Top Tech Tips: 5 Ways to Make Your Corporate Newsroom Social

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5 Ways to Make Your Corporate Newsroom Social

The Making of: Talk2Cisco

By Alex Romano

Corporate news content isn't very social by nature; historically, this includes some text-heavy press releases, maybe an earnings report, topped off with some 'talking head' videos. All is not lost. With a few simple (and some obvious) steps, you too can make your corporate news content social. Here are just 5 steps that we took for our corporate newsroom.

1. Facebook Fan Page / Twitter Handle — Setting up a Facebook Page and Twitter account should be one of the first things you create (after amazing content). Distribute your content by placing it in a Facebook post and/or Tweet to let the sharing and engagement begin.

• We currently manage the @CiscoSystems Twitter handle (38k+ followers) and the Cisco Facebook Fan Page (101k+ fans).

2. Youtube — Almost all of the Cisco PR videos can be found on our Youtube channel. The viral possibilities, search engine rankings, and ease of use make it a must use tool.

• We currently house almost 900 videos on Youtube with 1.5M views and counting.

3. Flickr — Flickr allows us to easily upload and embed our photos within our news content. In the end, Flickr increases our SEO, makes our photos social and creates another entry point for our news site.

• We currently share 784 photos with 1.3M+ views.

4. Social Sharing buttons — Social Sharing buttons give readers the ability to take our content and recommend it to their network which is essential in getting our message across a multitude of networks.

5. Live Streaming Video — Live streaming sites, in our case, Ustream, has created an environment that magically transforms our "talking head" executive videos into a fresh, engaging and insightful dialogue, driven by social media.

• We have currently reached over 41,000 views on this new platform. Watch this quick video about Talk2Cisco to learn more about the program:

What's next for our corporate newsroom?

We are currently looking to incorporate commenting, virtual badges, and mobile development in our efforts to become the premiere example of the next-gen corporate news site (spoiler alert: redesign coming soon!). If you have any suggestions please let us know your thoughts on our social media efforts thus far and how we can improve.