Social Media at Cisco Collaboration Summit

Two years ago it was all about unified communications, last year it was all about collaboration, and this year it’s all about video (with some collaboration, and pretty much no UC). Cisco’s Collaboration Summit in Phoenix was filled with sessions about its collaboration vision and products, with a heavy emphasis on video. It makes me wonder if next year’s conference will be called Cisco Video Summit. The key themes of the conference were pervasive video, desktop virtualization, and customer service combined with social media.

My favorite parts of the discussions were around social media, which I’ve been advocating for several years. Individuals are increasingly turning to social media as a way to complain, vent, and get customer support. As Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior noted during her keynote address, when you lose your luggage, it’s easier to tweet about it rather than calling a company’s call center and talking on the phone with an agent about it, since tweeting often gets quicker response (assuming the company is paying attention to the twittersphere, which many are not).

I was pleased to hear about the progress Cisco made on its “customer collaboration” product that the company told us about several months ago and released last week, SocialMiner. SocialMiner is software that enables companies to find and respond to customers and prospects through social media networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as other public forums or blogs. The software monitors posts, blogs, and even status messages in real-time, and alerts the companies and enterprises of anything related to them. Through this program, companies can keep an eye on the web to gain and improve business intelligence, as well as immediately reach customers who need service. By monitoring what is said about them online, businesses can quickly learn what issues there are and respond to customers. (Note to vendors: whether you acknowledge it or not, customer ARE out there talking about your company and products, so you would be wise to try to listen to the conversation and help to turn negative comments to positive ones – you can’t ignore the social web any longer).

Companies use SocialMiner to capture, analyze social feeds, prioritize items to respond to, assign work to responders, and engage with customers. The software appliance listens to and monitors conversations on the social web. Cisco customer Zone Labs presented to the analysts and told us that the company realized that social media will absolutely be a channel for them and can help build sales and retain customers for the long term. According to Petter Etholm, CEO, Zone Labs, “Our business revolves around collaboration with our customers, and social media provides a great new opportunity to build and strengthen customer relationships. We used Cisco SocialMiner to launch our social media engagement initiative and we moved very quickly from concept to execution with the Cisco solution. We saw immediate results in terms of customer engagement and measurable revenue gains. Being able to find new leads and respond with a structured approach to this emerging channel has established a great baseline and positioned us well for future growth.”

I’ve written quite a bit about the impact social media will have on customer care, and companies that start engaging proactively with customers through social media channels can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Cisco isn’t the only vendor providing capabilities to mine the social web and enable agents to respond to customers via these channels, but they’re the only ones that have a full suite of collaboration tools, including Cisco Quad, Cisco Show and Share, and Cisco Pulse technology.

There were several announcements about video and virtualization, but they’ll have to wait for another time.