In October 2012, Cisco, the networking equipment giant launched a Social Media Listening Centre at its headquarters in San Jose, California. The company, which has 67,000 employees and annual revenue of $48.6 billion, launched the centre in efforts to gain better knowledge of their large customer base. This means that they have to monitor all of their 5000 daily social media mentions across 70 company related Facebook pages, 100 Twitter accounts and a slew of other including Linkedin, Youtube, and company run blogs and forums.

According the research conducted on the listening centre by Nucleus Research, Cisco had a 281% return on investment over a 5 month period which resulted in an annual cost benefit of $1.5 billion. Among it benefits, Cisco had increased staff productivity, meaning that they were able to process and answer customer queries quicker. In addition they note that social media as a whole is a very effective tool to broadcast a message to a large group effectively and in a timely matter.

Personally I believe that this is an incredibly genius idea on the part of Cisco, being as large a company they are and as diverse they are it would be a challenge to satisfy it entire customer base. However with this in place they can effective pay adequate to all of their markets and customer bases. It would be a great irony if a company whose product is networking equipment could not effectively communicate with its customers, luckily for Cisco they can.