Over the last year or two there has been a ton of online chatter about identifying and leveraging your “organizational influencers” — there are even companies building automated monitoring systems to rank and identify important bloggers, followers and customers.
That’s all great… But don’t overlook what might amount to your biggest and most important group of online influencers (hint: it’s the people you pay hard cash to every week) — your employees!
Social media represents a powerful, simple, and effective opportunity to “light up” your employees’ personal brands, leverage their enthusiasm for your company, and capitalize on all of their past business relationships and successes.
Here are some ideas to turn your employees into effective online influencers:
Expectations– Engaging employees must start with a comprehensive social media strategy and a supporting policy. It’s unfair to turn people loose without defining expectations and guidelines. Be realistic. Create a program that honestly reflects your company’s cultural tolerance for employee involvement.
Education — Once you create a program, carefully and thoroughly teach people about it. For your organization to be successful in this new arena you must have a sustainable and scalable system for implementation, coaching, and best practices.
Deputize — Your social media strategy should be aligned with your overall business objectives. Find enthusiastic employees in the organization who really understand these goals, have a passion for the social web and use them to form a social media advisory committee.
Organize – If you are enlisting employees to represent your precious brand, consider creating a standard protocol for LinkedIn profile formats, consistent representation of company products, and other measures to create a uniform corporate look, feel and attitude without impinging on personal creativity. Create a plan to keep these employees in the loop on company information that can help them. This will do wonders for getting the word out about your company and will drive SEO for your company website.
Cooperative selling– Here is a big opportunity most companies completely miss. Why not tap into employee LinkedIn networks (and their network’s networks) to identify potential sales leads. Research shows these connections have a VERY high likelihood of actually being your target audience and employees are usually more than happy to help.
What other ideas do you have to turn your employees into social web influencers?
