Jeanette Gibson, global director of social media at Cisco, kicked off the Ragan Cisco Social Media Summit with an outstanding and inspiring review of how Cisco is using social media tools including blogs,

Twitter and employee-generated video. These are my more-or-less tidied up notes from her presentation.

Cisco has 22 external blogs that get 475,000 views per quarter. “Blogs are now the preeminent way that companies are communicating to get customer feedback.”

25 percent of their blogs are video blogs, and they’ve found you get five times the level of retention of your message when you use video.

Jeanette referenced a 2009 study by Charlene Li of Altimeter Group that showed “companies deeply engaged in social media grew revenues by 18 percent over last year... companies that were least engaged dropped 6 percent on average.”

“Every person in communications and marketing at Cisco is now a marketer,” Jeanette sais. “If you’re going to be engaging externally with our customers, we want you to shoot a video,” Jeanette said, and your videos need to be videos need to be ‘snackable,’ 90 seconds or less.

Videos are a quick, high-impact way to convey news. “We don’t need to spend a month doing a press release.” But it’s not easy. Employees need to learn the basic techniques and practice. “This is tough work. This is business process change.”

“This is why training has been so important internally,” to teach employees how to integrate video.

Twitter is another important focus for Cisco. “For Cisco, nearly 60 percent of our conversations on the social web are on Twitter. Two years ago that was zero. By getting your teams and executives engaged, you can shift the landscape.”

People come to Twitter first, then to the blogs, then to YouTube. Twitter is the amplification tool where people want to get information first and fast, then go to the blogs for more information.

“We saved $250,000 for one launch using social media.” By using blogs, saving money on video by using Flip cameras, and turning white papers into a series of blog posts.

“Information isn’t one deliverable.”

Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior is highly engaged in social media. Jeanette uses her as the example for people who say they don’t have time to integrate social media into their jobs. “If Padma can do it, you can do it.”

“You can measure everything and it can become very confusing because there’s no standard.” You need to have objectives.

Cisco has an established and well-communicated social media policy for employees that encourages participation and gives clearly-defined parameters.

“At Cisco our strategy is to encourage and protect. We want to encourage the use of social media... but we’re gonna protect you.”

Employees have a disclaimer that says, “These views are mine and not my employers.”

Even so, employers need to be aware of the fact that openness in social media can sometimes open them up for criticism, and they need to be comfortable with that. “Employees may say things that the company doesn’t like.”

Cisco found that many of the issues they wanted to address in their social media policies were already covered in existing HR policies. “We took our existing employee policy and translated it to what you’re doing on the social web.”

Twitter has been a major focus, including live Twitter chats with CEO John Chambers. CTO Padmasree uses her Twitter community of 1.4 million followers to amplify Cisco’s voice, share technology insights and get feedback on her ideas and presentations.

“It’s not always good. Let’s be real.” Jeanette showed some examples of customers complaining about download issues, and the way the sentiment turned around instantly when someone responded to the customer’s complaint.

“This is the new expectation of how we will interact with companies.”

Cisco is getting into social gaming with a real-time game that has more than 57,000 Facebook fans. Teachers are using the game with students to learn how to plan.

Cisco is promoting a program called I-Prize to crowdsource new business ideas. 2500 participants have submitted full business plans in the hopes of winning the $250,000 prize.

“Not all good ideas are going to come from us.”

They’re also running a contest at ciscocontest.com asking people what they want their TVs to be able to do.

“We didn’t hire people. This is our staff learning how to incorporate video into their marketing communications.”

They’re shifting from big product launches to having a longer conversation over time. “We saw 75 percent lower cost with increased customer interaction. We were able to extend our reach, have better conversations and spend less money using telepresence with executives and reporters,” but they also livestreamed it publicly.

As far as internal training, “We feel it’s very important to have one place employees can go for more information.”

Cisco has created a global social media community for employees. They can read policies, the FAQs, ask questions on an internal discussion forum, ask a question of a lawyer.

All of the events and training are linked to the internal community.

Lead by example. “We work top down and bottom up in social media.”

John Chambers does a monthly video blog. It took employees about six months to get comfortable asking questions, but then they started to talk more freely.

Jeanette quoted a stat from the National Business Research Institute that said, “When employees can use social media tools for internal communications and collaboration productivity rises 26 percent and employee retention is raised 15 percent.”

They’ve created a Reverse Mentoring Program where Gen Y employees help executives learn more about Web 2.0, and it’s been adopted by HR as part of the official mentoring program.

Jeanette showed a video titled ”A Special Valentine's Day Gift...from Cisco!", shot to promote the ASR9000 router (which got a well-deserved round of applause from the audience).

CEO John Chambers did a 27-second video demonstrating duck calls which inspired The Wall Street Journal to create a video series about how to teach anyone anything in 30 seconds.