#H2HChat Past, Present and Future of a Digital World with Mark Yolton

Hey everyone, how are you doing? This is Bryan Kramer. We're back for another H2H chat this week, and I am very excited about this one. We're going to go ahead and shoot the link out this time for YouTube. Suzy, if you don't mind, we had a couple people ask just for it up front, just in case. So go ahead and shoot that out. we get started, I wanted to just tell everybody how much fun this was this weekend getting ready for this chat. I've never seen so many people want to be a part of the chat as much as they did this weekend. And even more so, this whole meme about hats going off was fun, and we're about to show you something— Mark's about to show you something that had me almost crying and laughing at the same time. Before we do that, I wanted to just say a quick hello to my co-host, Suzy live from New York. Suzy, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, Bryan, doing well. Good. I see that Mark has his Giants hat. I wish I would have realized because I'm a Washington Nationals fan, so booyah. Gotta say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, very bad.

How many World Series have they won again?

That close, that close.

And we are off and running. So during the show, Mark, I want to explain something to you real quickly. We have this game, so if you can strategically place the word human into your sentences, the last person's record was at 9, you will have to do 10 to beat the record. In the total time, we are counting Jay Baer, Joel Comm, Chris Heuer, and a whole bunch of other great people. So now it's your turn to take the challenge. Are you willing to take the challenge?

I'm willing to take the challenge, and I'm going to attempt to do it without it feeling awkward. Good. So the word human is going to come out all over the place.

You like that?

Just like that.

And that's what you're going to hear every time you say it.

Okay, I'm ready.

Alright, and so without further ado, I'd like to introduce Mark Yoolton, very good friend and also the VP of Digital, which includes web, social, mobile, video, so you can rest, medicine, at Cisco. Now he says his views are his own, not necessarily those of his employer, but I think he has pretty congruent views if you ask me. He's also a husband, a dad, A captain, I'd like to know more about that. And for those of you who don't know, check out his profile on his Twitter bio, and I think that's your motorcycle, is it not?

That is my motorcycle, yes. I rode it yesterday.

So lots of stuff, you have a lot of stuff going on. Anyway, welcome to the HJA Chat.

Thank you, Bryan, and thank you, Suzie, too, for having me. Appreciate it.

Absolutely, super psyched for this one.

Good.

So before we get into the hats, I wanted to ask you, what are you the captain of?

Yeah, the captain. I'm a grandfather, but I'm far too young and my wife is far too young to be called grandmother or Grammy or some name like that. So we left it up to our daughter and son-in-law to give us better names. And so my wife is Lolly, which is some sort of French-sounding grandmother name. And then I left it up to my son-in-law, which is always dangerous, to give me a nickname, and he went back to Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents or one of those movies, and the dad says, call me Captain. And so he said, that works for you, so you're gonna be called Captain. And now I've really come to love it because now as I'm walking through the grocery store or something, my grandsons who are 12 and 8 will yell out, Captain! Captain! And of course it's to me. And so it sounds kinda cool. It's a better name than Poppy or some word like that, so I'm Captain.

Oh, that's awesome. I love that story. So it's funny, ironically I was having my son call me Captain, oh Captain, this weekend if he wanted anything, but not as cool a story as yours. So let's see so that everyone on the HAA chat can enjoy your hat display. Do you want to display the hats before we get started?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, to get us kicked off. Over the weekend, one of the folks on Twitter was suggesting that we wear hats or thinking caps or something. And so that's how we got started with this whole hat thing. So I pulled a few hats out of the closet this morning just to get us started. So of course we have the World Series-winning San Francisco Giants represented here. I think 3 World Series in the past 5 years if anybody's counting. So that's kind of cool. But I really love football a lot more, so we represent the San Francisco 49ers as well. I'm looking forward to the preseason, Don't know what's going to happen because the team has turned over so much. So I got the Niners here. Sorry, East Bay, I don't have the Oakland Raiders. We also jumped on the bandwagon in the past couple months and we've got the Golden State Warriors. This one is very flattering. That's why I like this one the best because it makes me look like 10 IQ points smarter. But I've got the Golden State Warriors NBA connection. I guess that doesn't count. This one is good to wear to, I think, a jazz festival. So this is good if you just want to sort of do the jazz thing. We also have Beat Poets here in San Francisco, so that's good for if you want to do that. And then if you're going for an evening out on the town, this very suave-looking hat. It might even have a feather in it somewhere. Anyhow, this one and all of these make me look more human, more accessible, more engaging. Thank you. That was pretty smooth, right?

Yeah, that was good.

I like that one.

That was good. Oh man, so how about this, why don't we lay down a challenge for everybody real quick on the HTH chat. If you guys wouldn't mind taking a picture, so that would be a selfie, of yourself with your hat and use the hashtag #HTHchat. I'm sure Mark would love to play back the tweet chat later on and see all the hats you are wearing.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So please make sure that you tweet a picture of yourself with a hat In the #HTAchat. Okay, time to get serious.

Yes, put on the serious face.

Let me put on my other hat, be good to people.

Oh, that's nice.

I'll keep this part on.

It's funny, when you wear this hat in public, you actually have to be good to people. So Mark, it is really, really— that was fun, but it was really good that to connect with you and also have you on the show. And so I wanted to kick this off just by explaining a little bit, because the topic of this show today is past, present, and future of digital. And you and I have had some really great conversations around it, but not nearly enough to, I think, explore really not just where things have been, but where they're going. So why don't we take just a quick trip back and have you tell us about your story, a little bit of background. on your own marketing career just to set things off?

Sure, I won't even really go digital yet. I'll just start with the career. I grew up in the Philadelphia area, went to school out in Amish country, very undigital. Where I went to university was a place where it was a legitimate excuse if you say, I got stuck behind a horse and buggy and that's why I'm late. So that's how undigital it was. It wasn't 1,000 years ago, it was just Amish country. Then I took the first job where somebody made me an offer, and that was the Prudential Insurance Company. I even started as a claims agent just because I wanted a job and I didn't want to live in my parents' house any longer, because through college I realized that that wasn't, you know, any good anymore. I needed to be off on my own. So I took my first job. Moved into the marketing organization soon after, which is where I really wanted to be. And somebody plucked me out of a group and said, hey, I think you belong in marketing. You're obviously not good at this. Maybe you'll be good at something else. So they put me into marketing, and then I realized, gosh, you know, insurance, not the most innovative and exciting place, so why don't I try to find a tech job? The big tech company in Philadelphia at the time was Unisys, which some of you, if you're old enough, you might remember Sperry, Burroughs, some of those old names. The combination of those 2 is Unisys. It's still an old mainframe company that's still sort of plugging along, still going. So I went there for a while. I did a stint out in the field doing field marketing. It was supposed to be 4 months, it turned into 4 years, and it was a very long commute, like an hour and a half each way. Wow. So I went to the boss at the end of this and said, oh please let me out of this, it's been 4 years, we thought it was going to be 4 months. Now, you know, I you know, bought several cars and lots of tires in order to get me through this. He said, okay, you did your thing, choose a job, any job, and I will help you get it. And it was around 1994, '95, and I said, this new thing called the internet looks kind of interesting. It might not be a flash in the pan. I'd like to try my hand at that. And so I went to work in the Unisys Corporation web department, whatever that was. At the moment, it was probably 3 people and a couple IT folks trying to figure out how to do HTML. And then it didn't take me long to realize that Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, is not going to be the center of the universe for this new thing called the internet. So my wife and I moved our kids across the country and came to Silicon Valley. We essentially chose the center and said, okay, San Jose, boink, that's where we're going to live and that's where we're going to look for jobs. We came out here without jobs really. I quickly found one at Sun Microsystems, that was a great ride, where I did some e-business work there. Then there was the dot-com bust that happened and everything imploded. I sort of took a little time and licked my wounds and went off in a corner for a little while and then headed off to PeopleSoft. Mm-hmm. Was there for a year. PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle, went there for a year, escaped to SAP for about 8 years, and then came to Cisco almost 2 years ago. So it's been 30-some years. And really, the internet part of it, the web part of it started in '94, '95 and has been the last 20 years or so. It's been fantastic.

Man, so you have obviously done a few things in your career.

Some of them successfully.

You know, that sounds like a very Silicon Valley story. You know, it's a lot of different changes and a lot of different things. I'm curious, what is one thing that, or even actually a couple things that you've seen change that were the points of the tipping point, if you will? Yeah. The things that changed in your career or in the environment as your career went on.

Yeah, I guess, well, let's just start with the digital stuff. In the mid to later '90s, let's say, in those days we didn't grow up with any of this digital stuff the way that kids or younger folks do today. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was no web, none of that existed. So there were even some rudimentary things, like I had the— if you Know somebody old enough, they'll know a story like this. I had the boss that had his secretary print out emails so that he could handwrite the answer on the bottom of the email, and then she would type them in as a response. So I had that. We had people in the office who didn't know how to use a mouse because a mouse was a new technology even back then, and people were holding it up. I remember one guy in the class, an older guy, holding it up sort of like the TV remote control and couldn't figure out why this stupid mouse thing wasn't working for him. It wasn't moving on the screen. So even learning something as silly as how to use a mouse, I mean gosh, we learn that sort of out of the womb at this point. We even had the debate within the office about should all employees be allowed to have the internet access at their desk. You know, God forbid they were able to do that because then they would spend their whole day sort of surfing the web, and surfing the web and surfing the net was the talk of the day. And what is the ROI of having internet access for every employee? Shouldn't just a few people have that? So there was that, that was one, just to get over the hump of access. Then there were things like UI and what we would call user experience to us. I mean, we didn't even know where logos were supposed to go. Right now we all know that when you go to a website, in the upper left corner is probably where the logo of the company should go, and that logo should take you back to the homepage. We were figuring that stuff out, we were figuring out, we were doing eye tracking and scanning and trying to figure out where should we put different things on a page, how does somebody read a page. Well gosh, they don't actually read it, they skim it, they sort of skim it from top to bottom, they are looking for links, all these different things that we sort of take for granted right now that are just user experience or UI design kind of standards that are expected now. Then we moved into something like, well, what is it that we can automate? You know, the first websites were essentially digitized brochures. So okay, we've done that, we can digitize a brochure and put a brochure up and that's our website. What else could we automate? E-commerce became a thing and e-business became a thing, and e-business was really how do we change some business processes or business practices, some of the things that wouldn't normally be done. One of my, I guess, claims to fame back in the day at Sun Microsystems was transitioning the Sun services organization to accept online trouble tickets into the tech support organization, and then giving customers this amazing ability to be able to track your tech support question on the web by yourself. Like you could track a WebEx package, and that was seen as a big breakthrough back in the day, and now we take all of that stuff for granted. I would say that a couple of the things that we've done in the early days was we automated existing processes the way they already existed, and then in the later days, the days like now, we are trying to figure out new ways to innovate, ways that we can change business processes completely As opposed to just automating the past. It's almost like paving cow paths, right? That was the old way that you figured out where the road was going to go. See where the cow has made a path and pave that, or the people have made a path to the village, pave that and you've got your first roads. And then you start thinking, well gosh, shouldn't we have an interstate system with roads, and what about bridges and, you know, all this other stuff that's going to connect these things together? Now I think we are in that mode of thinking of innovation rather than automating what already existed.

I love that. So that's interesting, the whole automation versus innovation. I hadn't heard that before, although I know the automation piece is, you know, something that everybody is trying to figure out. And obviously that plays really well with the theme of this chat, which is being human to human. But how, you know, I realize this wasn't in our question set, but I'm actually curious. Sorry, I'm throwing you a curveball here. Yeah. How do you see that? How do you see the human approach versus the automation approach? Do you have kind of a personal approach for the automation versus human? Like, where's the balance there? What's your thinking?

I think we're going to automate and have machines do the repetitive tasks, the things where you could start with, let's say, you know, put widget A into slot B. That's the first thing. The second thing will be then we'll start to have some algorithms to take that away, and then I think the machines are going to get smart enough so that we say, okay machine, now learn how to do that better. Get more efficient, get more effective, and that I think is the path that we're going to take from automation to innovation. I think then the people, the humans among us, get to do the real thinking portion of the problem. How do we do the problem solving? How do we think exponentially? How do we think outside the box? How do we think beyond the norm? I think that'll be the way that we go, so that we automate away the boring, repetitive, predictable stuff. At some point in the future, I think the machines are going to get smart enough where they do a better job and a faster job of thinking than the humans do, and that they're going to start to take over some things that we would normally do. I think we're going to end up doing the really higher-level intelligence kind of work And that machines take away all the drudgery.

That's a great response, I love that. And I can't wait.

Yeah, I hope there are still some jobs left for us and we won't just be the underlords of the robots, right?

The underlords.

Yes.

So what things today make you excited about digital marketing? I mean, I know we just talked about We'll get back into the future, but what about today? What are you excited about today?

Today, well, I think I would generally say I'm excited about how far we've come, and I'm excited about how far we have yet to go, because there is so much yet undone. One of the things that Cisco's Chief Marketing Officer Karen Walker says is that marketing is the last function to be industrialized and the first to be digitized. I hope that's true. That's what I'm here for, and that's what the team is here for, is to digitize marketing and then sales and then supply chain and etcetera, but really to digitize the entire company of Cisco. But I think marketing gets the lead on this one, which I think is going to be really cool. The ways that that transforms or transpires is that we start with some data and analytics, so I think we're going to see some really cool stuff about data and analytics, then automation is going to happen. Then we're going to start with better targeting and message customization to a particular individual, or it'll start as a group of individuals, then we'll get personalized down to one single person. We're going to get dynamic content, dynamic publishing with an audience of one, so that there's a bunch of content that could be created, but it's going to recognize what I respond to, or people like me respond to, or what I've responded to in the past, and it's going to be able to target to me. I'm excited about this whole idea of multichannel or omnichannel, where we won't be a person on the web and a person on Twitter and a person on Facebook and a person on LinkedIn and a person in real life, but that we are a person and that the machines, the automation, the systems will start to understand who we are, what motivates us, what interests us, what challenges we face, etc. can even anticipate some of the things that we have. So in part, I've gotten the opportunity, it's been amazing, to witness the first 2 decades, let's say, of digitization or the web and the internet. I'm going to get to see the next 2 decades at least, I hope. And I think how far we've come in those 2 and how far we have yet to go. At Cisco, we talk about the Internet of Everything. There's this— other folks might know it as the Internet of Things. But at Cisco, we add a couple other elements to the Internet of Things. We talk about people, process, data, and things. That makes up the Internet of Everything. I think as we start to connect all these things together, the possibilities start to take on— People, process, data, and things. People, process, data, and things equals the Internet of Everything. And I think all of those things, in essence, people take actions upon things which create data which change a process. That's the way that we think about it, or one of the ways we think about it. As all of these things start to get connected and then start to react and be proactive in their interaction and engage with each other and engage with us, I think the next 20 years are going to be just extraordinary, so I'm looking forward to that. That's what's exciting. Being in the middle of all this is really cool. Being at a company like Cisco, and I'm sure some of the folks who are watching and listening are building components of what's going to be the future, being at the center of that is really extraordinary. It's like being, I don't know, helping the Wright brothers push their airplane down the runway at Kitty Hawk in the sand, right, the beach. Or being part of the sort of the Industrial Revolution or something. Being at the center of this is really, really cool. That's what's exciting.

So not much, I guess.

Not much.

That's awesome. Man, so that could be its own show, everything that you just said. There's so much there that you just went through. The one area that I guess I'll kind of pick on Yeah. Is the thing of personalization.

Yeah.

Because I think that's— I mean, we all get the definition of it, but the action of doing it is probably the hardest thing in the world. Would you agree?

Oh yeah, absolutely. We haven't figured it out yet. We still have things like personas. We haven't gotten down to a human, a person, an individual. We haven't gotten to that yet. We still have personas and market segments, and we collectively are dabbling with, you know, individuals and being able to personalize. We can customize to an extent, but only to a certain extent. I mean, years ago people talked about an audience of one. We're not there yet. We need the systems and the tools and the algorithms and the data and the analytics of that data. We need all of those things in order to make personalization real. We're not there yet.

Yeah, that's going to be the interesting part, is to see how that unfolds. And when it does get here, it'll also be interesting to see where the creepy versus cool factor comes in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there is this potential for it to be really creepy. The first few times you get really personalized messages, you're going to be creeped out, I think. Yeah. But we've gotten comfortable with that stuff over time very quickly, like the whole Facebook back in the day, right, the Facebook personalization and the Facebook privacy policy changes and all that. Yeah. We were a little bit disturbed by those in the early days, but the more value we get out of something, the more willing we are to give up some of that privacy or data or information or control. I think as we see value We say, okay, I'm willing to give you another inch. I'm willing to give you another foot of rope to either personalize or not. If it starts to get too much for us, we can always pull it back.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if you know who Faith Popcorn is. She's a futurist, and she wrote a book in 1984 called The Popcorn Report. She predicted that we'd all be cocooning right around now, and we could order things to have them delivered like Amazon and so on and so forth. And now in the future, from today looking forward, she's saying that we'll be able to change things, our hair color with a pill. Wow. And we're going to solve things by sending robots into our body and have them fixed. And when you think about these things that can do all these unimaginable things, we imagine them happening overnight, but nothing ever happens overnight. It's all little increments of changes, which is what I think you're saying.

Yes, I think so.

That creepy part doesn't really enter into the mix too much.

No, well, I think all big corporations are thinking about the creepy part because we're trying to balance how fast do we go, how far do we go. There is a lot we could know about an individual who visits Cisco.com, let's say, or any website. We choose not to know it. We choose to aggregate it because it's a little too creepy and we really don't want to know. And it's not all that useful anyway to know what pages did Bryan Kramer look at. It's not all that interesting to a big company to know that about one individual. You want to know more.

Right.

When we automate it, then the machine will know it, the system will know it. Faith popcorn is a little negative in my recollection. Some of the things that I was thinking about it too over the past week or so And the thing that really popped out at me is, I'm going to pull one up too, is the Cluetrain Manifesto. That's one that I actually went and Googled it because I thought, oh my gosh, it's been now, I think it was 1999 this book was created, the Cluetrain Manifesto, and it had 94 theses I believe.

Yeah.

And I pulled them back up to say, I wonder how many of these have actually come true and how many we're still waiting for. Yeah. focus on the empowerment of the individual and that brands and companies would lose power. I think there's been a back and forth a little bit on both. Neither— it hasn't— the pendulum didn't swing one way or the other. It's still a balancing act. But it was interesting to go look at the Cluetrain Manifesto, see how far we've come and yet what's still yet to be accomplished based on what was published 16 years ago, amazingly.

Wow, yeah, I can only imagine. You know what, I need to do that too. It's been a while since I've actually looked at it. I'll bet it resonates so loud now, even more so than when it first came out. You're absolutely right about that. Yep. So, you know, I don't know if you actually talked about this in your introduction, but you are really well known, at least at your past job at SAP and maybe even before then, for being really, really strong in building community. And actually, you're one of the people that I completely look up to as somebody who gets how to build a community, and I quote you all the time on that.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that. That's an honor.

Yeah, I'm happy to. So I'm curious, and I'm sure everyone else is curious, where do you think community is and where do you think it's heading? How do you see community today and where do you think community could go?

Yeah, I—

I mean that in a digital perspective, not in like our, you know, the backyard and so

forth. Yeah, I guess even before SAP, when I was at Oracle, I was responsible for OTN and OPN. Those are Oracle Technology Network and Oracle Partner Network, which were early community examples. I think it's why I got hired into SAP, is to go build a developer community. And so one of the things that we built was the SAP Developer Network. Then we noticed some people were in that community but weren't really developers, so we grew a second community called Business Process Expert Community, BPX we called it, where we thought, okay, process people, sort of program manager, project manager, those sort of folks. And then we realized, gosh, we just built up an artificial wall in between these 2 groups of people. Let's tear down that wall and push them back together again, and it became the SAP Community Network. As I left SAP about 2 years ago, we were approaching somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million members of this community. It was a really, and still is, a very, very active community. We had blogs and discussion forums, and we had gamification before gamification had a name. We had all sorts of things that really made this special. We had advocacy programs, etc., etc. Now here at Cisco, of course, we've got lots of community. We've got We've got customer-facing and partner-facing communities that range from many around our product sets. So there's a collaboration community and a security community and an enterprise networking community, etc. There's a developer community, there's a partner community, there's an internal employee community. So we have all these different communities, all of which can connect with each other, except the outside folks can't connect as much on the internal. But internal can communicate out and can connect out. I think it's really important. I think it's the future of where we're headed. I think it's one of those things that the Cluetrain Manifesto probably got right, was the individual is empowered. And in these communities, individuals are empowered. Within the SAP Community Network, anybody can blog. If you are one of the 3 million or so members of the SAP Community, you can blog, you can post questions, you can post answers, you can thumbs up things that you like and agree with, you can add on to other people's questions. Same thing in the Cisco community, not everybody can be a blogger, but most folks can be participants in asking questions, posting documents, commenting on blogs, etc., etc. I think that is essentially empowering the masses to do as much as they want to, to influence the company that's hosting them, so it might be Cisco in our case. To influence the people around them, so that might be product managers who are engaging in that community saying, hey, I want feature X to be prioritized in the next release of this product that we use and you make for us, and advocate for that. I think it's really important, so I see nothing but upside in engaging in community. I think it's— and of course there's a Shareology community, I don't know if anybody knows, But there is this community for the book that's coming out. I heard that there is a book called Shareology that just happens to be coming out by a world-famous author, and there's an online community that allows you to engage with the author and with the other readers of that book and people who share ideas about this, about sharing and the sharing economy and all of that. So I think that communities are a way where you get to reinterject humanity back into the companies that are hosting these and into the engagement. Because I think in some cases it's like we think of company, vendor, provider, supplier, and then there's customers and partners. And gosh, really all of these are people. They all want to engage with each other. They all stand to benefit if they help each other to be successful. So I think community is one of those scalable ways where we can have that engagement happen, where humanity reigns, where individuals rule, where your voice can be heard if you're able to leverage it effectively, where your voice can be heard to influence some entity that might be perceived as more powerful than you. Gosh, you can really do a lot with communities, so I am really bullish and excited about what could happen and what can happen with communities.

I can see that's definitely a hot topic with you as well. Love it. I think you saw this weekend the results of your passion because everyone was even jumping on board to help support you and be a part of the community. It's amazing how much energy comes out in a community like that. I'm getting excited. By the way, thanks for the shout-out on Shirology. It has been—

Sure.

An absolute blast.

Your reference to the weekend too, it's just when people get excited about something or share something, it might just be, hey, we all know Bryan Kramer. That's it. We all want him to be successful. So a bunch of people jumped on Twitter and we were having all kinds of craziness with hats and photos and are you going to join us and encouraging other people to participate and ask fun questions and challenging questions. There was a whole lot of that. The other is I have without a doubt the best social media team on the planet.

Yeah.

And so they helped to amplify this, and so we issued a challenge and said, let's see how many people we can get to engage with us through this H2H chat. Let's see if we can really break a record and see if we can have more people than whoever the previous person was and then set a bar for the next guy or gal to try to beat that record. There is something about community too that means we have to stay engaged even though it's the weekend, it doesn't count as work. We're engaging with each other, we're connected to each other, we're sharing a common idea and a common interest. Let's all pull together and try to make something interesting happen. And that's what essentially happened over the 4th of July weekend of all things.

Yeah, right, you're absolutely right, I just got goosebumps on that. You know, one quick thing I wanted to just make I just wanted to make sure that everybody is continuing to ask questions because in 5 minutes I'm going to be turning this over to Suzy, and she's going to get the pleasure of actually asking the community questions to you. So speaking of community, I just wanted to make sure that you pose your question to Mark and use the hashtag #H2Hchat on Twitter, and Suzy is collecting them all there, and she's going to be asking Mark that in about 5 minutes. So just make sure that you do that. Mark, you're still at 2 humans, I just wanted to let you know, you're at the midway point. Alright. I always make sure that I at least let the guests know where they're at. And so I wanted to dive into the next question, which is where have you seen the most results digitally speaking at Cisco? Where have you seen the most results digitally speaking at Cisco? What emphasis would you put on— and when I say results, I mean clear benchmarks that you set and you accomplish them.

Well, there are a few, but I'll give you business results. I think I would go with growing top-line business. It's an area that I don't think we paid— Cisco didn't pay enough attention to earlier, but I don't think any company did, so I don't fault Cisco. But I think most companies, unless you're in maybe the consumer space where really driving revenue or driving new business is one of the key purposes of your digital strategy, it wasn't at Cisco. Cisco does 85% of its business through partners. There's a question about, okay, how much can we drive and how do we drive it. little complicated in a $50 billion company that's operating around the world. So I don't think we put a tremendous emphasis on how do we drive top-line revenue. I think what Cisco had done in the years prior was let's automate things, let's save money, let's get more efficient, let's get a little bit faster. Then the next thing became, okay, let's drive business. So we talked about this, we call it the pirate model, because you say arrr when you— It's awareness, Reputation, reference, referrals, reveals, registration, so it's an A and then a bunch of Rs. Arrr. It sounds like a pirate. So what we really did was, let's drive the full funnel through the digital channel and see what we can accomplish. Let's broaden our reach through social media, for example, with reach and immediacy. Let's drive people to our web properties where then they will be encouraged to reveal themselves so that they are no longer anonymous, but we get a name or maybe an email address or registration or something so that we can start to serve this person more personally and with customized content and things that might be relevant to them in the context in which they are working, that kind of stuff. And so we are driving much broader awareness, but more importantly we are driving reveals and registrations that turn into marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, etc. We have right now, we're targeting 1 million reveals this year in 2015, and we're targeting $1 billion, yes, $1 billion with a B, in sales qualified leads this year, this calendar year. Now we might reach it, we might not, it's a stretch goal. But we are targeting now, and those are some pretty big numbers, bigger than some companies perhaps. So a million new people that we can market to or have a relationship with is probably the better way to say it, and a billion dollars in sales qualified leads that the salespeople actually accept, put into their pipeline and their forecast, and move it forward. So driving the top line, that's the biggest one, business results. There are a number of others though. We're modernizing the infrastructure, the platforms, and the tools and so on. We're moving forward on user experience and design. We're modernizing and updating the design of some key pages of Cisco.com. We had a really nice left-brain experience on Cisco.com. You could accomplish a lot of tasks, it had a lot of features and functionality, but it didn't always connect emotionally with people, so we're trying to get the right-brain part. Where we have this emotional connection. So we are starting to update pages, you will see, people will see the rest of Cisco.com update over the next year or so, and across the 85 country sites and 40 languages that Cisco is working in. So those are some of the behind the scenes, but growing top line I think is the one that is starting to get people excited, and it's got our CEO frankly talking about digitization and digital as one of the big initiatives. And so if it's on the CEO's radar, we are accomplishing something, moving the needle.

You know, it's interesting that you guys are Cisco, and Cisco is one of the most technological digital companies in what you produce, and yet, you know, you're no different than everyone else. You're human because you're going through the same things that everyone else is.

And everybody has to fight for budget. Everybody has trouble giving up the old way of doing things and moving to the new way of doing things, which Machiavelli talked about in the 14th century in his book The Prince. He talked about how hard it is for somebody to give up an old way and to adopt a new way, because you're not quite sure the benefits of the new thing until it's been proven, and it hasn't been proven yet because it hasn't been adopted. So, I mean, it's It's all the same human emotions, the same human foibles, the things that hold us back or move us forward, motivate us or demotivate us, all the same within a big technology company, forward-thinking technology company, as it would be in any other company.

I noticed that you slipped 4 humans in there. I'm just going to give you one of these. So you're now at 8 humans. So Suzy, I'm going to pass the baton here, and I didn't get to cover the future. I'm hoping that comes out in some of the questions that's coming through. I think it is. I've been trying to pay attention to Mark as well. So hopefully you'll get to some of the future questions so we can cover that. But Mark, I'm going to leave you in the good graces of Suzy. Trust me, don't let the red hair fool you. She is— actually, let it fool you. She's a firecracker. So good luck with this one. Awesome.

Good, alright, thanks Bryan. Alright, Suzy.

Alright, well first of all I have to say this is an absolute pleasure. I was so excited when I heard that you were going to be jumping on. One thing I've been reflecting on, especially as you were talking about the early days of figuring out employees and the internet and all those things, I think I tweeted it out. There are some of the things that I'm hearing, and we're hearing a lot of the same parallels now, where it's, do we let our employees on social? Are we doing BYOD? Do we still limit internet access? Because some companies have the firewall. I have a whole bunch of audience questions queued up, but I just wanted to— I think this relates a little bit to the future, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, it's funny how history repeats itself. It's just sort of, you go through the same cycles, sort of recursive cycles a little bit, and we get a little bit further advanced as we go, but there is a kind of a feeling of 2 steps forward, one step back, something like that. The early days, I mean, in the early days it was, gosh, we shouldn't give people internet access because they'll be goofing off, they'll be surfing the net is the phrase, what's the ROI? And then I even went backwards further back then and said, Okay, well what is the ROI of having a telephone on everybody's desk? Won't they be calling their neighbors and their friends and their family all day long? No, we figured out that it's a communication device, it's a tool, it enables them to be more effective and more efficient and more impactful, so everybody gets a telephone. Now the internet is— let's put that in the same category. Web access or the internet access is the next thing that we need to let people have access to. because it's going to make them more productive. They're going to be able to be quicker, answer questions, you don't need to memorize everything, you can store it on a device, all that stuff. I think social media is one of those where people still don't— some people still don't quite get it, and they still revert back to that old— I hate it, but people say, oh, it's what I had for breakfast. I will tell you that I've been on Twitter since Early days, and I have probably seen maybe once or twice when somebody's talked about what they've had for breakfast in the midst of millions of tweets.

Right.

And so it's not that. It's this weird thing that somehow caught on that everybody's just goofing off. No, that's where I get my news, that's how I find out what's going on in the world. Social media is where I get connected to people and stay connected with them, even my own family. I mean, I have a son on the East Coast in Philadelphia. I stay connected to him more than I ever was connected to my parents when I was his age, even though he's 3,000 miles away and I'm off in Silicon Valley. We still talk on the phone and do all that stuff, but I know what he's up to on a day-to-day basis, where my parents never knew what I was up to, thank goodness, on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So my parents actually tune into H2H I'm 3,000 miles away, so they tune in and they go, oh, how's it going? They're small business owners, so they really enjoy it.

They even understand what you do. Hey, Mom and Dad.

My mom the other day said, okay, after 5 years, I actually get what you do. And I was like, yes, what every social strategist wants to hear, right?

Yes, you get people to engage with each other.

That's it. I absolutely love it. Let's jump in. A really great definition question that popped up and so key. This handle @tedq said, how do you define community?

Oh gosh.

The simple ones but the complex ones.

That's a little bit hard because you could go in so many directions. Here's the thing that I think about. You can have a development, like with houses and streets and parks and all the rest. You can have a neighborhood, or you could have a community. They are all made up of streets and houses and shops and whatnot, but community feels tighter. It feels more interconnected, it feels more networked. feels more intercodependent, let's say, more intertwined. And so that's one of the characteristics that I think about for community.

Yeah.

It's one thing to live in a development. That doesn't sound very warm and wonderful. It's another thing to live in a neighborhood, but it's really just a section of town. But a community, gosh, that's really something special. I live in a community right now. It's one of the reasons why I live where I live and still have a long commute But I live in a place where people get together all the time. I see neighbors on a regular basis. We have a thing called Sunday Night Supper Club, and every other Sunday we essentially do a potluck at somebody else's house.

Love that.

And this is like professional potluck. I mean, these people know what they're doing. At 6:01 PM, your doorbell rings, 30 people come in, set up their stuff, and at 8:30, because it's Sunday night and everybody's got to work on Monday, At 8:30 PM everybody picks up their stuff, heads out the door, and we're off, right.

Thanks.

But that's a community, we get together on a regular basis. So that's what we try to create with companies and its customers and its partners. It's a place where we can all get together, where we can share ideas, we can argue, we can help each other, we can disagree on things but still stay friends, we can attack the idea instead of the person. That's really what community is.

I love that. I just moved into a place with a community too, and I've been— it's the first time, and I've been raving about it and just been shocked. I love that offline example. So kind of moving into this, jumping into, you know, in some ways the ROI challenge, right? Because at the end of the day, we do need to demonstrate ROI. So Alan Berkson of Freshdesk, one of our Shareology sponsors— love Alan. How do you measure success for your communities?

In the early days, you measure it by things like how many visits, how engaged are people, how many questions are answered, how fast are they answered. Many early communities are tech support kind of questions or tech support kind of communities or product support questions— communities, sorry. So then the idea is, well, Did we do some cost avoidance, did we do some call avoidance? An easy thing back in the day was, okay, it costs us about $100 per question to answer a tech support question at a high-tech company. You've got to pay for the person and their salary and their desk and the building they sit in and their computer and the tech support and all that. It's $100 a question. Okay, how many questions were answered by the community instead of by somebody we had to hire? That's an easy way to do some ROI. The other is, I think we're not there yet in understanding the amount of influence that a community would have on the next purchase decision or on loyalty. Or you could look at things like, what does it cost me to acquire a new customer versus to retain, upsell, cross-sell an existing customer because their loyalty is higher and their connectedness is higher. So those are the kinds of things that you look for in a community.

I love that. Yeah, that makes absolute sense. I have a great question that just popped up, but I want to push it to the front because we want to make sure to talk about the future of digital. It's Gladys with a W, so shout out for an epic name there. Yes. She wants to know, what is the future of digital beyond communities, IoT, IO Every T says, can it be digital humanity?

It could be digital humanity. I think the idea is number one, automate repetitive tasks. We mentioned that earlier. Then there's connect everything to everything else, even if it seems stupid. Like, why is my refrigerator connected to my pantry? I don't know. That doesn't seem right. Or connected to my car. What does that have to do with it? Well, we might come up with something later. Then there's going to be self-learning and continuously improving networks. So I think there's apps and services, essentially smart machines. Machines are going to get smarter and smarter and are going to be able to anticipate our needs and requirements. I think we're going to move beyond algorithms, which people will invent, to more rule-based, like— Absolutely. Birds that fly in formation only have 3 rules, right. It's move forward, it's stay as close to the bird to your left and right, but don't crash into them. That's essentially what makes birds fly in flocks and not crash into each other and just have chaos. Well, those 3 rules, we could make up some rules and have the machine figure out the algorithm that helps to keep improving that.

Hmm.

I think there will be entire organizations that become more digitized or digital. I think Customers are going to get a lot more empowered over time. Go back to that whole Cluetrain thing, that thread that I was on earlier. I think customers are going to be a lot more empowered and there's going to be a balance of power. And I think this personalization and audience of one is going to also happen. So I think those are some of the things that are coming. Yeah. I think IoT or IOE is going to be at the center of it because all sorts of people, processes, data, and things are going to be connected to each other. And this whole Internet of Everything is going to move us all forward. It's going to be a really interesting future.

Yeah, absolutely, I love that.

Just throwing this out there, JS Gilbert, who's a good friend of H2H Chat, he said, I'm glad the machines are getting smarter and smarter because I'm getting dumber and dumber.

Well, you know, think of what I used to My grandfather, when he was alive, he would still recite poems that he memorized back in the day. We don't have to memorize stuff anymore. We have Google or Bing or whatever, you know, DuckDuckGo or whatever your favorite search engine is. We've got repository where the facts can live. We then need to do the reasoning, the important stuff. So in some ways we can get dumber, like I don't remember anybody's phone number. My wife's, yes, I remember her phone number, but other than that, there's nobody's phone number that I can remember. It's all in my device, I don't really need to know that, so I have removed that out of my memory banks. I have cleared that space for something more important like, I don't know, Angry Birds or Facebook or something ridiculous, but I don't have to know all that stuff.

I told my wife, if I ever end up in jail, chances are I won't be able to contact you.

Yes. I still remember my phone number as a kid. I bet everybody does. I still remember my phone number as a kid because I had to memorize it, but all these other phone numbers and other facts and stuff, I don't really have to know it. I can look it up.

Yeah.

No, I have the same exact thing. I know my husband's phone number, but I don't know my parents'. I tweet at my parents, right? I text, you know, it's all automated.

My parents just heard that if they're watching.

Yeah, there you go. I tweet at them. But yeah, and that's always the devastating thing, right, when you lose your phone. You see the Facebook messages or Twitter messages that say, please send me my number. It's a total crack-up.

That was meant to be— I didn't know that sound would do that. I meant to do this.

That was like the doom of the future, right? Robots are taking over the world. This is not good, we're going to be piles of sludge. I have a great question I want to jump to, kind of we may end up ending on this as well. So Donna Peeps tweeted and said, how do you think about the customer amidst all of the automation, and where does employee engagement and experience fit in? That's a big question, right?

Yeah, that is. But I think, well, let's take the first part. One is customer. The good news is the customer is moving to the center, so that's really good. I think I've heard back in the early days we talked about UI, we even talked about HCI. Does anybody remember that 3-letter acronym, which is Human Computer Interface, I think is what the 3 letters stand for, which was how do people engage with machines. That was back in the early days, Sun Microsystems, I remember that being a topic. Then it turned into UX, so it wasn't UI anymore or design, it was UX, user experience. That's much broader than design or UI and just that interface of a person and a human and a machine. And now we're really talking about customer experience. Yeah, customer experience is the new phrase, right, it's CX, it's not UX. So I think good news is The customer is moving to the center of all this. Now we're all trying to attract customers, so those of us who do a better job of it are going to be the winners. I think customer experience is going to be the new differentiator as we go forward. So that's one piece of good news is customer doesn't get lost in all this in digitization or digital. The customer is the reason for it. We're trying to do a better job to help that customer be successful. Through content, tools, access, power, the power to publish, all that stuff. Gosh, we didn't even talk about the difference between sort of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, where the power kind of shifted from big companies publishing out into the world to really let's now connect customers and partners and employees together so that we can together solve the customer's problem, because that's what we're all here for in the first place. So customer experience is really important. Then we talk about employee engagement. I think that was the next part of this. Yeah. How do we engage employees and all that? Well, the good news is employees can now engage with customers directly through social media like they never could before, or through community. That's another aspect of social media. They just happen to be hosted. So back in the day, unless you were a sales rep or a service engineer, you never saw a customer, you never talked to a customer, you never understood a customer. Nowadays we all get to engage and interact directly with customers because we have social media. So I get to talk to customers all the time on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, in our online communities at communities.cisco.com. I can engage with them by publishing a blog at blogs.cisco.com. and they comment and ask questions. I share things in LinkedIn groups, all that stuff. So all of us get to engage directly with customers. We also get to engage directly with each other so that we can sort of behind the scenes say, okay, what are we going to do, how can we do a better job, how are we going to help our partner, how are we going to help our customers to be more successful. So I think employee engagement with each other for the purpose of driving business, driving better customer relationships, etc., is all good news, and the fact that customer experience is really the centerpiece of topics and the trends, the memes that are going on right now, I think that's all good news for that question.

I love that. Yeah, yeah, so thank you, Mark, so much, and I have to say this was just the tip of the iceberg of the questions. So I know you're super busy, I know your team is there, but Diving into this, we have some amazing conversations and some people to whom I think you're their new hero. So look for an upswing in your Twitter followers from the H2H chat community.

I will commit, I may not get it all done today or maybe even tomorrow because I'm sure there's lots of questions that we never got to, but I will commit to engage on Twitter and I will look for the H2H chat with the hashtag so that I know what we're looking for. And I'll look for the questions that are relevant to our discussion today and go back and answer as many as I can. I bet other members of the Cisco family, social media team and others will dive in as well. I really thank you both, Suzy and Bryan, for having me, and thank you to the audience for great participation.

And Mark, to credit your social team, you have had tweets from just about every social handle at Cisco coming in.

Oh good.

Tweet chat. That shows the support system you have there. I am so impressed.

Yeah, they're awesome. Really, really good. They set the bar for social media.

Love it. Just real quickly, Mark, I wanted to thank you again for showing up. Also, for everyone out there who has listened to this, it's a special edition of HCA Chat. This is part of the Shareology series. Mark is a big supporter, and so is his team, of Shareology, the book. They've had me there at Cisco to speak and also are a partner with Shareology on the community website. Thank you very, very much, Mark. I really appreciate your support. It means a lot to me, and I really appreciate that.

Thank you. Happy to do it. We believe in what you do.

Thank you. To the other sponsors in support of this series, I want to just give a quick shout out to New Star MasterCard, again Cisco, IBM, Little Bird, HootSuite, Freshdesk, Speakeasy, Influitive, who's powering the community, Mutual Mind, and Cox Communications. So thank you to everyone who's helping to partner on the Shareology series. The book comes out on July If you are not in the Shareology community, please, please, please ping me and I will get you into the community. You can also check it out on shareologybook.com and it's also live on Amazon so you can just go look up the book and purchase it there and I would appreciate that. Otherwise, we will see you this upcoming Monday again at noon. We have a great series, this time with New Star. And it's going to be a panel of people, it'll be a lot of fun, and we'll have a good time. So check back in next Monday, and Mark, thank you once again, I really appreciate it. You have just one more human to break the record. Is there any parting words you wanted to share with everyone?

Well, I wanted to ask people to look for your book, Human to Human, the first one. As you're on your way to buy Shareology, preorder it on Amazon or some other place. Join the Shareology community and do drive more humanity back into social media. Show a personality for your company, for your brand. Please do engage with us. I'm happy to engage too. So thank you to all of the humans who joined us today for our H2H chat. Thank you.

Awesome, and one more for, for a bonus score. So thanks for breaking the record, and we'll see you guys all again next Monday on HHA Chat. Thanks once again, Mark and Suzie. Hat tip to you as well.

It's been great.

Bye all.

Bye guys.