social media marketing strategy Archives

Remembering Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today

I had the good fortune to meet Robin several years ago when I began serving on the Social Media Today (SMT) Advisory Board to help her advance engagement with Social Business Leaders and extend the Social Shake Up event programing to feature such leaders. It’s hard to believe what she was able to accomplish in such a short number of years. Always on the vanguard of what’s new and emerging in the industry that was coming of age. Robin was not only brilliant; she was fun and incredibly interesting. She was sincerely interested in knowing you, as a colleague as well as a friend.

She loved her boys and was so proud of their accomplishments. She joyfully shared updates on their progress as any doting mother would. She was open about the reality of building a business while balancing the demands of being a Wife and Mother. She had a special knack for helping aspiring women. I was a beneficiary of her generosity, for which I’m forever grateful. She was the quintessential Master of Ceremonies, bringing business leaders together from all over the world to advance the Social Media industry through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

No one could host an event and make it fun like Robin. She would light up a room with her energy and elegance. She knew how to prepare the “run of show”, she owned the stage with her glamorous style. So many times she’d break into dancing to her favorite tunes in between event segments. She embraced good times and welcomed all to join in … and we did. She made you feel special for being a part of what she was building. Always giving with her time and intellect, she was a connector from the heart.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 7.01.42 PM — Robin Fray Carey visits IBM Design Lab in New York

She shared the stage with so many. Not just the event stage, the editorial stage. She wrote incredible pieces highlighting bleeding edge work from brand leaders who were in the trenches making it happen. She wrote this post featuring the work of my IBM team, showcasing how we were using Agile practices to transform marketing as well as featuring the foundational work of the IBM Select program that I championed.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 10.34.46 PM — Employee Advocacy Summit 2014 Left to Right: Jeanne Murray, Constantin Basturea, Tammy Wagner, DeShelia Span, Denise Holt, Liz Bullock Brown, Sabrina Stoffregen, Michael Brito, Susan Emerick, Michael Ambassador Bruny, Chris Boudreaux and Robin Fray Carey

I’m especially grateful for all that she did for my co-author Chris Boudreaux and I. From hosting a book-signing event for our book launch in 2013 to allowing us to share the W Hotel venue to launch the Employee Advocacy Summit in 2014 as a half day pre-opener to the Social Shake Up.

The most moving post she wrote was this one about our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. While I was moved by the accolades she included and the hard hitting facts on the integrity of our content … that wasn’t what moved me most. It was the date that it was published and how I came upon reading it that really moved me. You see, Robin had a sixth sense. She knew that my mother was dying and I was her primary care giver. We talked a lot about our Mothers over the years and the kinds of role models they were to us and how we hoped our children would reflect on our legacy some day. So it was … the morning my Mom passed, as I was walking out of her room, a notification appeared on my phone of a new SMT post. When I opened it, this was the post she wrote. It was postmarked the same date my Mom left this world, January 27, 2014. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of Divine Intervention that my Mom was proud of me, while at the same time, so was Robin Fray Carey.

Thank you Robin and the SMT Family. We’ve created a movement, together.

How to choose a Employee Advocacy software technology partner

Employee advocacy is becoming a mega trend. So much so, there are now over 30+ technology platform providers in the space within the last 2 years alone. If you’re considering evaluating employee advocacy software technology to support your employee advocacy program, this post is for you!

The most important first step has nothing to do with technology.

Yes, really! First a foremost, you must establish clear business goals that your employee advocacy program is designed to support. If you don’t establish these and reach a unified agreement amongst company stakeholders on them, no technology platform can help you. Establishing clear and attainable goals is step #1. These goals must not only be clear and agreed upon, they must also be measurable! Otherwise you run the risk of not being able to evaluate program success by measuring performance and tracking progress over time. If you don’t sort this out first, your employee advocacy program will likely be short lived because you won’t be able to secure the needed investment and resources needed.

Once you’ve got your foundation of goals and how you will measure success in place, the 5 steps below provide you a proven roadmap. This isn’t simply my opinion. These are tested and proven. I followed these 5 steps with my team at IBM when we were evaluating and determining the optimal fit Employee Advocacy software platform for the global tech giant. I hope that they’re helpful to you:

Determine your business requirements for the technology before you begin evaluating any product, or requesting vendors bid on a Request for Proposal (RFP). This sounds obvious, but I’ve learned from clients and colleagues who’re leading Employee Advocacy programs for their brands, this is often a step they missed. Work with your team and stakeholders to gather, catalog and prioritize business requirements that are “must haves” for a successful implementation of your Employee Advocacy program. Starting with business requirement will help you review platform options with the same criteria. Once you have this inventory, you can begin to prioritize the “must haves” against other functional features and sort through features that are “nice to have” but not critical your program.
Demo as many Employee Advocacy platforms as feasibly possible, a great way to do this is by attending conferences. Be sure to take your “must have” criteria list and evaluate them first hand through demos and trials. In addition to evaluating the multitude of Employee Advocacy software platforms first hand, you’ll benefit from talking directly to the development and/or sales team. This also allows you the opportunity to get to know the staff that you’ll likely be interacting with. You want to be respectful of their time. Remember that they’ll most likely need to help others who are at their booth wanting to see a demo. So if you think their offering may be on your short list, ask them if they would be willing to schedule a private demo while you’re at the event. This way you can run through your list of must have’s with their help and you won’t be feeling pressured by the line of others who are interested in accessing the demo and are vying for attention along with so many others waiting in line behind you.
Beware of the “Shiny object” syndrome. While you might see and learn about exciting new capabilities you never knew about during the demo phase, it’s critical not to forget that you and your team spent a great deal of time pulling together your requirements list, establishing the “must have” features for your employee advocacy program. Be sure you’re evaluating your options based on your program priority “must haves” and avoid running the risk of getting enamored with a bunch of shiny new technology functionality that looks cool but you may not ever use.
Be realistic about what you can afford! A saying my Dad used often was … “you have Champagne taste on a Beer budget” … Don’t let this happen to you while you’re evaluating employee advocacy platform options. You’ll need to secure financial support not only from your stakeholders, but also your procurement team. So be cautious of your limitations and evaluate options with the financial reality and any procurement limitations (i.e. the specifications for providers you can transact business with) in mind.
Form follows function This well-known architecture principal, originally defined by the great designer Louis H. Sullivan should be applied to the evaluation of Employee Advocacy software. Remember that the technology platform you select must be implemented within the business infrastructure your company has in place. Where “function” is the enterprise technology infrastructure, architecture, and business processes that any choice must integrate with, “form” is the Employee Advocacy software that will need to work within it. It is critical to follow the form follows function principal. Consider how your program operates within your business model and evaluate how the software will need to be integrated:
- Will you require it to connect to your lead generation process?
- Your Sales and/or the Customer Care operation at your company?
- Your analytics, social/market intelligence and/or reporting functions?
- Your CRM system?

Consider these system integration requirements up front. If you don’t, the business is likely to suffer from your choice down the road and be fraught with challenges to integrate with existing processes and systems costing you more even more money in the long run.

Do you have other steps you’ve found to be critical? If you have, I’d love to know what they were, please post a comment with your feedback.

The New CMO: How One of the Most Influential C-Suite Roles is Changing [Webinar on Demand]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of discussing the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) with Sabrina Stoffregen, Corporate Initiatives Marketing Manager and Director of Intel’s Ambassador Program.

Traditionally the CMO has been responsible for building the brand outside the organization in critical areas such as:

Reputation, Community Responsibility, Brand Equity
Driving demand for lead development of offerings (products, services, solutions)
Improving customer engagement
Delivering measureable value at each stage of the Customer Lifecycle

Increasingly, CMOs are leading efforts to build the brand from inside the organization as well. Expanding critical relationships and change management requirements drives the need for collaboration across multiple business units and organizations, in such areas as:

Supporting the CEO and partnering with C-Suite to address transformation across business functions i.e. CRM, customer engagement
Supporting other key C-Suite leaders across the organization, such as CHRO, to communicate company values, building programs that inspire employees to adopt cultural beliefs and act as active and engaged brand champions, delivering on brand promise

CMOs Growing Influence
As a result of the explosion of emerging technologies that support marketing automation, improvements in customer relationship management, increased pressure to respond swiftly to changing market conditions, and customer expectations, the CMO requires capabilities to make better informed decisions based on analytics and insights. As a result, they’ve become a key influential decision maker on:

Technology decisions to support marketing, sales, customer experience
Business Intelligence & Analytics
Business and workforce transformation – especially in critical areas such as Social Business, CRM and Employee + Customer Engagement
Talent management: acquiring and retaining talent, rapid workforce skills development in digital, social, mobile skill sets

Check out the full presentation below:

How IBM Drives ROI Through Employee Advocacy

Today, I had the good fortune of hosting and moderating a webinar How IBM Drives ROI Through Employee Advocacy, featuring my long time IBM colleagues Colleen Burns and Amber Armstrong, who shared several case studies about how the global tech giant is successfully proving ROI through employee advocacy.

For those of you who’ve followed me on twitter @sfemerick or read my blog or book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, you know I believe the most successful brand advocates are those who gain visibility and trust by sharing their expertise, and the most successful brands are those who build systems around these experts to align and scale impact for the brand. IBM has done just that.

Kicking off our discussion by establishing a common understanding of how we define Employee Advocacy – meaning: brands empowering employees to support the goals of the brand, using content and employee-owned social — As explained in the book, this could also be extended to business partners or even customers. (The full webinar on demand is available towards the end of this post.)

But why should brands care?

Well, for starters Employee Advocacy is the fastest growing and most effective means of driving brand engagement and advocacy at scale. Secondly, customers trust your experts and regular employees more than anyone else in your company.

In fact, people trust regular employees as credible spokespeople more than official brand sources like the CEO, as shown by the 20 point gain since 2009, in Edleman’s 2014 Trust Barometer study. In addition, the study reveals that employees rank highest overall 36%, as the most trusted influencer to communicate across 4 out of 5 topic categories including: Engagement, Integrity, Products & Services and Operations.

Prove value to your stakeholders, or your program will be short lived

If you’re contemplating an employee advocacy program, you’ll need to consider how you’re going to measure, demonstrate value and deliver results. If you miss this critical step, the likelihood of your program being short lived is pretty high because you won’t be able to secure the resources or investment you’ll need.

While ROI targets are typically financial, such as Increasing revenue or decreasing costs, they may also be non-financial such as increasing productivity, improving operational efficiency or reducing time to market which have financial implications. No matter which is right for your program, you need begin with establishing measurable ROI targets for the program up front. It’s not enough to set targets, you also have to determine how you’ll measure and report progress against them.

Another critical step is to consider what motivates stakeholders – depending which part of your company is sponsoring your program they will likely have different motivations and attainment measures, the details on addressing stakeholder motivations is explained in Chapter 7 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. We also dedicate a whole chapter to measurement, where you can find a roadmap of how build a measurement framework.

IBM’s a leader in social business, committed to driving transformation, paving the way for open collaboration and employee engagement

Colleen Burns, Manager of IBM’s Influencer Engagement Team, shared IBM’s belief that employees are one of the greatest sources of influence. Not just in IBM products, but in the entirety of the company. IBMers (as employees call themselves), play a critical role helping to set the agenda, as well as build and cultivate relationships.

The IBM Redbooks Thought Leaders Social Media Residency is a great example. The program was designed to create a pipeline of thought leadership blogs and help motivate technical employees to establish their personal social eminence while sharing their technical knowledge and expertise while building engagement opportunities. Since it’s inception in 2011, program participants have authored nearly 2,000 blogs across 11 business topics. In fact 800 posts published on IBM’s Thoughts On Cloud blog have accrued 1.1 Million visits and counting!

IBM’s Select program, designed to identify high-value experts to support social strategies aligned to go-to-market priorities, enabled SMEs to tag links and track inbound referrals from their personal blogs. This program has quantifiably outperformed traditional marketing and paid media tactics, proving digitally engaged experts could achieve a 33% conversion rate to a call to action.

IBM is also helping customers like Performance Bicycle achieve results by creating a community based learning center, which has become the Go-to destination for cycling enthusiasts. Moderated by employees that are cycling experts, they’ve achieved a 300% increase in traffic within first four months while proving a 20% higher conversion from the Learning Center compared to other referral sources.

IBM’s work with Illy, an Italian coffee and accessories retailer, resulted in a 40% increase in traffic to the retailer’s online shopping catalogue.

Amber Armstrong, Program Director of IBM’s Social Business team, launched a unique employee advocacy program powered by Dynamic Signal with 200 initial subject matter experts (SMEs). This elite group drove 146K shares to date, resulting in 188M impressions and 603K clicks through to the call to action. An estimated cost savings on media spend between $300K – $1.2M.

Wow! What an incredible demonstration of ROI

If you’re striving to build a successful employee advocacy program and missed today’s webinar, you can access the replay below, and can also follow and contribute to the dialogue on Twitter using the event’s hashtag #AdvocateArmy

A special thanks to our webinar sponsors BrightTalk and Dynamic Signal

What’s the #1 incentive employees seek from an Employee Advocacy program?

Nearly every event I speak at on Employee Advocacy, I’m asked by business leaders, “What incentives do you find work the best to motivate employees to engage?”

This question was raised when I was honored to speak at the Social Media.Org Brands Only Summit, where there over 300 brands were present.

So,“What incentives do you find work the best to motivate employees to engage in an employee advocacy program?”

Do you suggest paying them?

Do you provide prizes?

Do you use leaderboards?

What about gamification techniques?

While these may provide a limited lift in engagement for some brands, I would say none of these are what employees are truly seeking. So what is it that motivates employees to engage in a committed way to share their expertise and great news about their companies? Two words:

Visibility and recognition

Top most is visibility amongst coworkers, managers, but most importantly Senior Leadership. Followed by recognition for their commitment and dedication. It’s truly that simple!

So what are you doing to integrate visibility and recognition types of rewards into your Employee Advocacy program?

Here’s a few ideas you may want to consider:

Start a column to recognize the most dedicated employees that are the most committed to regularly engaging to drive the program and company goals forward. Run this column in your company newsletter and create a feature story series on your intranet or company blog.
Create a monthly opportunity for Senior Leaders to recognize employees verbally on a management call. A simple mention of the employee with examples of how their efforts are driving results is a fabulous way to motive employees and spread the good word to management and the C-Suite as well as inspire others to engage.
Take advantage of company events where leaders can recognize the efforts of the top most engaged employees publicly amongst their coworkers. There is nothing more gratifying that public recognition.

You will find more on this topic during the Q&A of this video where I’m asked this question and more. Also, there is a whole section about rewards and recognition in my book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth see Chapter 2: Help your people do well

Best selling author and founder of Social Media.Org the one and only Andy Sernovitz pictured with me. What a great event!

“The Most Powerful Brand on Earth,” presented by Susan Emerick from SocialMedia.org on Vimeo.

Employee Advocacy Is a Game Changer: Are You Ready?

Screen Shot 2014-08-18 at 11.44.32 AM — Value Realization*

Building a solid business case for a large transformation program like Employee Advocacy, is a game changer. You’ll either get support or your execs. will move on to the next request in their long que. Are you prepared to demonstrate the cost to value ratio? Do you know what motivates the key stakeholders you’re going to need to sell your business case to? If you don’t, the likelihood of securing the necessary resource and investment to get your program off the ground is slim to none.

Are you ready to change the game?

This week I had the opportunity to be a part of Social Media Today’s webinar sponsored by Social Chorus’ @nalvino called “Engaging Employee Advocates: How Electronic Arts is Activating Employees to Amplify the Brand’s Message” (click to see the replay), along with Electronic Arts program manager @jroumian and our moderator @PaulDunay of PWC.

On the webinar, we all spoke to the real and quantifiable value of Employee Advocacy programs, but none of this is possible unless you start by building a solid business case and securing the necessary investment from key stakeholders. Getting to Yes, requires that you understand what motivates these key stakeholders, in order for them to give you what you need to get the program off the ground.

Here’s a brief summary of what I shared on the webinar on the nuts and bolts of building a business case, you’ll need to consider:

Value Realization
Securing investment – Selling to internal stakeholders
Understanding Motivations

Building the Business Case

The business case for a large transformation program will require both costs and value. If you only estimate the expected value, you do not have a business case; you have a value proposition. It may be very helpful to begin by estimating only the value proposition to determine whether you should spend the effort to develop a complete business case. There is nothing wrong with that. Just be sure to develop the full business case, with costs clearly identified, before investing significant resources and energy into the program. The most common sources of value include increased revenues and decreased costs, or efficiency and productivity gains. For example, revenues can increase when employees generate more leads or conversions. Costs can decrease if employees generate conversions at a lower cost per conversions —or— if employees answer customer questions in ways that cost the brand less per customer.

Another example might be, in your marketing campaigns, you may be able to create business value by empowering employees with the skills to condition the market, to persuade potential customers, or to create consideration and preference through their authentic trust and credibility with decision makers and those who influence them.

In such cases, you may find that costs of leads, conversions, recruitment, and sales improve through your program.

In general, the business case should clearly support the current goals of the business. Such business goals typically include goals for the current fiscal year or longer-term strategic goals. While you may be able to secure a small amount of pilot funding without having to show how your program supports the official goals of the organization, programs like this are only truly successful when they scale to touch the majority of the organization. In most organizations, that level of investment will only be granted if you can show how the program contributes to the most important goals of the organization for the upcoming fiscal periods.

Let’s break this down further, considering Value Realization

You should establish a method for proving the program’s value over time. This is necessary for two reasons: First, you need to establish a feedback loop to help you understand whether the program is on track. Second, you should hold yourself and your team accountable for delivering the results you forecast when you requested funding for your program.

As you develop the business case, think about the ways that you will track and prove progress of the program. For all of the ways you plan to impact costs or revenues, determine how you will track that impact over time. For example, if you believe that employees will be able to generate Web traffic that leads to conversions, determine how you will measure the traffic, the conversions, and the costs of the conversions. Also remember to measure the current state of conversions and their costs before starting the program, so you have a baseline metric against which to compare.

Value realization reporting should be a permanent part of your program management activities, so you will need to plan for resources who will gather, analyze, and report the necessary data.

Next, you’ll need to think about Selling to Internal Stakeholders

Getting executive support is as much about educating the executives as it is about building the business case. In this context, selling is more about consulting, educating, and enabling the executives. It’s critical to know what motivates the people who can get you resources and investment required. The motivations of stakeholders may be vastly different, in addition to understanding those motivations you’ll need to be clear on how your program will help them achieve their goals. Build your business case around supporting the business goals as specifically as you can and align your justification for the business case to the motivations of stakeholder across an organization that you’re looking to partner with.

Understanding Motivations – To help you think through what might motivate leaders across different parts of the organization, this illustration from my book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, describes the motivations and the metrics that stakeholders typically want to see articulated in a business case. You can find more on the nuts and bolts of building a business case for an Employee Advocacy program in Chapter 7: How to Begin.

I hope these tips are helpful to you! To learn more, join us in Atlanta for the Employee Advocacy Summit. We have a great line up of speakers representing various industries, ready to show you the ropes based on their first hand experience!

*Value Realization – Image source: freeimages.com/wmagni

The Role of Online Influence in Employee Advocacy Programs

Recently I had the chance to discuss online influence and what 3M’s has done to power employee advocacy experts to engage in the digital world. Greg Gerik who led 3M’s eTransformation team globally since its inception, shares some ideas on how employee advocates are encouraged to build their online influence, benefiting the company and it’s customers.

To learn more about Employee Advocacy and what’s really involved with creating a successful program, join us in Atlanta on September 15, 2014 for the Employee Advocacy Summit.

Below is the interview and full transcript captured at SXSWInteractive 2014 with Greg Gerik.

Susan: Hi I’m Susan Emerick, I’m here with Greg Gerik of 3M, where he leads the eTransformation team and drives innovation from Social Media to all things Digital. He’s also been a gracious contributor to our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. Welcome Greg!

Greg: Thank you.

Susan: I thought we would talk a little bit about influence. When it comes to social media and empowering employees at a company. You reference in book how important it is that every individual employee understands their own personal influence, I’d like to know how your program helps them grow that over time?

Greg: I think that one of the things 3M brings to the table is a very knowledgeable expert trusted advisor to our customers. It’s interesting to me the humbleness of the Midwest I think for our company lends itself to people just assuming they don’t have a very large sphere of influence. But sometimes employees need help to see how they can translate their offline influence to a digital world, getting them to the point where they understand that they can have a larger impact on our business, on their personal brand, on 3M as a whole and even on businesses that are not directly related to them, so it’s exciting when they see that. To be able to show that to them is the joy that I get out of that I get out of the work I do.

Susan: How do you incentivize and help employees build their online influence? What measurements do you use to incentivize them to keep going?

Greg: We take each on a case by case basis. We’re working with one division right now that has very aggressive sales goals and their rolling out some amazing new products in the architectural market and to help enable their team get to where they want to go we show them how they can leverage the content they’ve created, leverage the information they have about those products, and use that to make a deeper, richer connection with the customer – which they’ve always had, but now they can have in the digital world as well. It’s very rewarding and a good example of how we can do that. Setting measurements, of course you know is a passion of mine. We work with all of the teams to help them understand how they can measure progress against their objectives. They all have lots of objectives, but it’s about helping them measuring back to that object, not just awareness but what kind of awareness, not just impressions but what are they actually going to do for you or for the brand, the business, are you changing the hearts and minds of the customer? Are you there for them? That’s what matters.

Susan: Alignment to business goals is really, really important and unless that the foundation of how you’re enabling employee advocates you’re not going to be able to quantify any outcomes that are aligned to achieving those business goals. How do you address assumptions about digital? As you reference in the book, there’s a need to help people overcome dealing with their own expectations when they come to the table and really want to get involved. Could you tell me a little bit more about these assumptions and how you redirect?

Greg: People that are not expert level in digital as a whole sometimes come to the table with false assumptions about the industry, or false assumptions about who their customer is or where their customer is. In fact here at SXSW, I just had a great conversation with some people in the medical world that previously assumed that nobody was talking about digital and the Doctors and advanced practitioners aren’t the ones active in social it’s more the residents – but that’s not true. The data shows that Doctors at all levels are participating in conversations all over the place. Sometime publicly, sometime behind walled forums. When I think of my role, or the role of the Global eTransformation team as a whole, because I’m a small part of that team – when we work with our business groups, we encourage them not to think about the limitations but to think about the opportunities. There’ve been instances of communities or “walled gardens” of people having conversations that you can tap into because you can ask them for access, you can ask to be a part of the conversation, you can develop relationships within those forums and figure out a way to not offend the community they’re building but leverage it to support them and help them. Sometimes you’d be amazed at what simply asking a question can do. So being able to open up the opportunities to show the possibilities is a huge part of getting rid of the assumptions. People get very excited, business teams see oh wow we can do this – that’s out there, it’s amazing and then they want to do more and more. That’s really a blessing in my role.

Susan: So the future is very promising, things are definitely changing with data driven marketing. A whole new way that marketing and communications professionals have to be change agents. Think about enabling employees and what you can drive in terms of performance-based marketing. Thank you so much Greg for being here and for your contributions to the book.

Greg: Great book! Go out and buy this book!

Susan: Well, thanks, Greg. So nice to see you!

This isn’t Margaritaville. You can lose the parrot head, my friend.

What’s the most common Employee Advocacy mistake brands make? Many brands have given their employees permission to use social media, published a social media policy, and offered training on the use of social venues. But that level of support leaves a lot of potential value on the table.

Many brands avoid empowering their employees in social media because they do not want to dis-intermediate the marketing team from customers, or they do not want employees creating brand assets that the brand does not own. Some brands fear that employees in social media could damage brand reputation or violate regulations and create liability for the brand. Some brands just do not know how to begin.

Regardless of how a brand feels about its employees in social media, nearly every brand today has employees who are active in social media and employees who talk about their brand in social media. Those employees engage in social media for a wide range of reasons. In many cases, employees get into social media because their partners and customers demand it.

While almost every brand today can find employees using social media to discuss their products, services, working conditions, and so on, the brands that achieve the most value deploy corporate resources and guidance to empower their employees in social media.

Simply asking employees to parrot brand-generated messages through their personal social media may help the brand to gain small amounts of reach or engagement, but it is not a sustainable strategy for engaging audiences and developing relationships online. It is easy to do, so a lot of brands do it; however, that approach fails to respect the relationships employees and their audiences, so it does nothing to help employees create a differentiated and effective presence online. Specifically, when people simply repeat brand-generated messages, they lose the ability to attract people like me, thereby diminishing their ability to build trust and advocacy online, or worse irritating their network and causing abandonment.

Here’s a hilarious example of the effect of parroting messaging featured by CONAN, to demonstrate the point:

See what I mean?

All joking aside, this kind of parroting can do huge damage to your brand. Not only is irritating your followers, it’s likely driving them away in droves.

A preliminary study that I’ve been working on, with my colleagues in IBM Research Watson Lab, has found that more than 50% of the 230,430 followers of a certain branded social account is also following more than one of the company’s branded or employees accounts. Given this, there is a risk of creating more spam than value for our constituents, if parroting messaging and distributing through multiple accounts continues. Resulting in the opposite of creating value.

My team has coined the phrase “Ecko Gecko” to describe the phenomenon. We’ve created guidance to help our employees understand what negative affects parroting messages has when they simply copy & paste the same message and share it across multiple accounts. There is significant risk in damaging brand reputation.

Leading brands monitor social media and use social media analytics to observe and evaluate the effectiveness of their employee’s who are engaged in social on behalf of their companies. It’s scary what you might find. Especially when it comes to the practice of copying & pasting the same message over and over then distributing via social accounts, both branded and employee accounts. Are you monitoring in this way?

There is an important opportunity here, a teaching moment. Don’t let it paralyze your efforts, use the insights to create new education and training to course correct. Share the findings from your analysis and provide clear, concrete incentives for behavior modification. If you share examples of what not to do, backed by quantifiable and substantiating evidence based on data which demonstrates the negative impact such actions have, such as:

driving “un-follows”
encouraging “opt-outs”
causing “removals from lists”, (just to name a few)

Who can argue or ignore that?

For more on how to “Help Your People Do Well”, read chapter 2 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth.

Embracing challenge. Pioneering brand marketers pave the way to lead digital & social business at their companies

Greg Gerik @ggerik of 3M moderates a panel of pioneering brand marketers at the 3M Think Tank. Kevin Hunt (General Mills), Susan Emerick (IBM) and Mason Nelder (Verizon) openly discuss core challenges companies face when embracing digital & social.

Mason Nelder @MasonNelder cites “Closing the leadership knowledge gap” as a huge challenge and how “It’s on us to communicate and educate” and help drive change. “We’re in a big incubator – fail fast, fail often — but learn from it and find incremental gains. … We must keep the voice of the customer at every point of the product lifecycle.”

Kevin Hunt @kevin_hunt explains the talent gap. “There aren’t enough rubber bands and sticks of gum”, currently staff is stretched really thin and lack of funding is a challenge. There’s an expectation that people will where many hats. In the future, it’ll be a luxury that we’ll be able to have staff who are more well rounded, demonstrating higher levels of aptitude to support your company’s needs. “There are scores of new leaders on the horizon, soon a new landscape will be upon us.”

What is Nirvana? Susan Emerick @sfemerick shares that “social must become integrated into the way we work, a part of every aspect of the work we do, and gone are the days of silo’s. Soon, it will be integrated into Sales, Customer Service, HR, in addition to Marketing & Communications. …. We have a vast opportunity to expose the expertise of employees through Employee Advocacy.”

Seated left to right: Kevin Hunt, Susan Emerick, Mason Nelder and Greg Gerik

Touring the 3M Innovation Center was an amazing immersive experience. The space, set up with interactive demo stations, chronicled thousands of product discoveries, advancements and featured how each makes life better. Burgeoning with stories about the work passionate 3M employees do, all just waiting to be told.

A huge Thank You to Greg Gerik @ggerik of 3M and his team for organizing and hosting such a great event. I was honored to be included.