Web Business Woman

By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna’s Promo Talk

How would you use Cisco TelePresence to make a difference in your business or organization? The folks at Cisco Systems want to know and are inviting business people from around the world to send them a video explaining why and how they would like to use Cisco TelePresence. This new contest offers winners in two categories, Productivity and Shaping the Future, a chance to win $3,000 each and 5 hours of Cisco TelePresence.

Erica Schroeder, the director of marketing for Cisco TelePresence, appears in a video on the “Why I Want Cisco TelePresence” Video Contest website in which she introduces the contest and provides some suggestions on how to participate. Erica says “Please tell us your stories…they can be serious, they can be funny, they can even be silly, but they need to follow the rules”. Erica also invites visitors to view some of the videos already submitted and vote on their favorites.

Some suggestions on how Cisco TelePresence could help a business include reducing travel and related expenses and encouraging decisions to be made faster. It could also increase intimacy with customers and suppliers, bring internal teams together faster and more effectively and bridge time and space challenges to increase productivity. 

There are also suggestions on how Cisco TelePresence could possibly make the future better. For example, by reducing travel Cisco TelePresence could improve your “green” footprint. It can also bring you closer to friends and relatives, possibly deliver healthcare to remote locations or bring you face-to-face with your favorite sports figure or celebrity.

Since I normally cover many promotional contests and sweepstakes that
are targeted to consumers, I thought I’d feature this particular
contest because it’s a great example of how a business can use
interactive promotion, including user-generated content contests, to
promote their products to a B2B market.

The contest will be accepting videos and votes up till September 8th. At that time the judges will award the prize in each category based on the originality and relevance to the theme as outlined in the official rules. They will then give a score to each video based on the number of times it was viewed and the rating it received from voters. They will also select a runner-up winner for both categories who will each be awarded $1,000.

As of today I see a total of only 13 videos that have been submitted. Most of them have been submitted from men, so come on ladies lets get some presence here! Sherry Chapman from Westinghouse Digital does have an advantage since she’s the first video submitted. The second is from a husband and wife team who hope that by using Cisco TelePresence Ann, the wife, wouldn’t have to travel as much to meet with customers and would then be able to spend more time with her husband, Jack!

So get out your digital video cameras or get in front of your webcam
and give Cisco some of your ideas. Hey what do you have to lose? The
site makes it easy to enter and upload your video.

Thanks to the Cisco marketing team for being creative and good luck to all the entrants.

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