Be honest. At some point, you've most likely sent the following message in an email to your colleagues or employees:

"We've got a great new product/solution/service coming out next week and it would be great if you could share this news with your social networks. Included below is the approved tweet/Facebook/LinkedIn message for you to distribute. Don't forget to use our hashtag: #spam!"

Now, be even more honest. You didn't track to see how many of your employees actually shared your canned message. Most likely, it wasn't a significant amount, nor was it effective in achieving your objective. Why, you ask?

Because it's spam, inauthentic, and probably not the way your employees want to represent themselves.

It's hard to blame any brand for this approach. Controlling the message has always been such a crucial component to the business. Through controlled messages, the brand can influence perception and establish consistency. It's natural to carry over this behavior into the growing conversation occurring within social media. However, it is not natural for employees to speak like marketers and many of them - and people in their networks - know the difference.

Consequences of Controlling Brand Messages in Social Media

While the occasional request to assist with brand marketing efforts is certainly acceptable, adopting a micromanagement approach to social media has two very real side effects:

• The Robot Effect: Even if you are able to empower your employees to participate in social media channels, dictating how they share information from the organization results in the copy and pasting of carefully crafted messages flooding social streams. The message is out there, but if anyone responds, most likely your employees don't know the appropriate way to engage. You've only trained them to blast the message out without thinking about what happens next. Essentially, this behavior is the equivalent of creating hundreds of Twitter accounts and sending the same message. There's a bot for that.

• The Pavlovian Effect: Employees will become accustomed to receiving guided instructions on what, when and how to deliver messages via social media. This conditioning stifles creativity and proactive communication and encourages reactive and structured signals before employees participate. Before you know it, employees are confused about what they can or cannot say and may opt out of participating altogether.

Training Employees to Serve as Brand Ambassadors

Preventing the creation of a micromanaged environment starts with training. While training your employees to utilize social tools is important, true success goes beyond simple 101, "How To" and group training sessions. This is enough to get them started, but if everyone watches the same Twitter 101 video and is set loose in the Twitterverse, odds are they will all behave in the exact same way the video told them to. Stopping the training process here is a sure fire way to regress into The Robot Effect.

It should come as no surprise that many organizations empower their customer service employees to participate in social media. They are trained to have a conversation, to identify needs, solve problems, and do whatever possible to delight the customer. These abilities translate well in the social media ecosystem and if done correctly establish the brand as best in class. Zappos, Best Buy and Disney have cultivated brands that are frequently highlighted as putting the customer first. Not only do these brands consistently train their employees on how to participate in social media, but they also create a culture that supports it and hire people who believe in the mission. It's all part of the experience.

This mission does not have to stop with the customer service employee. Every employee can play a role in the brand experience and customized training that speaks to them as individuals, as well as their job function, can ensure the same success. Training employees to understand the situation, conversation, resources available to them and the customer, and desired outcomes provides them with the autonomy to participate in social media without the internal boundaries.

When employees understand how to engage based on their individual abilities and focus on the relationship rather than just the message, the opportunities for evangelism with personality are limitless. The social media world moves faster than many are used to and one unhappy customer can spark a social frenzy that can be tough to recover from. Training your entire employee base, not just a select few, increases the likelihood that an employee, from any discipline, will engage in a human, personable way and leave prospective or current customers with a lasting positive brand impression.

If they are asking for your help online, don't make them wait for an email that says, "Here's a link to our website that can help solve your problem." Because that is a #relationshipfail.

Originally posted on commpro.Biz http://blog.commpro.biz/marketinghq/?p=279