Cisco is the largest networking company in the world with over 70,000 employees. And it uses Snapchat for employer branding. Why? I recently spoke to their social media manager Carmen Collins to find out.
Have a listen to the podcast interview embedded below, on iTunes or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.
How does Cisco use Snapchat for talent branding?
"The talent brand team has been thinking for about a year now, how could we use Snapchat, because Snapchat is the new shiny social media tool and it's different to all other social media tools, which made it a little challenging as we thought about how we were going to use it. And it's also very age specific. It's very, very young; Millennials, Gen Z and they don't use it exactly for branding - it's not a marketing tool, right? It's not like Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram where you can have a little control as a brand and market. So we thought about it and thought about it and I had to take some time off from work to have surgery. And maybe it was a drug-induced idea, I don't know, but I came back and said, "You know, I think I know how we should use Snapchat. I think we should hand the keys over to our employees because I don't think anyone on Snapchat particularly cares what, you know, a marketing team or, you know, what marketers want to say on Snapchat."
What are the steps to get started with Snapchat?
"Well, the challenge for Snapchat is that it's about the quality of your followers. And while follower count has always been sort of this, I call it a little bit of a vanity metric, or a C-suite metric. The C-suite wants to see that you're growing your account, that people are following you, but they also want to see that people are engaging with you. And so Snapchat has made this an industry norm. Snapchat doesn't give you a follower count. Snapchat gives you a score, and you can tell how much engagement you're getting, but the idea of followers goes out the window. So that was one of the challenges - how are we going to measure success with Snapchat? Because it's not a traditional channel. And another challenge, which for me as a social media manager was the scariest thing, is how are we going to roll this out to an employee base that is 70,000 people strong?
So, you know, we have a global company, we have offices around the globe and how are we going to make this work because we're giving the username and password, you know, to our employees. And we had concerns about our account getting hacked. Not that our employees would do anything untoward with the username and password, but, you know, the more you share it, the more vulnerable you become as a channel. So what we did is we started by setting up the Rainbow Kitten Unicorns. That's because they are so awesome."
What type of content normally gets posted on WeAreCisco on Snapchat?
"Well, Cisconians - that's what we call our Cisco folks - Cisconians really like food. So you'll see a lot of food. They love the cafes, they love the chefs, they love their snacks. So you'll see a lot of food. But one of the things that we've really tried to do is tell our employees to be them. We have a social media policy at Cisco for all of our employees to sign that gives them, you know, general guidelines. I like to call it, "Would you show it to your mom guidelines," right? Just keep it clean, keep it smart and other than that, we don't over architect it."
Follow Carmen on Twitter @CShirkeyCollins and read the full article How Cisco Uses Snapchat for Talent Branding, with Carmen Collins.