How Cisco’s Learning Network Became a Social Hub for the IT Industry

Five years ago, Learning@Cisco, the educational services division of Cisco Systems, built a social network platform it called the Cisco Learning Network to help teach and train people who wanted to learn how to become certified by Cisco. But since then it has grown to become a portal for the entire IT industry with over 2 million users who share information on everything from Cisco certification to job searches. It has allowed Cisco to differentiate its brand, create loyal customers, mine for marketing insights and influence the market.

In a new Q&A, Cisco Vice President and General Manager Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn discusses the evolution of the Cisco Learning Network with MIT Sloan Management Review Social Business contributing editor, Robert Berkman. She reveals the origin of the network, how Cisco has attracted so many users and how its popularity in the industry has enhanced the company as a whole.

What is Learning@Cisco and what motivated its creation?

Learning@Cisco is a services division. We educate, train, and recruit customers and partners into the technical community. What that means is we spend an awful lot of our time and energy looking at the talent that needs to be in the industry in order to fuel the industry. We also help customers and partners to be successful with our technology and our products. We also help mentor career engineering people that touch the network.

Our audience is everyone from students in high school who are just interested in technology all the way through deep technology experts who are out there in the market, interested in continuing to advance their careers and learn more.

This puts us in a position of creating the next generation of Cisco customers. We add about 150,000 to 200,000 new customers to Cisco every year through our social mechanisms and recruiting efforts. It is also a great way to help us collect feedback from our customers on how we’re doing, and it helps us help them to help each other.

How did it start?

We started building this about five years ago. We looked at our organization and decided that we have to be in every single country in the world and reach out to every student — no matter where they are — in addition to our own diverse and global employee and partner base.

We also decided that we can’t do this just through our partnerships or traditional educational or communication means. We needed to build a platform that would allow us to bring together all this rich content and assets, as well as build this place for them to come and meet and talk to each other, study together and ask each other questions. So it’s not just for us; it’s really for the audience itself, the community. We combined these two ideas of community with building a rich content site that was socially adept. The tools would allow all these social experiences to happen for the community and the content would be the reason they would gather.

They started to come to the site originally to learn, to understand more about these technologies, business areas and job opportunities. Then they would realize how many other people were on this, since we have millions of people on this site now. In the first year, we had over 100,000 people on it. In other words, we built it for them, not for us.

All the tools are set up to be very consumer friendly, just like Facebook. The difference with us is that we have a lot of rich content that people can’t find anywhere else. Once people got there and saw the rich content it started to have its own momentum. We have over 1,000 active discussions every second on that site. As a social website in the corporate world, this is definitely considered one of the largest and most successful social sites. In the learning world, it was the first of its kind and many others are now trying to create similar communities for their own industry. Outside of the independent social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, this is probably one of the largest and most active social networks out there right now, owned by any corporation.

How do you interface with Cisco’s HR?

We split things up. Human resources handles the job roles for the internal people. In this charter, they work with the individual functions of the company on formulating career paths and job roles for our employees. Our job is to look at the job roles in the industry. We look at a specific space of job roles that are relevant to our specific industry, that touch on the engineering area and do this across the industry vs. just Cisco. In this way, we impact a much larger audience than our company in a specific set of roles in engineering that the industry needs to use our technology.

Our social learning site, Cisco Learning Network, is used by our entire industry to educate themselves on technology and job skills and for mentoring, careers, and locating jobs across the world. We’ve built partnerships with CareerBuilder and other entities to help people connect skills to jobs across the world and make sure we support the nomadic nature of people in our industry.

We are essentially taking advantage of an aspect of this flat world where you can get access to job openings anywhere — through our site — no matter where they are located.

We have many engineers coming from all over the place now. It used to be just the United States, Germany and Japan, and now it’s the United States, Russia, India, Southeast Asia, China, Mexico, Poland, Pakistan, Turkey, Africa, and many other interesting and far away worlds. And they are not only finding jobs, but they’re finding consulting opportunities. Engineers go on our site and look for information and they find people who have answers that then get connected to more consulting work or to a corporate position.

From a top management standpoint, how have your activities changed the company?

Our executives at Cisco would characterize our program and our Cisco Learning Network as a place where we have created a uniform way of touching each and every individual in this industry, whether it’s our own employees or everyone in the industry.

Many major corporations’ objectives are to grow globally, differentiate, add value and improve customer touch; a big part is bringing your employees, customers and partners on this journey. We’re moving an army of millions of people to keep them centered on our strategy, goals, what we think this technology can do for the world, and allowing them to all experience that simultaneously. It’s so much more powerful than standard marketing or anything else you can do in your company.

Social platforms help you scale and create this speed that allows you to capture market share so it’s a competitive differentiator. It allows us to grow faster, particularly in all these new emerging markets where we have a difficult time connecting otherwise.

Have you found that a particular feature or element of collaboration and learning has been particularly successful?

Initially, we looked at the things that our audience was interested in. The biggest thing was how to study for our certification, so we started there. Our certifications are accredited and considered the best in the industry. We had something there that was really sticky to begin with and then we used that as a draw and built content around those certifications on the site first. Once we built that content, we decided that people also want to know about jobs. They want to know about the industry. They want to know about the trends. Now it has become the career portal for networking industry. Even our competitors use it.

Today, a top application is to study for certification, leveraging both Cisco and user content. They leverage our collaborative tools on the site to formulate study groups, hold classes through WebEx and also keep the dialogue and advice going through their own chat groups. Some like studying in small selected groups and some just broadcast information. Their group can go off in a corner (if you will) on the site and invite people in. They can select who they want to work with, team with, and collaborate with.

Another thing that’s very, very popular is all the career guidance: where the careers are, what to focus on, the certification path that offers them a journey map for their personal careers.

The third thing is the job boards. Under that, we have a whole bunch of technology to make everything mobile on any platform. That’s also critical.

And, of course, none of this works without content. You have to start with content.

You said that you been developing this for about five years. Would you say people go here more than even Cisco’s main site?

I would say that we probably get more people than the main site does because we collect people that still aren’t even buying product yet, in addition to existing customers. About 10% of our customers are early in — still in school studying for their degrees. We have everything that Cisco has in terms of the buyer community, plus we’re bringing in 150,000, 200,000 new customers every year through our education efforts, networking academy, online outreach to schools, career and job boards, and things like that. So, even before people in the industry buy any products from Cisco, we are reaching out to them and recruiting them into our industry.

How much do you actually mine the data that goes in and out of the site?

Quite a lot. We have a whole team that does nothing but look at what’s out there and what’s posted. We have ways to flag it on the site, such as content that’s been voted highly.

We monitor the content and comments that seem to be most valuable and if we find missing things in our portfolio that people are trying to fill in the gaps for in education, we will then prioritize it in our roadmap and standardize it. Sometimes if we want to use content from a contributor, we ask for permission and we can embed it in other types of learning products that we already have. There are so many people out there who have knowledge. We make sure we capture and reuse it wherever possible.

During these past five years as you were building this out, what was the first sign that you felt, wow, this is really working?

Well, the first thing was just to see how many people came back to the site and registered because they wanted to be part of it. We realized that we really had something. At some point, it just literally got out of our hands and it became the community site, not our site anymore. That’s when we knew it had longevity.

I think a critical part of success is having annual goals for the long term. For us, we created a five-year plan with specific goals. We also continue to revise and take forward a continued investment plan to make sure we stay ahead of the game. You are never done — you continue to evolve.

I will share with you the metrics we use to define success. We know we’ll be successful when we double our community, have repeat customers who think this is “the” place to go for their education, and when we are leveraging the audience to get rich-content ideas and assets that can be reapplied in the business. Thankfully, we’ve done all of this over the last five years. We went from 600,000 people who were originally with Cisco, to over 2 million in five years. Then we set a target that 50% of all of our content would come from this community which creates sustainability because there is so much information they need. There is no way for us to create every single piece of it ourselves. Lastly, we are leveraging the site for great data, assets and insights to make our products better and more relevant.

Another important thing is what we did to inspire our community to participate and help others. We started to look at the people that were making the biggest contributions and we created a VIP program for them. We select our VIPs for the year; get them together, and have them meet some of our Cisco executives. We fly them in and give them rewards for their contributions. We make sure they know we appreciate their efforts and know how special they are for their great contributions. We give them special access to information so they can be our voice to the community.

So, it’s almost like badging.

Yes, exactly. It’s a badge for, if you will, contribution to the community. If you have a good, loyal set of customers, they love to be apostles for your programs and your company.

We try to do what we can for them to make them feel really good about our company. In fact, we did a study and found that of the certified people who were using our Cisco Learning Network, 25% to 30% were more loyal. That amount of loyalty difference amounted to a significant amount of revenue for Cisco. We’re able to directly tie that loyalty to revenue.

It became not just a nice thing to do and a good way to educate customers but also a great asset to our brand. Brand is not just about what you say, but it’s what you do in the marketplace every day. It’s also about what your customers say and do about you in the marketplace every day from their own experiences.

I’m assuming that Cisco does some social monitoring outside of this site to see what’s being said about your company.

Yes, we monitor everything customers say about us through formal surveys, informal customer gatherings, through publications, and of course all social media.

Every company has its apostles — the most loyal customers — that have had great experiences with the company, buying its products and services and interfacing with its employees. There are also times when customers have had an unpleasant experience with the products or services they received and therefore have a different image of the company than you want.

Every company should track all social media as well as its own support calls to see what kind of activity it is getting, to mitigate bad situations and amplify good ones. We always take the approach that the customer experience is critical to our overall success and find ways to treat every situation — even the difficult ones — and create loyal customers from those experiences. By looking at social sites across the industry and seeing what customers are saying, you get a sense of the trends. Managing customer sentiment through social media is critical these days as information spreads quickly; the sooner you turn around a bad situation the better.

Likewise, the sooner you leverage the good press you are getting in social media and leverage that community, the faster you can impact your business. The trick is to manage those bad situations and — at a minimum — try to convert bad experiences to ones which actually lead customers to better embrace the company and become an apostle.

Social media, if used properly, can be used as a lens into the mindset of your customer. We use social media on Cisco Learning Network to understand what they want and what is missing from our site that they need. We also use it to help clarify messaging with the community when we see that a customer may not be clear on one of our products and they need to get more information that will help them have a better experience.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced and had to overcome?

Our own success has been largely from thinking less about the tools, to thinking more about the audience and what we’re trying to accomplish in a big picture.

That is the challenge I see for people who have tried to do this and maybe haven’t done as well in using social mechanisms to either gather their audiences or make these sites useful. Every one of these social initiatives needs to have a broader goal. You cannot treat it as a just a tool, thinking, “If I build it, they’ll just come, regardless of whether there’s any content or any reason to come there.” That, I think, is the biggest misstep that most corporations make in trying to get into social media and becoming a more collaborative organization.

The other major point is that in order for any company to continue to be successful in this hypercompetitive market, they have to be able to break down the silos within their companies and create a culture of collaboration.

If you talk to any CEO — of a bank, a service provider or a retailer — every single one of them has silo operations where they don’t collaborate amongst themselves internally, so they have no way of taking all the great assets they have as a company and combining them with force to a customer in a meaningful way that adds collective value to the company.

CEOs are saying they want to create a more collaborative environment to change their approach to markets, by developing their products and services and interacting with their customers. I think in order to do this you have to do three things: Have top-down clarity on the changes needed and the goals desired, and then set up structure and tools to support the collaborative changes you want to adopt in the company.

The reason why Cisco Learning Network works is because we had a big vision. It was a path towards an end goal. It itself wasn’t the goal.

Do you have a next milestone that you’d love to see this get to in the next year or two?

Yes. We’re going to have some really powerful capabilities that allow us to go from thinking about this as pure education to more knowledge-based and just-in-time information. We’re going to mine content from our audience in a way that allows us to truly provide knowledge services in this social community.

The future will be about going beyond education, beyond accredited programs and really thinking about information and moments of need that our customers and employees have. We will provide decision support information in that moment to support them in their jobs. We’re integrating our best collaborative tools with our content management systems so that we can have people not just find information, but quickly reach out and find an expert with the tap of a button, get a video conference with somebody and have that conversation with them in a rich environment, so they can make that call or conversation happen beyond the chats and recorded video that we’re doing today.

So you see this as a kind of crowd-sourced, rich content, real-time customer support resource.

Yes. This addresses getting critical information from both Cisco and our community to everyone who needs it in real time — allowing rich interactions and relationships to be developed along the way.