition of Spotlight to find out more.
In the four months since The Gateway’s launch, customer advocates are becoming an invaluable part of Cisco’s transformation. To date, they have provided 271 testimonials, 79 referrals, and 92 reviews...and this is just the beginning! By offering education and growth opportunities to customers first, we are driving towards our goal of enticing even more customers to become vocal advocates for Cisco.
How is The Gateway Helping our Marketing Efforts?
By centralising all of our advocacy requests, we are working to create a unified, valuable experience that will delight customers and inspire them to help us out. (A win-win situation for us and our customer advocates.)
Transformation to Authentic Customer Storytelling
We have also started using ‘Upshot’ for creating customer stories. First, advocates volunteer to talk about how Cisco solutions have helped them achieve their goals through The Gateway. Then, advocates are handed off to a ghost writer (sourced through Upshot, which is connected to our hub) that helps the advocate craft their story in a first-person narrative—which ends up sounding more authentic than something written by our content team. The transparent back-end approvals process built into the solution makes the experience faster and more enjoyable for both our team and our advocates. We’ve just published our first customer success story on Upshot, which had an impressive 103 social shares, 247 views and 5.5% conversion rate on our embedded call-to-action in the first day. We’ve also had five more customers volunteer to create these powerful accounts.
Results
The Gateway vastly improves how we ask for advocacy. Before, it was mostly on a case-by-case basis via emails and occasional phone calls from Cisco employees. This method wasn’t engaging, didn’t create a consistent experience, nor did it give advocates the option to choose how they really wanted to advocate. Now, advocacy is always able to be tracked and recognised properly through one central programme.
Since we launched The Gateway in February 2017, we have built a community of 678 advocates. In the first three months, we had steady engagement rates of 61.5%. At the time of entry, it is currently sitting at 94%. Our advocates have completed 7,189 challenges (that’s 10.6 acts of advocacy on behalf of Cisco each!).
The Gateway members have provided us with:
Check out the new monthly infographic, highlighting our May results
For Cisco, advocacy isn’t just about quick transactional wins. It’s about getting to know our customers on a personal level, as well as building a tribe of advocates who feel a sense of ownership and belonging. That’s why we focus on long-term ROI metrics, such as revenue and effectiveness.
Please get in touch with us to nominate your customers!
