It’s safe to say that not everyone, perhaps even no one initially, is interested in using
social media to promote a business. In fact, it can be terribly difficult at
times to establish a digital culture in a place of business for some managers
and owners. Often time’s customers and employees aren't inclined to participate
because of a lack of awareness, or maybe it’s an aversion to technology. The
only real way to achieve peak performance, both socially and digitally, is to have complete participation within the ranks. Creating
this culture, however, isn't an easy feat. It takes training, encouragement and
proven results to really get off of the ground.
In the dawn of social media and sharing many business owners
were afraid to allow employees to use social sites at work. They were concerned
for overall productivity and of course, sharing trade secrets or guarded
information. Many government agencies and large companies, especially those
with high security levels, still do not allow access to sites like Facebook or
Twitter across the board. Occasionally employees are even required to lock
their phones away before their shift to ensure that private information remains
that way. There isn’t much you can do about that, when dealing with highly
secure information, but for the small to midsize business, or businesses that
don’t deal in protected data, the days of the security walls and social bans
are long gone.
TRAINING & BEST
PRACTICES
Many Fortune 500 companies now offer training to employees
on best practices around social media and you’re hard pressed these days to
come across a new employee manual that doesn't offer up some sort of
regulations around social activity. Whether you’re trying to protect your brand’s
image or your client’s information, having a best practices for employees
surrounding social sharing is just… well… a best practice!
When it comes to encouraging employees to use social media in a business
perspective, however, things can still be quite unclear. Most companies,
especially smaller ones, do not monitor employee activity online. HR and
Marketing Depts. rarely offer training on how employees can offer assistance in
company growth online, and they most often don’t encourage it. This, in my
opinion, is the first real mistake.
On one hand, you’re not observing employee activity and
ensuring they’re standing up to the rules that have been set in place. An
occasional Google of employee activity isn’t nearly effective enough in
ensuring they’re meeting your standards. When a customer offers up a negative
opinion on your business or services its bad enough, but when an employee does
it? There could be no coming back from that!
NEGATIVE vs. POSITIVE
EMPLOYEE SHARING
We see stories every day of employees posting photos and
videos of themselves, or their place of employment, shining a light on poor
working conditions or management. Often this activity results in the immediate
termination of an employee, sometimes reasonably and sometimes not. Rarely do
we see upper-level management using such an occurrence as an opportunity to
review their own practices and determine why the employee would risk their job
just to share something of that nature online. Either they are disgruntled over
poor working conditions/treatment, or they’re inefficiently (if at all) trained
on appropriate online behavior as an employee. Both of these fall under the
management umbrella and without being addresses, could occur at any time in
your business.
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INCLUDE YOUR
EMPLOYEES IN YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING EFFORTS
Beyond the obvious need to train employees on best-practices
around workplace social sharing, it’s also increasingly important to include
them in the digital marketing plans for your business.
Offering training, info sessions and employee events that
can be utilized as a way to encourage positive employee sharing online is a
great way to start!
Here are some ideas as
to how you can begin to create a (positive) digital sharing culture in your
workplace:
- Encourage employees
to take photos with customers happily buying product. Offer up a hashtag
that is company specific and show them where they can post them online (with
customer approval, of course!)
- Create a Private Facebook Group for employees only, where you can include shareable content to be posted from your social sites onto others, as well as directives and questions/polls. This is a great way to gather information and see who is participating!
- Share your digital
roadmap/objectives with employees! Give them an opportunity to join in on
the work. Many hands make light work and many employees create a larger reach!
- Embrace newer social
sharing sites like Instagram, Tumblr, Google + and encourage employees to
help carve out a new audience there.
- Offer incentives
to employees who achieve certain goals socially. Including: Getting likes on
your facebook page from their friends, encouraging contest participation,
getting X amount of views of a workplace-video online. Not all incentives need
to be monetary; some can align with workplace rewards like events or product.
- Create online
profiles for your employees on your website and ask them to participate in
sharing their own personal pages. Utilize little-known facts, fun ideas and
games to create high-content pages or blog posts about them. Encourage online
sharing across all social media.
- Encourage check-ins online on sites like Foursquare and Facebook, especially if there is low customer participation.
- Hire a photographer
to do employee portraits. What would an employee rather share than a
particularly great photo of themselves? They’ll be grateful for an opportunity
to have a professional photo taken at no cost to them and likely share them in
an exceptionally positive light.
- Create events
(online and offline) that especially
encourage digital sharing. Ex. Offer to have a bi-weekly/monthly movie
night IF employees share X amount of posts every week, and then get them to garner
votes online for what movie should be presented.
- Ask employees to brainstorm ideas for marketing efforts, like blog posts, photo sessions and product displays. If they’re putting effort into the conceptualizing and execution, they’re far more likely to share the finished product online!
I hope that you’ll be able to effectively deploy some of
these ideas in your own workplace! Please let me know your results!
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