Cisco Likes Facebook's Like Button

Cisco has gone live with Facebook’s Like button throughout its Data Center product pages and select Small Business product pages. Cisco continues the trend of staying ahead of the curve in utilizing social media technology to better communicate with its customers and partners. The Like button will give Cisco customers and partners an intuitive and elegant way to share content they find valuable.

Cisco has developed a strategy on how to integrate social media into Cisco.com, leveraging Jeremiah Owyang’s framework, which outlines the evolution of social corporate websites. Today Cisco is proud to announce the rollout of Facebook Like buttons on over 180 product pages on Cisco.com. You will notice them when browsing Cisco’s Data Center or small business product areas.

Why Facebook? Cisco has over 685K fans on Facebook across it’s various Facebook pages and it has seen referral traffic from Facebook increase over 50% in the last year. So Cisco’s customers are on Facebook and they are using Facebook to share information – why not make it easier for them to do that? In fact on other Cisco sites where this feature is deployed – Cisco Blogs, News@Cisco and the Cisco Umi site – Facebook quickly became the third biggest traffic referral behind Google and Cisco.com. Similarly other companies are seeing huge traffic gains, The Washington Post has seen its Facebook referral traffic climb 290%, ABC News saw an increase of over 250 percent in Facebook referrals and Levi’s, who was an early adopter of this feature saw more than 4,000 likes on it’s website in the first week!

For now this is still just a pilot program at Cisco but if things go well as Cisco suspects, you can expect to see Facebook Like buttons appearing on product pages throughout the site and who knows where next!

I would like to take this opportunity to recognize and thank the Marketing IT team, the Web and User Experience Team, as well as the Data Center and Small Business website strategists, for working with Social Media Marketing to make this happen!

So what do you think…do you “like” it?