Petra Neiger | B2B | BtoB Magazine

Petra Neiger

Story posted: June 11, 2012 - 6:01 am EDT

Title: Senior manager-digital and social media

Company: Cisco Systems

Years in current job: 2

Petra Neiger joined Cisco Systems in 2007 as a digital marketing strategist, and two years ago became a member of the corporate social media team, where she now leads the company's social business group.

“In my job, my main focus is what I call enablement—helping drive adoption internally, and educating and enabling our employees to feel comfortable participating in social media,” Neiger said.

She recently helped develop a social ambassador program designed to identify and “activate” Cisco employees who participate in social media and enable them to use various platforms to engage with customers and prospects.

The program debuted in November and now has more than 1,100 social ambassadors in the U.S., China, Europe, India, Latin America and the United Arab Emirates.

Another recent effort that Neiger was involved with was the revamping of Cisco's social media training certificate program, which was completed last month. That was first launched two years ago, with the goal of training Cisco employees in social media best practices.

“It's a complete overhaul,” Neiger said. “We now have multiple programs and tracks, targeting subject matter experts. The reason why the program is so important is that getting subject matter experts engaged [with social media] is critical. Our subject matter experts are from other areas; their main job is not social media.”

A new element of the program is Social Match, an internal community site that pairs subject matter experts in such areas as engineering and product development with social media experts.

“It's like an online dating program but for social,” Neiger said.

The certification program also has gaming elements and is integrated with an education management system.