a groovyweb by isman tanuri » LinkedIn

Your Happy Employees Are Your Best Brand Ambassadors (And Social Media Can Help)

Isman Tanuri — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:00:20 +0000

Brenda Neckvatal asked on LinkedIn Answers:

‘Can treating employees like customers increase job satisfaction?’

The Satisfied Employee

Here’s my initial response to Brenda’s question (with edits):

It is crucial that we treat employees as ‘internal customers‘. Making that differentiation can make a lot of difference to how they perceive their jobs/roles and contribution to the company. Job satisfaction will equate to retaining of talents and knowledge assets, which is something a lot of managers are grappling with (especially in a positive economy).

Peter Drucker said ‘management’s duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care’*. In that respect, all employees must be equally treated with the same care typically reserved for customers. In today’s information-producing workplaces, even more importance and care must be given to increasingly-mobile employees. Unlike the manual worker (who peddles his strength and energy), today’s information-driven employees retain their practice’s knowledge and developed skills and sought to bring them along to the next employer (and, in some cases, including knowledge of the ex-employer’s strategic and operational secrets).

Now watch what Tom Peters had to say about ‘treating your employees like customers’. Peters recounts a story about an American Airlines’ annual meeting in Dallas being picketed by the Airlines Pilot Union. On the same day and in the same city, the same pilot union took out two full pages of advertisement in USA Today to honour the contribution of retiring Southwest Airlines’ co-founder, Herb Kelleher. Why? Because of Southwest’s differentiated support and care for its pilots. In Herb’s own words, the secret of Southwest’s success is “You have to treat your employees like customers.”

The Employee Ambassador

Further, I continued in my reply to Brenda and the main focus of this post ‘Employees as Brand Ambassadors’:

I personally subscribe to the belief that employees are an organisation’s best brand ambassadors. A satisfied employee talks about their employers in a better light, they share more about the brand and, in time, improve customers’ and public’s perception of the organisation. Especially when social media-generated content are indexed more and more by search engines, any brand mention by an employee (good or bad) can make a lot of perceptual difference to a prospective customer or client.

Let’s explore more on why I believe employees are an organisation’s best brand ambassadors and how social media can help.

With social media (or more accurately, user-generated content channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) becoming the norm and pervasive in our daily lives, a satisfied and happy employee is more likely to be naturally-inclined in displaying their professional affiliation on their social media profiles. We see many examples of this on our friends’ Facebook profiles. I have personally encountered many tweets from my Twitter mates professing their admiration for their bosses and colleagues. A more publicly visible example would be Robert Scoble’s initial admiration for Rackspace and his subsequent employment with Rackspace, whom he consistently and positively write about on his personal blog.

The Happy Employee Ambassador Spreads the Word

The US$1billion American shoe company, Zappos, showed that encouraging and empowering its employees to be happy gave such a positive vibe that its customers return for more, one is even quoted as saying Zappos delivers ‘Happiness in A Box‘. And how about this? Zappos further helps its employees to spread its Happiness mission by building ‘Twitter.Zappos.Com‘. Not only it showcases all Twitter mentions (positive and negative) of Zappos, the portal also displays all tweets and twitpics by its employees for the world to see. Empowerment and trust at play. See it here: http://twitter.zappos.com/employee_tweets

Closer to home, look at how an ex-employee (Wei Yang) of The Garden Slug, a dining eatery in eastern Singapore, positively responded and left a public comment on The Garden Slug’s blog post to announce his next career change. Despite the severance of professional ties, the satisfactory and appreciated stint Wei Yang most likely experienced at The Garden Slug ultimately contributed to a positive PR outcome for the eatery in the form of public endorsement.

Here’s another real-life example. As a current employee of Hogg Robinson Group (HRG), my LinkedIn profile reflects my affiliation and I am happy to include a URL link to HRG Singapore’s Communique Digital Magazine on my profile (pictured below). Why? Because I am happy to be empowered with a major responsibility, which is to develop HRG’s communication initiatives and this is one of them.

And the result? Someone did clicked on the ‘Communique: HRG Singapore’ link on my LinkedIn profile and most certainly discovered more information on my employer (shown below)*.

A simple referral link on LinkedIn has positively provided exposure for my employer’s brand (and at minimal cost). Can you imagine the impact a unified and consistent LinkedIn approach by your happy employees will have on your organisation’s brand and stature? For B2B organisations, a devised branding strategy for LinkedIn may perhaps be a valuable, effective and worthwhile effort to undertake.

So back to the question, how then do you create job satisfaction AND progressively encourage employee ambassadorship?

That’s a big question that deserves its own post. In my opinion, a full dive-in is essential to fully understand what is required by leadership teams to engage ‘social media-empowered’ employees and how they can tap into these ready-pool of brand ambassadors. Despite its infamy as an exclusive arsenal of the irate customer, leaders must now view social media and its technologies as valuable tools to help an organisation meet its business or people objectives.

Part of my current thinking has been heavily influenced by Charlene Li’s ‘Open Leadership’ book (which I am currently reviewing, have a look here at what it all means). These are some of the keywords I will explore with you in the near future: ‘employee empowerment’, ‘organisational openness’, ‘collaborative work’.

In the meantime, can you think of any other examples of happy employees who have undoubtedly become brand ambassadors for their employers? Please share in the comments as I’d love to hear from you.

* Quote from ‘Management Challenges for the 21st Century’
* Disclosure: I am currently responsible for Communique: HRG Singapore hence the access to the web analytics.
All opinions stated in this blog are of my own and not of my employer.

Twitter: Increasing Followers’ Count vs Building a Community

Isman Tanuri — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:04:16 +0000

Rakesh Ojha asked this Twitter question on LinkedIn Answers recently:

How to Increase Twitter followers?

Which of the two is a good strategy to increase Twitter followers for business purpose and not play number game?
1) Follow large number of members who will follow you in return to increase your followers.
2) Tweet interesting topics, value insights so that others automatically follow you.
I understand initially you need to follow people to allow for others to follow you but in the long run which strategy you will adopt to increase your followers. I mean real followers who can actually be beneficial to your business later on or you can benefit from them.
Will you follow twit(s) (Somebody who uses twitter) who will never follow you?

A fair number of people on LinkedIn mentioned ‘Buy your Twitter followers on eBay’ and I totally agree with that. It is fairly easy to increase your followers count if you are really keen on doing that and there are published methodologies on how to go about doing it. An example, certain keywords that you tweet on will somehow automatically get you followers, for instance, ‘social media’, ‘holidays’ and the very popular ‘sex’.

Personally, I do not really care about my followers’ count on Twitter. A third are probably bots and another third are friends who were wondering ‘what’s this Twitter hype’ and have since left the conversation. I do have to admit a fair number are probably still lurking and mostly reading. They are the quiet audience.

Building a Community on Twitter

Here’s my published answer on LinkedIn Answers (with some edits):

I will answer this objectively. Perhaps you would like to look at it from a different perspective. I personally do not believe in ‘follow to get followed’ or ‘tweeting interesting topics to get followed’ etc.

My suggestions on how to ‘increase your Twitter followers’ count’ organically:

1. Build a community.
An interconnected community that chats and exchange ideas and knowledge on Twitter. It takes a while but once you get there, you will realise that people who were once strangers to you already knew each other and will now know you. The richness of Twitter is in the living community. Not in followers’ count.

2. It is not about who is following you, but who you follow – Scobleizer
Robert Scoble: “I don’t define myself by who follows me, but I define myself by who I follow! I follow smart people who teach me things and put interesting stuff in my view”

3. Interact with community.
You may follow thousands of folks on Twitter but if you do nothing to interact with all of them, they will do nothing to interact with you. Followers’ size do not matter and, remember, there are many bots on Twitter.

4. Your best followers are those who interact with you. Value them.
Here’s my observation, your best followers will be those who has sub-30-50 people on their Follow list.

They are not Twitter superstars. If someone famous, with millions of followers, retweets you, that is as good as striking a lottery.
They are the ones who will notice your tweets more (because their own Twitter timelines are less obscured by random musings).
They are the ones who use Twitter as it should be: interacting, chatting, (most importantly) sharing and they are THE MOST LIKELY to retweet you.

5. Be appreciative.
Something I find sorely lacking in Twitter etiquette, even among the power users. All it takes is a simple personal ‘Thank you’ if someone replies to a question you asked or helped in retweeting your question or a funny tweet you made. Nothing beats that personal appreciative touch to build a valuable listening community.

So, above all, build a Twitter community, not your followers’ count.

I don’t think I have covered all there is about building a valuable interactive community on Twitter. If you have any suggestions or would like to share your own personal experience on cultivating your on Twitter community, I hope you will kindly do so by leaving a comment below. Keep on tweeting!

University of Chicago and My Literature Review: ‘Role of Social Media in Contemporary Marketing’

Isman Tanuri — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:50:16 +0000

When Jason Parker wrote to ask if he could use an academic work of mine for his Social Media appreciation class at the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies, I was thrilled. It also dawned upon me that social media is certainly worth all that time and effort.

How did Jason, Adjunct Professor at University of Chicago and Planning Director at Leo Burnett and quite possibly on the exact opposite of the world, discover ‘Role of Social Media in Contemporary Marketing’, an ‘obscure’ literature review I had completed only last September?

Social media.

And how did I make that happen?

Social media.

I had sowed ample digital opportunities where Jason and others could have found this piece of work. And this is how I did it.

Slideshare & Scribd

I had shared this literature review (an extract from the full Final Year Professional Project I had to accomplish for undergrad studies) on Slideshare and Scribd since last September.

Here are the stats, so far:

1257views + 137 downloads on Slideshare

3665 views + 321 downloads on Scribd

Impressive numbers, I guess, for a ‘non-viral’ academic work.

So why did I choose to publish and share my work online? Am I not afraid of it being plagiarised or copied?

The answer is ‘No’. If it isn’t for the openness and the acts of mutual sharing all over the Internet, we’d still be visiting libraries every day, painfully looking for stored manuscripts and hidden knowledge. Or my work would still be languishing in my hard drive, waiting to be ‘nostalgically re-discovered’ a few years down the road. (Technologically, there are restrictions in place on both Slideshare and Scribd to protect your work.)

Jason Parker does it too. See Jason’s slide deck for his first class lecture on Slideshare.

Also, as many people increasingly continue to come online and partake in digital citizenship, I am one who believes that digital personal branding has an increased importance in today’s society and this is the ‘invisible edge’ that is needed to move ahead of the pack. Be it in social circles or, of more importance, for professional opportunities.

Sharing your interests and expertise on social media is one way to do this.

Blog It

I had also blogged about this literature review earlier. I am certain the format of the study (literature review), combined with the timely relevance of the subject matter, had provided enough search engine optimisation (SEO) for my initial blog post to be found. In fact Google searches on ‘literature review social media’ and ‘role of social media in contemporary marketing’ brought up my blog and literature review pretty high on the list. As they say ‘Content is Always King’.

Jason Parker does it too. You can follow Jason on his Social Media Class blog as he updates his class on a regular basis, the social media-way.

Others have also found my work. To date, I have received emails from two current students of Northumbria University in the UK asking for my full project (which I have refused for obvious reasons. School is about effort and interaction, guys). However, I had provided enough ideas and direction for them to accomplish their undergrad tasks.

I have also connected with Susan Schwendener, a fellow communications practitioner, from Jason’s class. The possibilities are endless on social media.

What Price is Social Media Sharing?

I really hope Jason’s Insights and Opportunities in Social Media certificate program class had enjoyed reading the literature review distributed during their Week 1 class. Gives me the chills.

So what did I ask for in return for sharing my intellectual property?

What else but an endorsement in social media currency!

Jason kindly provided me with a LinkedIn endorsement that is viewable by my current and future prospective employers as well as my peers. The permanency and transparency of this and my other LinkedIn endorsements ensures that my professional profile, accomplishments and body of work is as truthful as I present it to be.

Acknowledgements

To Jason Parker for extending the opportunity to share what I’ve gained.

And to Erik Yek, my undergrad tutor and Northumbria facilitator at the Marketing Institute of Singapore, for the guidance and patience.

Here again is the literature review ‘Role of Social Media in Contemporary Marketing’. You may wish to download the PDF for later viewing or scroll through the presentation below.

Tell me what you think in the comments?

Role Of Social Media In Contemporary Marketing

View more documents from Isman Tanuri.