Casie Shimansky is the mastermind behind the successful @WeAreCisco Instagram strategy, which has experienced impressive organic growth—reaching over 21,000 followers who are highly engaged.
The channel also has engagement rates that are sometimes three to five times more than industry standards—making Instagram one of Cisco Talent Brand team’s most-engaging channels.
With the inclusion of Instagram Stories, Albums, Stories Highlights and Instagram Live, Shimansky has more tools in her toolbox to continue to make personal connections with talent—staying true to her company’s mission—by innovating within each of these elements to continue to convey the WeAreCisco story.
For each Instagram platform, Shimansky has designed a dedicated strategy, content calendar and employee-ambassador training, resulting in a connected world that appeals to possible talent and invites them to see from the perspective of employees why Cisco is a great place to work.
Shimansky has also conceived a pair of hand selected Instagram ambassador groups. The WeAreCisco Shutterbugs, for example, is centered on photography as well as Instagram Stories. There are close to 50 employees within these two groups and Shimansky takes care of the logistics, which can be chaotic, with her equating it to what NASA mission control must feel like.
In her first few months on Cisco’s Talent Brand Social Team, Casie Shimansky developed a dedicated strategy for growing its brand-new Instagram channel. First, she grew it to 1,500 followers. By building relationships with employees to amplify their stories, she took the account to 5,000, 10,000 and now 15,000, all through organic growth.
However, any good social media manager knows that followers don’t matter without engagement, and Shimansky is a great social media manager. By strategizing the right hashtags, the right voice, and replying, the WeAreCisco Instagram channel exceeds industry engagement rates by 3X, sometimes as high 6X.
When Instagram Stories launched, she thought through her strategy and made sure that the content was unique to the channel. She made sure that the content wasn’t “Snapchat light,” but showcased employees through video, boomerangs and photos with her signature style.
She also led the social strategy for the biggest recruiting event of the year, the Grace Hopper Celebration, by taking over the WeAreCisco Snapchat to highlight the event. She also managed the contest that paired Snapchat and Instagram stories that led to two offers. Also, in 2016, she was instrumental in carrying out the logistics for the LoveWhereYouWork employee social activation, and she developed video-on-demand trainings for recruiters and employees to encourage best Instagram practices.
I often joke on our team calls for Cisco’s Talent Brand that we’re going to “schedule the entire year” when giving updates on the Life at Cisco blog—but now that I look at our calendar? That’s kind of what we’re doing!
On a mission to set the team up for success ahead of my honeymoon, I rolled right into scheduling through December 2018, with no plans to stop there.
Blogs have been around for a while, dating all the way back to 1994 (although the term “blog” wasn’t coined until 1997) – but what does it look like when they’re integrated into your whole digital ecosystem in 2018 with a small, versatile team?
I can help provide that picture.
According to ContentPlus, 60% of consumers feel engaged and positive with a brand after reading custom content on their blog—this is an opportunity you don’t want to miss. We’ve heard from interns and full-time employees alike that they decided Cisco was the place to work for them after they read the stories our employees have shared on Life at Cisco.
Here’s how we took the blog from week-to-week to three months out:
Source content through social. We source an overwhelming majority of our content for the Life at Cisco blog through the @WeAreCisco social media channels. So what does that look like?
Casie Shimansky, Social Media Manager, Talent Brand, Cisco
Our employees share their stories on social media and hashtag #WeAreCisco. Using this hashtag is something we started about three years ago as our tribe’s calling card. The Talent Brand team has constant eyes on this hashtag, and when we see a great image we’d like to use, we reach out and ask our fellow Cisconian for permission to share it further.
Instead of just re-sharing these images on our social channels, we reach out to employees who’ve posted compelling photos with a simple question that tends to take an image from social post to blog post.
Ask, “Can you tell us the story behind the image?” This one simple question—which we ask any time we request permission to use an image further—has been gold for us in terms of filling our content pipeline for the Life at Cisco blog. Every visual moment holds a story. All you have to do is ask for it.
Our team is comprised of writers, photographers and storytellers. We have a refined eye for knowing a potential story when we see one, but taking it that extra step and simply asking for what’s behind the photo wins us, on average, one to two blog topics a week.
Use contests to encourage your tribe to post. When you build it, they will come. Every February we run our annual #WeAreCisco #LoveWhereYouWork Contest. This contest was designed to encourage our employees to post on social and share why they love working at Cisco, but it’s also intended to prompt our employees to post the images we value the most.
What’s that got to do with blogging? The stories that come out of this contest and the images posted are powerful. Some of our most moving and authentic stories about why Cisco employees love where they work are shared in the five weeks this contest runs. Our 2018 contest produced 75 stories alone. And at two a week, that gave us 37.5 weeks of content.
Set your authors up for success. Most of our blog authors will tell you that they never considered themselves to be a writer, and so most of what I do in the beginning is to assure them that they absolutely have a story. Writing is scary even for writers. For non-writers, it’s sometimes impossible to see. So we do our best to set them up for success right off the bat.
I’m a master of templates. If I have to write anything twice, it becomes a template—and that includes our Life at Cisco blog guidelines, outline and the overall expectations we give our authors. All they have to do is “brain dump” their story to us like we’re at a coffee shop chatting about work and we’ve asked them, “Tell us about your day at work.”
We take care of the rest. From editing to scheduling, we try to make the storytelling experience fun for everyone, and we love seeing how happy employees are when their work is published and shared for all to see.
Determine the best organizational process for you and your team. This takes some trial and error, but develop a system that works for you. While I reach out and connect with potential authors and edit the blogs, I have teammates that assist with creating author credentials and scheduling the blogs in WordPress. We’ve worked hard on creating a system that works for us and that enables us to efficiently move forward in the process.
Have honest conversations here, and see what works best for you and your team.
For a time, I was getting multiple emails a week from contributors asking about when their blogs might be posted. Understanding their desire to know when posts would be shared, but not quite having the bandwidth to respond to them all, I created a Webex for Teams Space and invited all of our authors to join. In that space is an RSS feed of the Life at Cisco blog so that authors can see when their own blog post goes live as well as when other blogs go up. This drives interaction among authors.
While the space was initially designed to streamline the blogging process, it has since become a thriving, devoted and supportive community of ambassadors who cheer on their co-workers and champion their stories by sharing them on social media. The cherry on top of this sundae is that we’re also able to obtain feedback and source future contributors.
Start small, then keep going. Don’t try to schedule the whole year right away. Good things take time. We were scheduling week-to-week on the blog for the first year. We became more prolific at scheduling content after our first #LoveWhereYouWork contest and have never looked back. At no point did we say, “We’re scheduled three weeks out, guess we’ll take a break!”
Now, we work in “future time”—so I’m about three months ahead in thinking about what content and stories we might want to highlight on Life at Cisco. I’m even looking ahead to next year’s posts.
Find content for your first week or month, but don’t stop.
There’s another story out there to tell, you’ve just got to keep looking.
Follow Casie: @TheNameIsCasie
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Now that Instagram has surpassed its billion-user mark, competition for attention on the platform is heating up. Instagram content must be positioned even more strategically in order to cut through the noise.
Casie Shimansky, social media manager, talent brand, Cisco
Casie Shimansky, one of The Social Shake-Up’s 2018 Movers & Shakers and social media manager at Cisco’s talent brand @WeAreCisco, says that Instagram’s monumental growth (not to mention algorithm change) has caused her team of two to constantly test their approach to creating and sharing content. Using different hashtags, geotags and posting strategies, the @WeAreCisco duo, led by Social Shake-Up advisory board member Carmen Shirkey Collins, ensures “we always stay true to the overall tone that the Instagram community expects.”
Within Instagram, there are several different features social media pros can use toward different ends. Shimansky, charged with Instagram strategy specifically, has developed specific goals for @WeAreCisco’s Instagram feed posts, Instagram Stories and Instagram Live broadcasts, each tied to overall objectives for the recruiting arm of Cisco’s business.
In terms of the big picture, @WeAreCisco’s overarching Instagram goals are to:
See the three elements of Instagram @WeAreCisco currently uses, and individual KPIs for each, below:
Instagram Feed:
Instagram Stories:
Instagram Live (still being piloted):
Having laid the groundwork above, one can only imagine where Shimansky and her team will take their department’s strategy for Instagram’s new long-form video feature, IGTV. Coding competitions between engineers? A condensed documentary of an employee’s first day on the job? For Shimansky’s team, the possibilities could be endless.
Follow Casie: @TheNameIsCasie
Follow Sophie: @SophieMaerowitz
If you look up the word “daunting” in the dictionary, I’m fairly certain “starting a new social media account for your company” would be one definition.
When Cisco’s Talent Brand team opened an Instagram account in the summer of 2015, we didn’t just throw a few photos into the feed, bedazzle them with hashtags and call it a day. We knew that getting people to show up and remain engaged with the account would be a challenge.
The goal of @WeAreCisco’s Instagram account was to make connections with prospective talent through dynamic imagery and storytelling provided by current employees. We didn’t want to just tell people that there were jobs at Cisco—we wanted to share why they would want to work here.
So, how did @WeAreCisco’s Instagram account grow from zero to 18,000 followers, with healthy engagement rates, without paying a dime? Here are the five steps we took to flip the switch on employee storytelling on Instagram.
It’s OK to let your audience know there’s a person behind the account. In fact, it’s encouraged.
A few months before opening an Instagram account, we started changing our tone and voice on Twitter. Gone were the days of simply posting job listings—now we were laser-focused on employee storytelling and being social ourselves. There’s a big difference between pushing out content and becoming part of a conversation. Being human allowed us to be part of the conversation and to grow our following as well.
Casie Shimansky, social media manager, Cisco
Instagram’s community is very specific. It’s a storytelling platform created for artists and photographers. So, we put a heavy focus on photography and even trained our teams on Instagram, Instagram Stories and photography basics so they knew what type of images we were interested in.
It was also a conscious decision to keep our Snapchat strategy and Instagram Stories strategy different. These are two distinct channels—like different children from the same family—with unique goals and storytelling capabilities.
Always converse with each platform’s audience in their language. Very few accounts can get away with bombarding their followers with text overlays. Take into consideration what your audience wants to see and illustrate that through imagery that feels unique and native to the platform.
Are there easy ways to misspell your company’s name or is there something your audience may be talking about when they’re really trying to talk about you? Perhaps there’s a certain geotag your customers use that you may not know about. You should go wherever your audience is. By finding out where they are and meeting them there, you’ll surprise them.
#Cisco is a frequently used hashtag that can mean anything from a character on a TV show to the misspelling of Sysco (a name shared by a food product company and a rapper). So, we started focusing on event hashtags like #CiscoGSX and #CiscoLive, as well as our global offices, via Instagram geotags. When we showed up unexpectedly in these places, we surprised people and our following really took off.
We didn’t set out to develop a program for employee advocacy. But by listening to the conversations our employees were having on the platform, we noticed that some were already sharing why they love working at Cisco—and they were good at it, too. We decided to harness their enthusiasm and that is how the WeAreCisco Snapchat and Instagram ambassador programs were born. There are now more than 125 active ambassadors across the two programs that span the globe.
The more you encourage and enable your employees to post, the more their networks have eyes on what you’re doing. Trust them to do their jobs, tell their stories and be an authentic voice for your brand.
The @WeAreCisco Instagram account is entirely user-generated content (or as we like to call it, employee-generated content). We always ask for permission to share their images and always give the employee a photo credit within the post. Our following rapidly grew once word was out that employees could have their images featured on @WeAreCisco.
Casie Shimansky manages strategy for the @WeAreCisco Instagram and Twitter accounts, while also helping to harness the stories of Cisco employees through the Life at Cisco blog.
Connect with Casie Shimansky: @TheNameIsCasie
