Empower Your Employees: Create brand evangelists!

Your friends are doing it. Your competitors are doing it. Are you empowering your employees to engage in social media forums on your behalf?

Today, the power of the Internet extends far beyond research, data collection, and news feeds. Companies can engage clients in healthy dialog, create brand evangelists and empower employees to promote your company to audiences previously inaccessible.

Why should a company engage in online brand marketing?

• Your employees are already online. Whether they are proactively engaged in conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, or their bio is on your website, your employees are already online. By directing them and giving them tools to promote your company, you put them in a position to become a brand evangelist.
• Monitoring: You can’t be everywhere at once. Empowering your team to be on the look out for conversations and opportunities related to your industry or company gives you more eyes and ears “on the street” so to speak. You can assess: How are you known to the market today? (What is your client’s expectation of your product/category/ company?)
• Feedback: Most social networking platforms offer polling, question & answer tools and discussion forums. Using these tools to query your audiences can give you powerful insight and opportunity! Oftentimes our clients are looking for a forum to sing our praises or offer feedback. You can provide this opportunity by being active in social networking settings where the conversation takes a collaborative approach.
• Contacts & connections. Do you know where your next customer or client will come from? They may be half way around the world right now looking for you. Being active online gives you exposure and reach in ways you never could imagine before the Internet. Consistent, effective and compelling social media strategies attract audiences who are uniquely interested in your company, product or offer. As companies think more globally about their offers and clients, social media can work along side traditional marketing to increase awareness and reach.
• Public relations. The train has left the station… your employees are chatting online. Empowering employees, partners, vendors and other stakeholders to be informed brand ambassadors for your company increases your exposure and credibility, if done with consistency and integrity.
• Customer/client engagement. I recently brought a boutique firm onto the social media platform. They did not believe brand support in the market would make help their retail efforts, but they gave it a try. Within weeks, customers began sharing testimonials about how their product had improved their life, new ways they had used the product, and the outstanding customer service the company offered. Their customers were craving such an outlet and loyalty for their brand skyrocketed!
• It’s relatively inexpensive. Developing a social media brand protocol to help employees have positive, effective and appropriate online dialogue enables them to use tools readily available (for free) online. When your social media program is robust and effective, you may have to increase your customer service staff to handle increased orders coming in… and your PR team may work overtime to funnel all the positive comments and testimonials you receive, but this a small investment compared to the good will and brand exposure you gain!
• Positive ROI. Whether you’re measuring ‘return on investment’ or ‘return on impressions,’ social media offers numerous touch points to build awareness, share information and promote your company. Is it time consuming? Sure is! But the cost/benefit of honest, transparent and compelling engagement with customers online proves more effective for many companies than traditional marketing vehicles, especially if done with brand intention and consistency.
• Your competitors are doing it. Your competition is courting your clients and prospects right under your nose. They are providing information, resources, collaboration tools and attractive incentives in a very public way. Can you afford not to keep an eye on your competition? Are you secure in your client relationships such that you can be absent from the seductive dance your competitors are engaged in with them?
• It can be fun! Aside from the interaction, information sharing, social communities and fun languages (i.e. “tweeting,”), your employees will benefit from increased morale and enthusiasm for the brand. Soliciting feedback, running contests, polls, incentives and creating unique opportunities for clients, can create fun for employees!

Set protocol to ensure consistency, relevancy and protection of your brand
Before you consider the online space to prospect, engage and reward clients, create a social media protocol for employees to follow. Your brand will set the parameters, metrics and guidelines for the protocol, which should be adopted by all employees venturing online as representatives of the company. Your brand will articulate: what your company promises to it’s clients in terms of functional and emotional benefits? What can your stakeholders expect to feel in a relationship with your company/product/service/staff?

Your online social media protocol should include:

• Do’s and don’ts for posting online as a representative of the company
• Guidelines for advice-giving (Note: financial services, legal and medical communities are strictly monitored for advice-giving. Always defer to industry standards in these fields.)
• Who can post and where
• Strategy for building engagement with target audiences
• How employees can positively reflect company values through their personal social networking (i.e. on Facebook)
• Landmines to avoid (risk mitigation)
• Protocol for handling conflict or negative feedback online
• Processes for monitoring and assessing competitors online
• Strategy for targeting new and existing client bases (and target markets)

Each company protocol will have unique items to be addressed. For instance, in helping a large professional services firm craft a protocol, we added a crisis communication plan for online reputation management of senior executives. For a local retail operation, we included a set of guidelines for running in-store promotions and contests.

Once you have trained and briefed your employees on brand ambassadorship on the Internet, and have set metrics to measure success, enjoy the benefits of building a relevant, compelling and unique company brand online!