Cisco Live continues to be one of the leading technical conferences in the U.S. The highly anticipated and well-attended annual event is where technology professionals gather to share innovative ideas and transformations taking place in our digital world.
At Cisco Live 2016 in Las Vegas, a record of more than 28,000 people attended in person, along with a massive virtual audience. Decca’s Cisco Support Team provided assistance for 600 PowerPoint presentations before the show in less than a month, and 760 presentations onsite. This was an increase of 236 decks from the prior year, and accounted for approximately 75,000 slides.
Five years ago, when Cisco recognized the need for greater visual and technical consistency during the annual conference, Decca came up with the solution of a Decca Support Team. Each year, Decca designed a PowerPoint template that met the needs of conference organizers and followed the Cisco brand guidelines. The next step was to make sure that presenters could get their ideas and visuals across effectively. Thus the review process
was born.
The Decca team is onsite during the conference, reviewing final presentations and providing last-minute assistance to any speakers who need it. To handle this volume of work quickly without impacting speaker schedules, Decca developed a tracking tool to track daily workflow and make sign-in easier for speakers. The tool featured a walk up sign-in, pre-populated with session IDs and speaker names, so speakers could sign in quickly and get on the wait list or make appointments during busy times. A recently added function in 2016 sent speakers text reminders of their appointment time. They could respond if they were unable to make their appointment, and even reschedule.
As the next step in achieving presentation excellence, Decca President Sheila Hatch hosted a WebEx conference for approximately 350 Cisco Live speakers. The session included best practices in creating presentations, and examples of compelling visuals that are concise, and consistent with Cisco corporate brand initiatives. Decca also provided materials to help speakers make high quality presentations. The materials included an At-a-Glance PowerPoint tips and tricks, a presenter’s checklist, and various video tutorials for both PC and Mac users to assist in specific PowerPoint tasks.
Half a million fans on Facebook is a big deal. So when Cisco decided to capitalize on this monumental milestone, they asked for our help. Decca Design and Learning@Cisco have been teaming up since 2009.
In that time, Learning@Cisco’s Facebook fan base has skyrocketed from 4,000 fans to well beyond 500,000 (and counting). That’s an annual growth rate of roughly 265%.
To show its appreciation to Facebook fans, Learning@Cisco and Decca launched “Fan Appreciation Week.” The week-long promotional event was filled with daily contests and terrific prizes. Showing gratitude wasn’t Cisco’s only goal. The group aimed to drive traffic to the Cisco Learning Network Store and position it as the premiere location for Cisco Certifications self-study materials and Cisco product training. A task Decca is always up for.
There were a lot of moving parts to this complex promotion. Decca worked alongside the Learning@Cisco team to manage them all without a hitch. The social media and email campaigns attracted new daily fans. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts kept the fans engaged throughout the week. Decca owned every aspect of the event from launching the pre-contest marketing, to contacting contest winners to claim their prizes.
The results of this promotion were impressive:
Fan Appreciation Week turned into a smashing success. The campaign was named a finalist in PR News’ Social Media Icon Awards category of Facebook/Contests/Games. On the heels of this successful campaign, Decca and Learning@Cisco continue their partnership, broadcasting new announcements, promoting special offers, and building stronger fan relationships. We could point to several reasons for our successful teamwork but, ultimately, it comes down to effective collaboration.