Are you wasting your most valuable asset as you design your social media programs - your employees?
There is a lot of talk about how to "allow" or "encourage" employees to use social media. I'm not talking about the marketing department running the Corporate Facebook page or creating viral YouTube Videos. I'm talking about your sales people, your secretaries, your truck drivers - everyone - going onto sites like Facebook - both outside of and possibly during normal work hours.
While some companies have simply closed the door to allowing their employees to use of social media at all, there seem to be two trains of thought within companies that have begun to roll out social media guidelines to their employees.
The "Please Don't Damage My Brand" Approach: This approach is really focused on making sure that people don't do stupid things that will reflect badly or create legal problems for the company. This includes making racist comments, posting private or company sensitive materials in a public forum, or arguing with a customer or prospect. It also typically includes branding, logo, and even language guidelines. Finally, these approaches usually provide guidelines as to how and when to use Facebook (e.g. don't spend your entire day playing Farmville).
The "Social Can Help Drive Business" Approach: This includes companies that are encouraging employees - even during work hours - to go on to both their company branded as well as their personal pages to talk up the company, the brand, and the solutions they offer. When done correctly, it can be a very powerful thing for a variety of reasons:
- Immediacy and Responsiveness: Let's face it - customers love quick service and answers. While there are marketing tools to monitor the every growing cyberworld that we all live in, marketing can't be everywhere. Well trained employees can help marketing and customer service by providing quick answers to customer questions and even deal with customer complaints. As an example, in these days of telephone trees and voice mail jail, I have found Twitter to be a pretty effective tool to use when I'm interacting with both large and small companies. Posting a question on Twitter can often get me a personal response faster than e-mail or the pain and aggravation of going through nine levels of a company's 1-800 system.
- Sales Via Leveraging Your Employee's Networks: Anyone who has any type of social media account has some degree of a network (possibly very large) with whom they communicate. I learned years ago about the power of LinkedIn as a way to build and network with the right people at companies I'm selling to. As Twitter and Facebook continue to move from consumer toys to business tools, these ever growing networks can also be very valuable to a company's bottom line.
- Increasing Employee Moral And Excitement: Particularly within companies with remote offices, social media can help to tie employees, customers, and prospects together. Even constructive venting can help provide market research and information that marketing organizations are hungry for.
As you do this, beyond a well written social media plan, you may want to ask whether you want to provide or tell your employees to create a separate work account for Facebook or Twitter. This is becoming even more noticeable as you can now take your Facebook and Twitter accounts throughout the internet - via things like Open Graph likes / links or logging onto systems with your Twitter account.
Many employees have already chosen to do this so that they can continue to share pictures with their family via their personal account and run their "business stuff" on their other account. I believe this is an excellent approach. Depending upon implementation, it can reduce employee usage of social media as a toy, and turn it more into an invaluable tool. It can also allow companies valuable insights and reporting beyond their website and Facebook page.
Social media is not going anywhere. Your employees can be your best asset to help drive your message through the social channels.
What do you think? Is your company encouraging or embracing social media for its employees? Or have they closed the door due to compliance concerns?