How You’re Not Leveraging Your Biggest Marketing Asset

As a millennial, I can tell you that we are on social media regardless of whether the company we work for allows it or not. Smart companies will see this as an opportunity to leverage their employees to become company ambassadors.

What many companies don’t understand, is that if they empower their employees to be active on social media, and the employees are helping to spread the message of the company, the company will be effectively multiplying their marketing, recruiting, and support teams.

Employees will be able to speak honestly about what it’s like to work there, and why their company is a great place to work. People are already having discussions about brands online, and allowing employees to take part in those conversations will make the company seem more authentic.

If companies empower their employees to be active on social media, and the employees are helping to spread the message of the company, the company will be effectively multiplying their marketing, recruiting, and support teams.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in CEOs has been declining, but trust in company employees has grown. Knowing this, companies should develop a strategy to educate and empower their employees to be brand advocates on social media.

As a leader, if you create an environment where employees can feel comfortable to be themselves on social media (but are spreading the right message) then you’ll be creating an amazingly powerful employer brand.

The secret to all of this: start with why. Explain the vision, mission and purpose of why your company does what it does, and make sure employees fully understand that.

Gallup asked more than 3,000 randomly selected workers to assess their agreement with the statement “I know what my company stands for and what makes our brand different from our competitors.” Only 41% of employees strongly agreed with this statement.

The following three companies get this right, and have successfully empowered their employees to use social media. The common themes that each of these three companies share is that they actively provide training to employees on what tone/message they want to get across on social media, they give employees autonomy to be on social media, and they empower their employees to act as brand ambassadors.

This not only creates a strong employer brand for the company, but it increases employee engagement.

As a leader, if you create an environment where employees can feel comfortable to be themselves on social media (but are spreading the right message) then you’ll be creating an amazingly powerful employer brand.

1. Adobe

Adobe is an amazing example of a company that gets social media right. A case study that was done on Adobe in mid-2014 found that:

• Social media influences 20% of subscriptions to Adobe Creative Cloud.
• A greater percentage of Adobe employees are sharing content about Adobe on Twitter than any other tech brand in the world.
• As of mid-2014, approximately one-third of Adobe’s 11,000 employees have taken Social Shift training to be brand ambassadors.
• In some months, one Photoshop brand ambassador has generated more revenue than the official Adobe @Photoshop Twitter account.

The key to their success is that they trust their employees, and train their employees properly through their Social Shift program.

As a way to show off their company culture and what it’s like to work for them, employees are encouraged to use the hashtag #adobelife and add pictures and videos to promote their employer brand.

2. Nokia

The objective of the Nokia Social Media Communications team is to:

“Encourage the use of social media internally to bring out the company’s unique authentic voice and to engage in social media externally on behalf of Nokia, and contributing to product and service announcements by opening up a dialogue and driving online engagement.”

Nokia encourages employees to be active on social media and offers a six-part social media certification which they must complete before becoming active on social media. Nokia employees must:

1) Be prepared

2) Be transparent

3) Be smart

4) Be nice

5) Be yourself

6) Be professional

Every Nokia employee can speak freely online across social media networks. This gives employees the power to go out on social networks and be real brand ambassadors.

3. Wiley

Education publisher Wiley originally had multiple social accounts with no unified strategy, which led to inconsistent customer service.

As a result of this, Wiley created an education program that educated more than 200 employees, and saw a 90% increase in employee engagement.

Not only should you allow your employees to be on social media, you should be actively encouraging them to spread the message for your company.

Their director of social marketing, Michelle Lockett, spoke about this recently in a webinar with HootSuite. They were able to provide better customer service through a unified, company-wide social media strategy.

Wiley was smart in the way that they equipped their employees with the knowledge and tools they needed to become brand ambassadors.

Let Employees Be Active On Social Media

The takeaway: not only should you allow your employees to be on social media, you should be actively encouraging them to spread the message for your company. Employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and brand awareness will increase.

Let them be brand ambassadors, and try to be as loose with your rules as possible. The more natural an employee behaves on social media, the more real the conversations will be, and that’s what consumers want – real conversations with real people.