Original source:
Inside Out Recruiting, Recruiter.com
The job of the recruiting department today has become somewhat of a business generalist role. They are measured in terms of typical recruiting metrics, but they really have to be astute in every facet of the business. Marketing is one of those skill sets that a progressive recruiting department must add to their list of skill sets. You’re no longer just recruiting for the marketing department, but you are literally doing marketing for your company in order to attract and retain top talent.
Marketing you ask? Yes, you must become kings and queens of messaging as it relates to conveying your “employer brand”. This starts on the inside of your organization. It doesn’t do much good if your recruiters know that your company is an employer of choice but nobody on the inside of the organization knows that. Once you “market” your key messages inside of your organization, your employees begin speaking with that same vernacular and hopefully recruiting great candidates along the way.
Utilize tools such as an Intranet or Employee Benefit Portal to communicate these key messages about your company. That’s a start, but from there you should brand some of these key messages on things like trade-show giveaways, posters within your physical building, on your email tags, and certainly on the pages of your career site on your company’s external website. The important thing here is to make it a whole-company effort: every touch point between your company and the outside world is a potential recruiting opportunity.
Tagged as:
brand ambassadors,
employee ambassadors,
employer branding,
recruiting
This post is a continuation of my series on “How to Make Employees Social Media Ambassadors“. See further down for related links on using employees as social media ambassadors and employee engagement.
The other day, I was sitting at a restaurant bar (as I’m prone to do) and started a conversation with someone — yes, I know, I make for a captivating dinner companion — on how employees are a company’s most under-utilized asset for communicating its brand. However, as my fellow bar person pointed out, how do you have employees represent your brand if they don’t even know what it is … if they even care? So yes, before you can use your employees as brand ambassadors, you might want to not only make sure that they understand your brand, but that they actually embrace and support it — the values for which your brand stands and the services and solutions you provide.
So how do you launch a social media brand ambassador program if your ambassadors don’t know the brand?
Obviously, you don’t.
Whether or not you’re looking to launch a social media ambassador program, the key to success for any company who wants employees represent its brand is that they MUST not only appreciate and understand its value, but be able to also communicate it. And in order for them to understand it, you must effectively internalize it to them. Seems kind of logical, doesn’t it? Of course it is, but it seems to be a one of those things that are either: 1) assumed or 2) not executed effectively. So how do you educate, so that your employees can effectively communicate?
Tagged as:
ambassadors,
brand ambassadors,
employee ambassadors,
Employee Engagement,
social media,
social media ambassadors
So, as a company, you now recognize that a socially networked company makes for a more human workforce. So, what are the next steps to making employees social media ambassadors?
There really are two different approaches to empowering your employees as social media ambassadors. You can either give open access to your entire employee base or start with a “pilot group” of officially recognized ambassadors. I don’t know that either approach has more proven benefits over the other, but if you’re a conservative company like mine, you’ll go for the latter…. and here’s why:
- Allows you to embrace social media while still being cautious about how to fully deploy or manage it;
- Gives you time to further refine your social media guidelines with a small group of individuals who will eventually become leading examples to the rest of your employees; and,
- Provides the opportunity to measure your social media impact using the initial pilot as a control group.
Building a Social Media Ambassador Pilot Group
- Survey employees on social networking habits and interests. Determine what social networks your employees are using and ask them if they would be willing to use their personal brand / social networking profiles to serve as the company’s social media ambassadors.
- Lots of employees will say they are passionate about social media. But you will need to weed out those individuals who are just consumers of social media information versus the ones who are conversationalists in social media — those who create content and dialogue within their existing social networks.
Tagged as:
A.R.E.,
ambassadors,
employee ambassadors,
Employee Engagement,
social media,
social media ambassadors
As companies start to dip their toes into the social media waters, we have seen them implement a couple of different approaches. Some companies start with a small group of employees who are identified as brand ambassadors or official representatives of the company in social media networks. Other companies, such as Zappos and Best Buy, have given their entire employee base access to platforms for participating in social media, thereby making all the employees spokespeople of the company.
The Creative Underground has an excellent blog post on using your employees as brand ambassadors… and while it was written more from the perspective of empowering all your employees to be brand ambassadors, I think it rings true for either approach to social media.
That’s right. Instead of just one or two people being social media representatives of the company in the Twitterverse and elsewhere, what if all of them were? I know. Your first thought probably is: “Ha. Good one. We’d never get anything done.” Hear me out. There are rules to this concept working in practice, not just in theory.
1) Cover your you-know-what.
Namely, adopt a Social Media Policy. I’m talking about a formalized document that establishes some guidelines on ethics and privacy. While you may already have a corporate communications policy of this sort, it’s very smart to be clear that social media is part of that policy too. I could write a blog post on this very subject alone but Sharlyn Lauby, president of Internal Talent Management, already wrote an insightful post that covers it: http://mashable.com/2009/04/27/social-media-policy/
Tagged as:
ambassadors,
employee ambassadors,
Employee Engagement,
social media,
social media ambassadors
Now that you know how important it is to make employees ambassadors of your brand, the next step is to develop an internal brand campaign. If what you communicate externally isn’t understood internally, how do you build a company that lives what it does? More importantly, how then do you commit employees to emulate the brand and become your company’s greatest advocates?
One of the most important aspects to the success of a company often starts from within. Employees who know your business and who understand the roles they play in helping it achieve its goals are thereby motivated to help the company succeed. It is essential that you explore strategies and tactics to increasing employees’ understanding of who and what the company does, educating them around your services and then focusing on short and long term action plans to increase awareness and engage employees to live the brand characteristics and core values.
Help your employees articulate your brand promise, by beginning with these steps:
Step 1: Marketing is Your BFF
Marketing and internal communications can sometimes have a tenuous relationship. But this is the time for these two organizations to become BFFs. Work with the marketing team to determine the key external messages, and internalize those key messages into a primary message that is broad enough to resonate with employees, and structure that message into easy-to-understand formats. Review the external brand creatives and determine what components parlay into internal communication pieces that educate employees on the solutions your company offers as well as the products that support those services.
Tagged as:
ambassadors,
brand management,
brand strategy,
employee ambassadors,
Employee Engagement,
internal communications,
social media ambassadors
