Yesterday I met with Autumn Truong, Senior Social Media Strategies for Cisco Corporate Communications, and she told me about plans to relaunch the pioneering News@Cisco site.

I’m a big fan of what Cisco has done with its communications. Cisco was the inspiration for my "Every company is a media company" mantra.

More than five years ago, Dan Scheinman was running Cisco corporate communications and also head of Cisco’s M&A strategy, a multi-billion dollar a year war chest for acquisitions.I met with him and was amazed by what I heard, that News@Cisco, the company’s corporate newsroom, was getting more traffic than the top industry trade publications at the time. Cisco had more than 200 RSS feeds, and was employing a cadre of top journalists and editors to help tell its story and that of its customers.

Cisco now planning to extend its News@Cisco site and make it less about Cisco and more about the industry and Silicon Valley. There will be articles on collaboration, social media, virtualization, video, network technology, and culture.

"Cisco is already producing a lot of content from its different divisions. We will be curating a lot of that work but also adding new content by commissioning work from outside of Cisco," said Ms. Truong.

The relaunch is planned for November of this year and it has been in preparation for about five months. It is part of a team project managed by John Earnhardt, Director of Social Media Communications at Cisco. More details to come…