7 Steps to Making Your Employees Brand Ambassadors

August 19, 2009

Your employees can be your best brand ambassadors.  What does that mean?  It means you can mobilize an army of employees dedicated to communicating your company’s key messages and building your brand reputation online.  First, it is essential to establish a positive two-way dialogue with employees so they feel involved in the process of promoting the company.  They need to know management is listening to them and that they are important to the company’s success.  The key is trust – companies can’t control what employees say but if you have good relations with employees you can trust they will represent the company well.  Zappos, Intel, Comcast, IBM, Diamond Technologies and a host of other companies have done it.  So can you. Read more

The CEO as the Chief Communication Champion

April 8, 2009

The shadow of a leader – meaning the impact an executive has on his or her employees – is always bigger than you think.  This is especially true when it comes to trust and believability in internal communications.  For internal communications to be meaningful, it is important for executives to lead by example: “Don’t just do as I say, do as I behave.”  In addition, employees in most companies are craving leadership – they want champions they can trust to lead them in new directions. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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