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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.

Facebook: It’s Not Privacy You Are Losing But Your Consumer’s Rights and Control

Isman Tanuri — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:00:39 +0000

The hot topic of discussion in the social web right now is Facebook’s push towards becoming a more public platform and its ‘shenanigans’ with your privacy. There is now an organised movement (QuitFacebookDay.com) that has earmarked May 31st as D-Day. For a better idea of what has changed on Facebook, I suggest you have a look at the informative graphic below. PC World has a good article that outlines Facebook’s open social strategy too.

The Open Web is The Future Web

Without a doubt, I am all for an open web. I keep my Facebook profile public and I do not shy away from sharing most parts of my life on the web. I believe the more we are willing to share, the better our experience with the web will be and the more knowledgeable and useful the internet will become. Note this: I chose to be open.

I am blogging this in response to Daphne Maia’s own post ‘Privacy Has Been Long Dead. Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Steal It’. Daphne made some great points that I agree big-heartedly, including:

Facebook still remains a juggernaut in our lives. Our friends and family are in there and it is a great platform for businesses with over 400 million Facebook users to tap. How will we ever let go?
Facebook is a “structured blog..within a big big community” and more (eg. games, online shopping, news, etc). I agree with Daphne here that Facebook’s main draw is its blog-like feature, a space to share with people on your network. There are really an abundance of things to do on Facebook. (FarmVille anyone?)
‘Facebook users need to learn how to: exercise gumption and exercise discretion’. I agree wholeheartedly. Very important. I have seen so many sharing failures on Twitter (an even more public platform) that I sometimes wonder if people ever realised they are being watched and read.

But my stand and opinion differ from Daphne’s here on on a large part of her observation and belief. Disclaimer (if one is required): Daphne and I are friends, online and in real life. Friends can disagree, yes? :)

Not Everyone Is Schooled in Social. Open Social.

Daphne knows the value of social media, just as I do. We are communication professionals who know how to control the message. The what, where and when to let it out. We share and blog ‘smartly’, we behave appropriately online (Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, you name it, we’re on it!) and we ‘game’ the system to build our own personal brands, consciously or otherwise (Daphne on Google).

But not everyone is as well-versed as us. That is the very real reality. Despite all the goodness of being open and social online, not everyone understands it and not everyone wants it. And that is essentially a basic right of the consumer that has to be respected.

In the long run, I would love to have everyone contribute to the open web but, realistically, that time is still much far off. Lots of education and understanding is needed to move people on the same open-thinking platform, perhaps only with the next generational change even. But for now, we, marketers and communicators, must respect consumers’ rights in wanting to protect their personal profiles and data. That can only be a positive prelude to a much more open relationship with consumers in the future.

Facebook: Rogue Business Practices?

Facebook’s success is fuelled by the rate of adoption and use by the masses. It sold us the idea and premise of a “private social network” to connect with “friends and family”. It has a secured, login-required platform that even Google’s mighty spiders do not have access to. And that was the pretext of joining Facebook for most people. Share your photos and thoughts, say Facebook, and shared away we did. We did not even care if Facebook owns our data for eternity. Why? Because there was ‘CONTROL’. Easily-manipulated controls over our profiles and what was to be shared with others. (There are now 50 settings with 170 options in Facebook’ privacy settings. Can YOU figure it out?)

Daphne made a point: ‘What makes the content you publish on Facebook so differentiated (in terms of privacy) from the content you would put on your blog?’ On the contrary, THAT is exactly the reason why most people on Facebook don’t keep an open personal blog. Instead they trust Facebook to keep their sharing and profiles private within their inner circle. They add friends very very carefully. These folks want to have control over their online profiles and engagements and Facebook offered this great and innovative solution. A ‘friends and family-only’ network. We have to respect this right to remain private as much as we expect others’ not to go through our personal belongings.

The Erosion of Trust

Do you think there is a trust issue here?

In business, trust is everything. Facebook is a business. One that earns from advertisers and 3rd party developers, but the way Facebook is pushing its open social platform forward (way too prematurely, I think) in a daredevil, yet blasé manner, I am not sure if they are building upon the trust granted by its users. People are leaving already. Robert Scoble, despite his arguments for going all-out public on Facebook (with a very public profile with public data. Because Scoble does not trust Facebook with his private data), suggests splitting Facebook into two: one private and one public. Scoble obviously knows the value of trust within the every day republic. Read more on Scoble’s suggestions to Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO)

In Facebook’s pursuit to compete with Google and Twitter (both being very public and open platforms) in chasing the advertising dollars, where, I wonder, is the respect for its users that have kept its platform alive and well? Remember, Myspace, once mighty, now languishes, feebly.

Do Not Lose Control of Your Consumer’s Rights

As the graphic illustration below shows, much has changed on Facebook. For me personally, and I agree with Daphne on this, privacy on the web remains an elusive endeavour. As long as you use somebody’s online asset, be it Google, Twitter, Hotmail, etc., your privacy remains at their mercy. Even Steve Jobs got his emails outed in public. Another thing, are we, online users, a part of a huge market research data pool for advertisers? You bet and I don’t care!

But what should remain always yours is your control over your personal profile and your data. As an online consumer, you have the right to make choices on who receives your data and who has the right to capitalise commercially on it. But should every online move we make be granularly tracked and sold on to 3rd party services without our permission? I’m not keen. Just because someone in my network is playing FarmVille does not mean Zygna (FarmVille’s developer) has the right to access my profile and those of my friends’ and family. That is an outright abuse of trust.

In fact, one of the main reason why I remain on the fence about staying put on Facebook, is that I feel uncomfortable exposing my family and friends’ privacy (those who still value them) and profile data through my very public Facebook page. I chose to be public because I believe in openness but at what cost? Now it seems being public and open is such a selfish thing to do.

So Will I be leaving Facebook too?

I don’t know as yet. I know it is hypocritical if I stick around in Facebook, but much is at stake (including my professional needs) so I would like to look at options and solutions. But for a start, I will look at how I will now interact with Facebook and how I can move my personal relationships within my network beyond Facebook.

For those who treasure and are still pursuing online privacy, Gina Trapani’s Online Privacy: Check Yourself (Before Your Wreck Yourself) is a good read and outlines what steps to take. When I get home tonight, I will be looking at the service Youropenbook.org. As explained by PC World in the article ‘Facebook Privacy: Secrets Unveiled’, there are so many personal stories, some damning, to be found on Facebook that has been publicly published, unknowingly.

But I am sure you won’t miss me if I do leave Facebook. Want to keep in touch with me? Here’s my Google public profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/isman.tanuri This is the truth, nothing but the truth.

And I’m in control.

Share your thoughts on this Facebook and privacy issue. Are you still keen on Facebook now? Which side are you on?

Graphic above originally found at: http://s3.moveon.org/images/with_dims/facebook-graphic-1.3_750x615.png (Courtesy of @lucian on Twitter)