Adding to my argument in last week’s post 6 Steps to Empower Your Employees as Brand Ambassadors, David Pogue, technology columnist for The New York Times, explains the importance of allowing your employees access to social media while at work.

He is interviewed in this Ragan.com video entitled “Half of U.S. businesses block social media. What’s the point?”

Employees 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.

Slowly, but surely, more companies are seeing the wisdom of enlisting their employees as brand ambassadors. I’ve written about this several times, including the post 7 Steps to Making Your Employees Brand Ambassadors.

Employees are eager to help because if their company succeeds and grows, they will too.  Employees who are actively engaged on social media as brand advocates help to burnish the company’s brand, they are motivated by being asked to take on the assignment, and customers receive better service.

CommProz.biz has identified 10 companies with outstanding brand ambassador programs. What companies would you add to their list?

Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang via CrunchBase

More employees of small companies are advocating for their companies on social networks than their much larger competitors.

That’s what the Altimeter Group found in its recent survey of 140 companies. By ratio, smaller companies in the 1-5k range had one 1 out of 195 employees publishing compared to 1 out of 356 in companies with 100k or more employees (see graph below).

More flexibility, less red tape

More flexibility, less red tape, and evolving cultures may be among the reasons.

As I wrote in a post 7 Steps to Making Your Employees Brand Ambassadors, the internet allows companies to empower their employees to promote the company and its products. Small companies can’t compete with the monster advertising and social media budgets of their biggest competitors. But small companies can enlist an army of their own employees to go viral with positive comments on social networks.

I’m glad to see this happening and as the company’s web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang, said in announcing the survey results, “Over time, expect all ratios to drop, as a prolific next generation rises into senior roles. We’ll be measuring this periodically, but for now, I would assert that more employees will be using the official accounts over time, as the younger generation learns their way around the business, climbs up the ladder, and is granted ability to publish.”

The director of operations for Gunwel Associates, a boutique tax and bookkeeping firm with only four employees, wrote a post earlier this year, describing how his firm is building customer loyalty and attracting new customers through the activity of its employees on social media. As Christopher Sheehan wrote, “If you’re not connected then you must get connected…becoming active in social media can and will grow your business as well as build client loyalty. We’ve seen it happen.”

So let your employees publish, you big companies out there. Small firms are nipping at your heels!

Altimeter research on employees on social networks

[tweetmeme]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.

Organizations 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)

• 

  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.

I 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.