Content Marketing

Corporate blogs the Cisco way

Corporate blogs the Cisco way. OK, I’m ready to admit to it, I am a Cisco fan and I really think it’s a great company. I was lucky enough to be their counterpart at Orange Business Services for three years running and I am very proud of what we did together in the alliance programme we created back then between our two companies.

Corporate blogging the Cisco way
Corporate blogging the Cisco way

They are business-oriented, their people are forward-looking and client-driven, but they are also leaders in value selling with IBSG (their Internet Business Solutions Group dedicated to value selling and run by Gary Bridge, an outstanding and visionary orator).

Cisco was created because two guys invented a router which would enable them (husband and wife used to work in different universities) to exchange e-mails. Those pioneering days are gone obviously, but the company has always retained a bit of that trail-blazing spirit. Today, I received my weekly e-mail newsletter to Cisco partners and guess what I saw? Corporate blogs by Cisco open to us and dedicated to our business.

Cisco’s blogging habits started nearly a year ago (as shown on the mobile visions blog). In this mobility blog, all the posts are signed by an Alan Cohen. However, I wasn’t able – at first – to ascertain whether Alan was a Cisco employee or a freelance journalist working on behalf of Cisco or even a contributor from the blogosphere.

However, the legal disclaimer at the bottom of the blog is tale-telling as it mentions that the ideas expressed in this blog are those of individuals working for Cisco but aren’t legally binding for Cisco itself.

To a certain extent, I was surprised when I tried to see how many blogs were linking to Cisco’s wireless blog and found out that only a few pages knew about Alan Cohen’s effort on the Net (so today there will be at least one more trackback hopefully).

More googling led me to the answer to my question though, and I discovered that Alan Cohen is senior manager of mobility solutions at Cisco as shown on that personalwireless.org page.

At the end of the day, I find it’s really great to find senior people like Alan blogging on the Internet like you and me. Yet I don’t think that showing some transparency on who writes those articles – very good ones by the way – would do any harm to either Alan’s or Cisco’s image.

I am very happy that I found these blogs and that reminds me that I should take my Cisco newsletters more seriously when I receive them. I promise 😉

Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »

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