Kirsten Chiala is Digital Content Manager, Social Media Communications at Cisco. She is leading her team to tell Cisco’s story to reach and engage their B2B audience through a newsroom-style branded journalism strategy. You’ll discover how The Network at Cisco features thought leadership content, as well as creative content such as a graphic novel featuring superheroes like SuperSmart and Dr. Analog, a serial magazine, 6-second Vine videos, and other fresh content on relevant technology topics.
Cisco is a global leader in the hardware, software and services that are used to create the Internet solutions that make networks possible. An employer of more than 70,000 people, Cisco has a plethora of angles from which to tell their story. How will you apply their creative content strategies in your business?
On This Episode You’ll Discover:
- That Kirsten is an Emmy Award winning Executive Producer at NBC News in San Fransisco.
- How Kirsten transitioned from television news coverage at NBC to storytelling at Cisco, a Fortune 500 company.
- How The Network is Cisco’s newsroom style content hub which publishes thought leadership content as well as technology focused content.
- How Kirsten says brand journalism is talking more about what’s trending, not just about your brand.
Brand journalism is like being next to a cool person at a party… don’t always talk about yourself, talk about what’s trending.
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- How Cisco updates The Network five days a week with new stories written by their team of journalists.
- The make up of the content team at Cisco’s The Network and how they decide what to cover.
- Why Kirsten insists on the need for a content team to have an editorial calendar, and how agility comes into play with trending topics.
- How Cisco plans out their serial content months in advance and what types of serial content they produce through their FOCUS digital magazine.
- How Cisco is using videos, graphics and text content to portray their innovative DNA to their audience.
- How Cisco’s Vine campaign #ImagineCisco consists of short stories about how technology is evolving.
- How you can incorporate Periscope into your content strategy and how employees can be storytellers with proper guidance.
- How their graphic novel, SuperSmart in The Case of the Smartest Cities, is one of Cisco’s best performing content assets.
- How Cisco created a blog around a trending hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer by requesting employees to tag their photos with this hashtag.
- What Kirsten’s team considers when targeting their B2B audience and how the content is optimized for each social channel.
- How Kirsten’s team created a trailer for #DetectedMovie into snackable pieces of content for people to understand the technology.
- How Kirsten recommends looking to the various tools available to do storytelling for your brand.
- Why your content team should ask for content from other teams outside of marketing.
- How Cisco takes their big rock content and creates blogs, infographics, interviews, etc., around it to reach more people.
- Why Kirsten’s one thing is to be innovative and take risks that will empower your brand to stand out.
Featured On This Episode:
- Kirsten Chiala on Twitter and LinkedIn
- Cisco on Twitter
- Cisco’s Newsroom The Network and the Detected Movie website
- Cisco’s documentary trailer #DetectedMovie
- Cisco’s graphic novel, SuperSmart in The Case of the Smartest Cities
- Download Social Business Journal, Volume 5: The Community Playbook
- Subscribe to our Newsletter
- Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
- Bernie Borges on Twitter: @bernieborges
- Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
- Vengreso’s YouTube Channel | YouTube channel
- Social Business Engine website
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P.S. Don’t miss next week’s podcast episode with Chad Pollitt, Co-Founder and V.P. of Audience at Relevance!
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