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

Companies Need to Trust Their Employees as Brand Advocates

June 12, 2009

Smart 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. 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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