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Leveraging social media in employee engagement

Leveraging Social Media in Employee Engagement
August 10th, 2009

Hi IntegratedBrand.com members and readers!

Check out Briana Marrah and Joe LePla’s presentation from their recent workshop at the ALI’s Internal Branding Conference in Chicago.

View more presentations from Parker Lepla.

A Social Media Framework for B2B Product Managers and Marketers

A Social Media Framework for B2B Product Managers and Marketers
July 13th, 2009

Check out the presentation below on how B2B product managers and marketers should leverage social media. Our very own Jen Travis, vice president of online brand experience, was a panelist on this webinar!

View more presentations from Dan Sears.

Social media or social brand?
June 22nd, 2009

Social media is a channel. While a social brand is a way to be. Think about it as a cultural shift in the way you live your brand online and offline–as a business strategy (how do we deliver our customer service? or how do we develop new products/services?), as a people strategy (how do we find great talent? how do we train them and empower them to live our brand?), and as a communications strategy (how do we find new customers or audiences, what are they saying and how do we engage with them online?).

The line between your offline and online brand may be well segmented in your business internally (between departments and roles), but from a customer’s point of view they are non-existent. You are your brand no matter where they find you or interact with you. So, in other words, be the same brand you are on your website or Twitter that you are on the phone and on your product packaging.

Check back often for more on how to build and manage a social brand.

–Jen Travis

Your Social Media Strategy
June 12th, 2009

There’s a lot of talk around the need for a social media strategy, but why and how? The reason is simple: if you’re not currently in control of your digital identity, the odds are pretty good that others are or soon will be. And if your organization dives into the social media world without a road map, then you could run the risk of appearing narcissistic, like you have ADHD, or even worse… inauthentic. Creating a social media strategy is akin to creating a blueprint to help your organization hone in on the important stuff, such as figuring out what channels makes sense, how much time you should be spending, and who to engage. Social media should be a piece of your larger integrated branding strategy, because it’s essentially another touch point, or an opportunity to communicate and reinforce your brand promise.

-Bianca Abate

Social Media: who’s doing it well?
May 29th, 2009

I thought this list to help companies determine if a social media consultant was any good was informative (and even made me second guess some of our approach to social media). So that’s how to do it wrong—so who’s doing it well? I like United Way’s recent foray, connecting with donors and volunteers. The Wilderness Society is engaging recreationalists, conservationists and wilderness-adjacent communities through its North Cascades initiative. And of course, there’s Obama, the social media savant, who is gathering up an army of connected activists through http://www.barackobama.com/, complete with listening tours, story collection, links to social media sites and more.

-Lynn Parker

ALI’s Internal Branding Conference
May 28th, 2009

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Branding experts Briana Marrah and Joe LePla will be leading a workshop at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Internal Branding Conference. They will be speaking on how to leverage social media tools to engage your employees and create effective brand champions.

Save 50% on your registration fees when you mention email code “SPK”!

Description:
Social media tools have added more visibility to your brand, providing a channel for anyone’s opinions and experiences to be distributed to the world almost instantaneously. If this isn’t enough to make you a little nervous, what about the fact that conversations in social media aren’t limited just to your customers? Your employees are online sharing their opinions about you, too. Your employees’ lives and jobs intersect online where the lines between public and private are blurred at best.

Don’t be deterred by this reality! Your employees, if given the right incentives and tools, can become the biggest champions of your brand. They are the most important audience in any brand effort because they both deliver the brand experience and influence public opinion. If you re-examine your internal social media policy through this lens, your employees look less like a ticking time-bomb and more like message mercenaries.

In this approach, we find a more authentic way to communicate with all audiences, an opportunity to personalize your brand and connect on a deeper level—a level synonymous with trust, honesty and transparency. And that’s what builds a brand. You must be deliberate, strategic and careful in this effort, however, to improve the likelihood that your employees’ powers are being used for good and not for evil.

Attend this workshop and learn ways to utilize social media tools to help, not hinder, your brand. Specifically, you’ll learn:
-Examples of how social media has enhanced and destroyed brand value
-How social media can be used to drive deeper engagement
-Ways to overcome hurdles to implementation and gain organizational buy-in
-How guidelines can ensure that social media touch points stay true to your brand
-Tactics and strategies to successfully leverage and measure social media effectiveness

For more informatiion: call 888-362-7400. Get discount by registering by June 19th or by bringing or Marketing, HR or Communications Team. www.aliconferences.com.

A Brand Cannot Rely on Social Media Alone
May 15th, 2009

I read a very interesting blog post this morning entitled, “How to Kill a Brand with Social Media.” While I can’t say that I agree with the entire blog—particularly the part that says Twitter is not social media—I do think the author made a very valuable point when talking about the lack of brand alignment in social media.

While most Twitter users are aware of the amazing job that Frank Eliason has done for Comcast on Twitter, acting as a one person rescue squad for their customer service issues, the rest of the brand has not aligned with this new way of doing business . . . Why? Because having one or two people creating a good impression on one platform is not enough. If there is no brand alignment behind the philosophy of listening and responding then all of the social media efforts in the world will not turn a brand around.
–From the IncSlinger blog, posted on May 14, 2009

Although we have been discussing the immense value that social media offers organizations, we don’t believe that a brand can rely on Twitter or Facebook alone to strengthen its relationship with consumers. The brand must be delivered consistently in all customer touch points, not just those in the digital world. A certain computer company that I’ll call “Swell” (for the sake of anonymity) has a great social media strategy—from their blog, to their Facebook page and now their Tweets! Yet, when I call “Swell” to troubleshoot my computer issues, I’m left to navigate through a labyrinth-like phone tree before I reach a “technician” that has no idea how to fix my computer, let alone communicate without reading off a script.

A brand cannot hide behind the façade that it creates online. If you’re not living the brand that you’re projecting online, your customers will eventually find out and they won’t stick around—they might even de-friend you.

-Hiley Spaet

How to: Architecting the brand experience online
April 24th, 2009

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Your brand is experienced by your customers in a multitude of ways: through your product/service, your marketing, your people and…(no drum roll needed) your web presence. This doesn’t just mean your website anymore (although, that is a really important piece of it), but your online advertising (whether banner ads or Google AdWords campaigns), discoverability keys (keywords and meta-tags you use to define yourself) and your social media presence (whether managed or not) as well.

Yikes. That’s a lot to think about. But, when filtered through the lens of your brand—your unique value and promise—it is much easier, because you already have the road map, you just need to make sure you manage the stops along the way (the trip, if you will). How do you ensure that your online presence delivers your unique brand experience?

1. Know your users: Who is coming to your web site or following you on Twitter? What tribes do they belong to and what are their motivations, needs and online behaviors as a result? Segment them, profile them and think about how they would engage with you online.
2. Benchmark your online brand equity: What do your current site analytics tell you about your visitors’ interests and how they found you? What is the current murmuring about your brand in blogs, on Twitter, around Facebook? Review and analyze this to gain an understanding of where you are now and what is currently working (or not working).
3. Collect and categorize your content: What can (and do) you offer your customers? Is it thought leadership? Tools? Resources? Humor? What? Inventory organizational content (intellectual property, images, video, etc.), filter it through your brand, and develop a content development and repurposing strategy to deliver this content on your site and social media channels.
4. Map it all out: How will you organize your content to demonstrate your brand and meet your user’s needs? Conceptually and diagrammatically map out how users will use your content and how that experience demonstrates your brand value.
5. Implement and measure it: Design, deploy and measure it against your benchmark, using criteria and metrics that help you define the brand equity gained or lost, increase in awareness, connections, and of course, conversions.

With 74.4% of the North American population using the Internet, it’s more important than ever that you differentiate, engage and deliver online.

–Jen Travis

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Your Facebrand Page
April 17th, 2009

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Social media will hijack your brand (if it hasn’t yet already). The masses will talk about your organization as kindly or ruthlessly as they wish and you can either partake in that conversation or slink off to the dark ages. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the power of social media. By participating in the conversation, you have the power to engage your customers on their terms and on a deeper level. Plus, you get to learn from your audience in real-time and for free.

The number of social media avenues can overwhelm, so my recommendation is to start with the most popular, most trafficked site out there—Facebook. Checking Facebook has now become routine habit akin to checking e-mail, with people spending hours at a time on it and checking it multiple times per day. The question is no longer why you should use Facebook, it’s how to best use Facebook.

Facebook empowers your brand by offering it another “home” to thrive and grow, aka your Facebrand page. Today’s consumer wants to interact with your brand, so by fostering this page and proactively engaging them, you can begin to manage your brand’s greater online presence. And if you don’t think this is important, ask yourself what’s the first thing people do when they want to find out about something—they Google it. Your online presence is the megaphone to your brand. If done right, your brand online can better communicate what your brand offline promises.

So here are a few helpful hints to help you create and take full advantage of your brand’s Facebook page:

· Do a little research to get to know your audiences. This will help you determine what content will be the most valuable to them.

· As you start communicating, be authentic and use your brand as a filter. Before posting or tagging anything, weigh its content and make sure it aligns with the brand you’ve created offline.

· Let people come to you. Facebook, as a social tool isn’t a place to advertise. So don’t crowd your page with too much marketing fluff –it’s sure to turn them off.

· Keep in mind that people “fan” your page because it reflects something about them. If they relate to your brand enough to become a fan, they are in essence announcing their loyalty and championing your brand to the rest of their network. That’s a big deal.

· Be engaging. Back in the day, people wrote fan mail; today, people write on your wall. Pique their interests with polls, discussions, and notes. Delivering fresh content is key in bringing them back. Updating your status message is one way to stay on people’s radar, but avoid clogging up their news feed with too many updates—once per day is more than enough.

· Think outside the box. Betty Crocker’s page offers recipes, a “what kind of cupcake are you?” quiz, coupons for fans, quick baking tips via its status update and an online cooking class with cooking experts. Your job is to find ways to deliver more of your unique value in a creative and compelling way.

-Bianca Abate