Branding through Employee & Social Media

Tapping employee social network Making employee brand ambassadors

In December 1996 Hotmail had 500,000 registered users – less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users. This astonishing growth rate was down to the fact that every single email sent from Hotmail included a small advert promoting the service in the footer. That is the power of leveraging the network.

One of the first examples of viral marketing

AgendaObjective: Brand building

Who: All employees

How: Leverage Employee social network

Delivery channel: Social Media platforms

Why: Its simple, relatively easy, zero cost & highly effective

Lets tell others why employees are proud of the place where they work

Concepts : Power of NetworkingSix degrees of Separation (log v/phi X log squared 1/phi)any two people are on average

separated by no more than six

intermediate connections

Time taken for spread of gossip =

estimate of time (log v/phi X log squared

1/phi);v is the number of vertices of

communication; phi stands for

conductance.

Greater Reach & Faster Reach

Leverage Social Networking

• Social media platforms• Create company profile on social media platforms• Ask employees to have their presence on major

social media platforms• Ask employees to embrace the company profile :

like , follow , comment , tweet , retweet , post

But we need to do more……..

Not everything gets heard

• With so many updates on Social Media platform, your messages will get lost

• Your messages might also get classified as junk by audience

• Your network might simply classify as ‘irrelevant’ and hence ignore the content

How to ensure that messages are read

• Focus on content • Make it relevant• Tweak the content based on audience

Your company got USD 100 M funding. If you are technical person, talk about how the investment will fund in future technologies. If you are biz dev person, talk about how this will help grow / enter new market

• Build interest• Don’t repeat

Don’t publish messages every minute / hr / day just for sake of publishing messages. Publish only when there is important message which you think will attract attention

• If possible, use neutral 3rd party referencesYour company got USD 100 M funding. Don’t simply publish this message. Publish the link of Forbes magazine where this news is covered

• Use pictorials if possible, marketing people always believe more in pictures than in words.

• Finally, create audience

Build Audience

All companies have customers.

Lucky companies have fans.

But the most fortunate companies have audience.- Jason Fried, David

Heinemeier Hanssonco-founder, 37signalsrubyonrails

You can buy a 10 sec prime spot on TV but that does not guarantee to grab attention.When you build audience, you don’t have to buy people attention, they give it to you.

Share information that is valuable and you will slowly build a loyal audience who will get the word spread out and will wait desperately for your next post

Building an audience

Speak

tweet

Document – ppt / doc Tell experiences

HOW

write / blog

make videos / brainsharks / whiteboards

WHAT

share updates

how you did that

Show behind the scenes

most importantly - share freely

Teach

Reveal inside the black box

open the secret like chefs

upload on open source - github

Focus on WHAT

How to build / to do / to deploy / etc

Why to do in particular way / use this framework / etc

What it takes to do / solves this problem / etc

Examples:Share, teach, tell – TED Behind Scenes – Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers on DiscoveryPain one goes through in making something – Jackie Chan movie end scenes

Don’t worry even if its in raw format, people still will love it

Content

What takes to Deliver ?

Documentation

Finishing

Publish

A great content material

Document it using any of available media

Make it appealing to users, they should understand what you are trying to say.

Publish it to make it available to all

Making it simple for the audience to comprehend

Follow ‘Rule of 4’ levels - Start with 1-3 WORDs to tell the topic

Highlight the topic in 2 - 5 SENTENCEs Summarize in 5 - 10 LINEs

Detail out in 2 - 3 PAGEs

Wherever possible use pictorials like graphs, numbers, charts, images to start at level ‘0’

Motivate employees to be BRAND AMBASSADORS

• We all are “brand warriors” or “brand ambassadors”• Lets use social media so that we are the ones

conveying the message about our company• Its not just the Marketing, HR and PR departments

whose job is to brand the organization• A hired model will not be able to create the connect

with the organization• Employees live the brand, they can tell the brand,

they connect with the brand, and are considered genuine

Think like a Brand Ambassador and you will become one.

vishwadeep.anshu@gmail.com