Employees Online…Brand Ambassadors Or Brand Assassins?

I’ve just been checking out Jason Anthoine’s blog and came across this fantastic presentation from Fleishman Hillard about how social media is impacting employee engagement.  According to research, internal social adoption is heating up with nearly 80% of internal communicators using social tools to engage employees and boost productivity.

I particularly liked Trend 7 – “Employees As Digital Ambassadors”.  If every employee in your company were engaged enough to be evangelists of your company, the brand impact could be huge.  Likewise, if your employees are out there chatting negatively about your company, the brand impact could be huge.   Remember the Domino’s Pizza video that employees posted on YouTube?   The brand was damaged instantly.

Either way, social networking has knocked down barriers.  Conversations are transparent, real-time and permanently recorded online!  Employee conversations can, and most probably will, impact your talent recruitment and retention strategies.  People talk to people.  They listen to their peers.  The seek to reassure their impressions.  So what can you do to support Trend 7 in your business?

1. Create social media guidelines for your employees (some good examples here)
2. Communicate your social channels to your employees – encourage them to connect to those channels!
3. Train people on how/when to use social media in their jobs
4. Look at adopting social tools internally for collaboration and sharing (e.g. JiveSBS, Yammer)

Most of all…embrace social media as part of the culture, don’t ignore it!  The Fleishman presentation summarises how social media can engage employees into 7 key trends:

• Mobile Tools – Podcasts, Apps, SMS feeds – all available on device
• Townhall 2.0 – Interactive live chat, question blogs, live file sharing, video broadcast
• Social Learning – Rank and rate training modules, seek input for new training ideas
• Social Portals – foster collaboration across internal teams
• Digitizing the front line – internal social media tools e.g. leadership blogs can help leaders connect closer to employees
• Crowdsourced innovation – encourage knowledge sharing across the borders
• Employees as digital ambassadors – enabling your employees to evangelise on the companies behalf