Archive for Brand advocates
The CEO as Chief Communication Champion
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The buck stops with the CEO when it comes to employee engagement. This is especially true when it comes to trust and believability. For internal communications to be meaningful, it is important for the CEO and his executive team to lead by example: “Don’t just do as I say, do as I behave.” Most employees are craving leadership – they want champions they can trust to lead them in new directions.
The CEO must also be the CCC – Chief Communication Champion of the company. As I’ve written before, she needs to ensure that other executives are truly leading the development of a Culture of Communication – meaning that all corporate communications are reliable, truthful, timely and contain the full story. The CEO should establish a system of rewards and incentives to instill new behaviors. A healthy two-way communication will lead to better performance. For employees to be truly engaged with the company and each other, they need to know that:
CEO Leadership is Key to Employee Engagement
• The CEO is the visible leader of corporate communication
• Executive behavior in support of positive communication is rewarded
• Employees are rewarded fairly
• The company values employees and actively engages them as brand advocates for the company in customer interactions and on social media networks
During bad times – such as layoffs, a hostile takeover, a product recall – those CEOs who are truly CCCs will have earned the trust and commitment of employees to work through any crisis.
Employee Social Media Communities Not Top Priority for Companies
Posted by: | CommentsOrganizations are not tapping social media’s full potential, according to a Deloitte study I just came across. It was released at the end of 2009 so I don’t expect that much has changed since then.
Entitled “2009 Tribalization of Business Study,” the survey measured the responses of over 400 companies, including Fortune 100 organizations, that have created and maintain online communities today. The communities ranged from fewer than 100 members to more than one million members.
Marketing continues to be the primary driver of online communities, according to the study, with the following business objectives. See if you can guess what’s missing.
- Increase word-of-mouth (38 percent)
- Increase customer loyalty (34 percent)
- Increase brand awareness (30 percent)
- Improve idea generation (29 percent)
- Improve the quality of customer support (23 percent)
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Employees can be your best brand ambassadors
EMPLOYEES. That’s what missing in this study, conducted in conjunction with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research. The study reports that while companies are using communities to engage with customers, partners and employees, only 20% of respondents have set up formal “ambassador” programs, and these give outsiders preferential treatment in return for being more active in the community.” Any rewards for employees being active social media ambassadors? I discussed this last month in my blog “Make More Money Through Employee Engagement”.
Companies are missing a big bet if they don’t engage their own employees as brand advocates for the company. They are the ones “touching” customers every day and should be rewarded accordingly. Give employees a chance to become more active in social networks, and they will boost the metrics most important to their companies – the ones that ring the cash register.
How IBM Promotes Employee Engagement with Social Media
Posted by: | CommentsI am constantly impressed with IBM and its open attitude towards its employees’ use of social media. The company has on its website, for all to see, its “IBM Social Computing Guidelines”. 
I wrote about this on the Blogger’s Bulletin, a LinkedIn subgroup. With the start of 2010, other companies, who are floundering with their social media policies, would do well to check out IBM’s guidelines. One of many lines in the guidelines that intrigued me: “IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators.” What a profound statement. Gone are the days when a company can tightly control its message through advertising and printed materials. IBM has recognized that thousands of its employees, within certain guidelines, are the touch points for communications with customers, prospects and the general public.
Empowering employees to be brand advocates for the company takes courage and a great deal of trust. From the guidelines, “In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet – at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate.”
IBM says that when it wishes to communicate publicly as a company it has a well-established means to do so – through employee blogs and other forms of online discourse. Isn’t this refreshing? That a company as huge as IBM is empowering and leveraging its employees to enhance its brand? There are other companies, too, like Zappos and Comcast that understand the value of employee involvement in social media. But there are too few companies who understand the power of the Internet. And some companies are still muzzling their employees – but it’s too late. Their employees are already out there.
Jon Iwata, SVP, Marketing & Communications, spells out IBM’s social media policy in this video. Jon Iwata – Social Media as an Internal Tool. Well worth watching.
Companies Need to Trust Their Employees as Brand Advocates
Posted by: | CommentsSmart companies are waking up to the idea of their employees being their most important brand advocates. As I’ve written before, employees are still largely underutilized in this role. When there isn’t a positive culture of communication within a company, management doesn’t trust employees with carrying their message to the outside world through new social media tools like blogging and Twittering.
Trust is the operative word.
In a video on social networking at IBM Jon Iwata, SVP, Marketing & Communications, points out the company can’t control what employees say. This scares the heck out of CEOs who don’t trust their employees to do the right thing. But as Iwata points out, the same policies that apply to an employee who might give away company secrets in a bar apply to the employee who is posting a tweet. IBM isn’t afraid of social media because, as Iwata says at the conclusion of the video, “employees can be trusted.”
Probably the most notable example of a wide-open culture with employees talking directly to their customers is Zappos. As those devoted to Twitter know, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is a committed Twitterer. Type in twitter.zappos.com and you can also read the tweets of all 431 Zappos’ employees on Twitter. Just think of the good will being sown among the many customers and potential customers who are following Tony Hsieh (735,000+) and all those employee tweets.
Yet, surveys show that most companies are still in the old command and control mode. Management hasn’t begun to tap into the power of employees as advocates of the company on social media networks. When will they wise up?
