Archive for Branding
6 Steps to Empower Your Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Posted by: | CommentsEmployees are actively engaging on social networks such as twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, tumblr, Pinterest and others that seem to pop up every day. With the encouragement and trust of senior management, employees can become your company’s most important and loyal brand ambassadors.
Engage Your Employees
Below is a presentation (slightly revised) that I presented at a recent HR.com webinar on Social Media and Employee Communications. My presentation entitled “Empowering Employees as Brand Ambassadors” included:
- The steps your company can take to develop a corps of brand advocates – from identifying ambassadors, training them, developing a pilot program, and then launching your advocates on social media.
- How companies like IBM, Zappos, and Comcast are engaging their employees to burnish their brands and sell more products and services.
- How to develop a social media policy that works for your company.
If you would like a larger view, you can see the presentation on SlideShare.
How Do You Define a Leadership Brand?
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That was the question that Bea Fields, a top leadership coach, asked 14 business leaders. I’m flattered that she included me in that group.
There were a variety of answers, as you might expect. She printed them, including mine, in her post Gaining Loyal Customer By Building a Strong Leadership Brand.
Bea’s Definition
Bea’s summarized own take on the question as follows, “When you build a brand based on true, enduring leadership, each person in the company not only speaks about the brand and the promises you make to your customers in your marketing strategies… each person in your company truly lives those promises every day in both their personal and professional lives…”
What is Your Definition?
Both personal and company branding can be confounding to define. How do you define your leadership brand? Don’t be shy. Please leave a comment below.
A Couple of Neat Search Tips Using Google+
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This isn’t going to be an in-depth discussion about Google+. I’ll leave that to the experts. In fact, before my search tips, let me point you to two sources that provide updates on all that’s new on Google+.
HubSpot has published a comprehensive free e-book How to Use Google+ for Business. Just click on the title and you will be able to download the PDF from the home page.
The other is also a lengthy tutorial (slightly more technical) but well worth reading on Blind Five Year Old by AJ Kohn.
My Tips
These are predicated on your being a member of Google+. My good friend Richard Newman at the Newman Group pointed out this new feature when you conduct a search on Google. Read More→
Bloomingdale’s is Writing a New Script for Winning Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction
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Richard J. Mast
A few weeks ago I was in Bloomingdale’s when a friendly young store employee approached me to ask if he could help. I wasn’t obviously shopping at the moment so I asked him who he was and learned he was Bloomingdale’s Director of Customer Loyalty, a new position in New York. This led to the following personal interview about the store’s robust customer loyalty program with Richard J. Mast, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street in Manhattan. Mr. Mast discusses how understanding and responding to customer needs engenders customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Why did Bloomingdale’s create the Director of Customer Loyalty position? Is it part of a corporate branding program?
If you’re in the retail business you know that satisfied customers will continue to shop with you. So it’s our responsibility to enhance the customer experience. We’ve had employees assigned full-time to customer loyalty for several years. There are four Managers of Customer Loyalty in the Manhattan store but we decided to strengthen the structure by appointing a Director of Customer Loyalty with the other MCL’s reporting to him.
What are the responsibilities of this position and who does the Director report to?
The role of the Director of Customer Loyalty is to interface with the senior executives in charge of ready-to-wear, Men’s Young World, the Home Store, Fine Jewelry and other departments. They tell the Director what they need and what customers want, and then these needs are translated to the MCLs assigned to these departments who then implement the actions to be taken. Read More→
