In addition to sharing my journey as a first time author, we discussed the book content, which is based on my experience building and implementing a successful employee advocacy program at IBM and that of many others who’ve led brand reputation initiatives and employee advocacy programs at global companies. It provides a full roadmap on how to unleash a brand’s most valuable resource, engaged employees, who build credibility through sharing their knowledge in social media and becoming employee advocates.
I hope these insights will inspire you to invest in building earned relationships that last. [button link=”#http://www.bryankramer.com/the-most-powerful-brand-on-earth-with-susan-emerick/” newwindow=”yes”] Listen[/button]
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.
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!
At the 2014 Employee Advocacy Summit in Atlanta this September, Liz Bullock will share lessons on training and making use of insights from data from her experience leading Dell’s employee advocacy program for 3 years. Below is a short interview I did with her at SXSW last Spring, where Liz shares valuable tips on how training and using insights from data are critical components to running an effective employee advocacy program.
Here’s the full transcript of the video:
Susan Emerick: Hi, I’m Susan Emerick. I’m here with my guest Liz Bullock who has been a gracious contributor to our book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, where we cover a case study of the work Liz did when she was at Dell as Director of Social Media and Community. I’d like to talk with you about your experience there and how social media impacts every stage of the customer life cycle and how employee advocacy is a part of that.
Liz Bullock: Yes, absolutely Susan. It’s a true honor to be here. You and Chris (Boudreaux) did an amazing job on the book. When you look at how customers are buying today, it’s fundamentally changed. They’re basically going out and researching products beforehand, whether it’s B2B or B2C and they’re making decisions through their peers. Once they make those decisions, they’re expecting the brand to engage and thank them for their purchase and if something’s not right, they expect an immediate response, usually within an hour. Companies really need to think about social throughout the customer lifecycle and how are you activating employees to go out there and listen and learn from both customers and engage in peer to peer networks. Be a part of the conversation where it makes sense.
Susan Emerick: You’ve done a significant amount of work to establish the SMaCU (Social Media and Community University) training program at Dell. Would you please share more with us about that?
Liz Bullock: Yes, absolutely. So I was part of the Center of Excellence team and our focus was around how could we drive social media strategically into the business, as effective tool across HR, Sales, Product groups etc. So we began with training. Dell being a data company, in some ways we started with the data first. We said, let’s start by looking at what our customers are doing and what we found there was 10,000 conversations per day in English and this was 3 years ago. Then we said, employees are out there, what are they doing? So we started by looking at 400 employees across the board representing different parts of the organization – marketing, product group, and sales. We started to dig in and see what they were doing. Some were fantastic, really engaging with customers in really rich and authentic ways. But, there was a mid-section, where we saw an opportunity for these employees to be more savvy in how they had used social media. So we decided to launch a training program called SMaC University – it stands for Social Media and Community University. We basically opened it up to all employees, but there was a requirement that any employee engaged in social on behalf of Dell, had to be certified. The requirements went into our policy. What are the risks, what are the best practices with Dell’s strategies. what was Dell’s point of view on employees roles, and last thing was teaching them judgment. There’s a lot you can teach, but I think it’s important to share best practices and ensuring they are doing the right things.
Susan Emerick: It’s really interesting that you describe a data driven approach to employee advocacy and how you enabled employees at Dell. At IBM we’ve been transforming our marketing and communications function from social intelligence. Gathering data and adjusting our strategic approach based on insights that come from the data. I think this is a significant change as a marketing professional over the years, having been involved in marketing and communications myself since pre-internet days. I’m curious to know how you think data is changing your role.
Liz Bullock: There’s such a rich amount of data now. With social you can get more insights into customers likes and dislikes through sentiment. I just heard Sandy Carter (IBM) speak about how from 200 tweets you can see 52 personalities – that’s incredible data. As a brand, I think you need to leverage that information to really understand you customer and how to service them and support them. So I think it’s the data pieces that are fundamentally changing the way marketing and communications teams have to advance. I don’t know if they’re aware of that yet, but that change is coming and they’ll have to embrace it.
Susan Emerick: Thanks for being here today, Liz, and all of your contributions to the book.
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.
As author Emily Giffin once said, “Everyone wants to belong, or be a part of something bigger than themselves, but it’s important to follow your heart and be true to yourself in the process.” This quote perfectly sums up what employee advocacy is all about: empowering employees to promote their company’s message on social media and, in the process, allowing them to develop their personal brand, and position themselves as trusted advisors and thought leaders in their own networks. I couldn’t agree more! Today, I had the pleasure of sharing my experience leading successful employee advocacy programs and what it takes to empower employees to engage. Getting started may seem daunting. But remember the saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day” … this applies directly to building an employee advocacy program. It takes time, but you have to start somewhere! So here are a few tips I shared on the webinar. I hope they help you to get underway. If you need help, let me know, I’m just a tweet away @sfemerick Tips for getting started: Building the business case: Understand & Articulate Why You are Starting a Program To establish an employee advocacy program, you will probably need to build a business case to explain the value the program will create. Getting executive support is as much about educating the executives as it is about building the business case. They are not necessarily specialists in marketing strategy, or how to pull together a marketing program, or social networking. They will not have the time to stay abreast of the changes and emerging technologies that are occurring and how they’ve impacted the way people communicate. They may not fully appreciate how marketing, sales, and service must adapt to these changes to improve the customer experience. You have to be the expert who helps them understand the way people connect and communicate is changing the landscape of the way decisions are made and who decision makers trust. I shared some important research that can help you educate your executives, including the Edleman Trust Barometer, the Nielson Consumer Trust in Advertising study are good sources that illustrate employees and “people like me” are the most trusted sources of information online. Set Goals and Objectives: Align to business goals and priorities, for example:
New markets
Market growth
Customer Acquisition
Retention and Loyalty
Financial Growth or Cost savings
Make sure program goals and content align with corporate branding initiative Find a Champion. Better yet, be one!Build a pilot with early adopters. Here are some common characteristics of best suited candidates:
Expertise aligned to business priorities, they can be Technical or Business topical experts
Comfortable collaborating, commenting, publishing in social environments
Comfortable with and finds value in creating relationships digitally
Committed to sustaining activity and evolving participation to achieve personal and business objectives
Willing to leverage internal listening capabilities to identify existing social graph and enhance online professional network
I hope these tips are helpful to you! If you can, 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! In case you missed the buzz on Twitter today, here’s the full Storify ….
Social media has changed the way people connect, interact and form relationships. We now have the ability to easily share our opinions and engage in dialogue with knowledgeable network connections, anytime of day, anywhere in the world. In a social business, value in social media is dependent upon the people who share and tell your company story.
“In a social enterprise,” says GinniRometty, CEO of IBM … “your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart on others.”
Employee engagement in online activities and conversations with thought leaders will allow you to impart valuable knowledge to the global community and contribute to the business goals.
Competitive advantage, in this exciting new world, is afforded to the organizations that not only make use of social tools and networks but also equips employees to share their knowledge and authentic voices. Engaged employees building relationships with others, helping them by sharing their knowledge and expertise on industry trends, emerging technology, or even economic trends through social networking, are key attributes of a truly social business.
A conduit between internal and external influencers, employees can take an active role in shaping how the public interacts with a company, brand properties and communities across the social web. The use of key social marketing strategies to activate employee experts and initiate conversations around key imperatives will separate leaders from the pack.
What are you doing to equip your employees to take part, share knowledge and offer their authentic voice?
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)
If you’re considering Employee Advocacy as a means to drive engagement in Social Media, you’ll need to develop a solid program and make informed choices about the software to support it. This report, published today by my co-author Chris Boudreaux has been well researched, and will save you lots of time.
Chris explores over 25 vendors providing technology options for Employee Advocacy programs, while categorizing the into 3 key use case areas:
Employee Enablement
Compliance Management
Performance Measurement
It’s a MUST read http://socialmediagovernance.com/social-employee-advocacy-software-buying-guide/
People tend to struggle with measuring the value of Employee Advocacy in social media for three reasons:
• First, there is the data. Tons of it. So much data that we call it big data. Social data aggregators and monitoring tools give us filters to remove much of the data that is irrelevant to a particular need, but even those tools often produce far more information than a person can digest.
• Second, there are the tools. Even after all the acquisitions that occurred during 2011–2012, there are still hundreds of social media measurement tools on the market. None of them will address all of any organization’s needs. In fact, many companies hire consultants to help choose the right bundle of measurement products, usually from multiple vendors.
• Third, people don’t know what to measure. Social media are still very new to most people. In addition, the media and our ability to measure them are still rapidly evolving. And many people simply measure whatever metrics the social networks publicly display, such as Fans or Followers.
So how to begin measuring the effectiveness of your brand and employee advocacy program?
You need a framework
At the most basic level, social media are all about relationships. Unfortunately, most measurement tools or approaches focus on interactions or transactions. Some tools focus on conversations, but that is still not the same as relationships. For example, Facebook “Likes” are not relationships. Brands that define their goals based on a targeted number of Likes are not focusing on relationships because that kind of goal focuses on one specific interaction or transaction. Such goals do not guide an organization to nurture valuable and lasting relationships with customers.
In general, the most successful employee advocacy programs provide fact-based, quantified performance feedback that encourages desired behaviors. The only way to do that is to establish a consistent measurement framework with clear metrics that everyone understands.
I see lot’s of attempts to pull together glitzy reports with loads of data but little insight or quantifiable attribution on how employees are actually contributing to business outcomes and demonstrating that their efforts are helping the brand gain share of wallet or increase it’s favorable position in the marketplace. If you’re stuck with this challenge, I recommend you begin by establishing a clear and consistent Measurement framework, with supporting key performance indicators (KPI’s) aligned to business or program goals.
Here’s a basic construct we’ve been evolving over years. It can be applied to B2B and B2C industries. You’ll need to evaluate performance in 3 key areas:
• Program readiness: Continually appraise and assess the degree to which your internal capabilities are prepared to pursue and achieve the goals you set for your program or your team.
• Employee performance: Measure the performance of your employees* in social media. For all of those groups, measuring their performance is not the same as measuring their activity. Therefore, your measurement efforts should focus on outcomes that your employees achieve with their target audiences, not the amount of work each employee does or how much content they produce.
• Business outcomes: All of this effort should be guided by your business priorities: the outcomes that matter for your organization. Maybe you want to find new customers. Maybe you want to hire the best people. Maybe you want to increase satisfaction among your existing customers. As you design your Employee Advocacy program, be sure to specify the business outcomes you seek to support and then define a plan to measure the extent to which you actually help achieve those outcomes.
Define a plan for measurement that includes the specific brand goals the program is intended to support, the tactics you will use, and the metrics you will track to evaluate success. Before you set out to measure and report performance on any one of these, you’ll need to set specific goal attainment targets from an established benchmark data, such as:
• Increase community engagement by your internal experts by 5 percent monthly from current baseline xNumber.
• Increase the online share of voice created by external influencers by 17 percent, versus your current baseline xNumber, by the end of the fiscal quarter.
• Increase employee connectivity to influencers and their extended network by 10 percent, from the current baseline xNumber, within the next 6 months.
The framework should ultimately allow you to measure and quantify to outcomes any effort (program, campaign or tactic) delivers. For example, financial impact but can be measured in terms of cost savings, quality improvement or increased revenue attainment.
See more details on these concepts and frameworks in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth – Chapter 5: You’ll measure new things in new ways
Your employees are the stewards of your brand, empower them to share their expertise & knowledge in service of customers. This won’t just happen, cultural change & a system of engagement are necessary to make it a reality. Ethan McCarty shares what we’re doing at IBM to Embrace Brand Identity in the World of Social Media.
This post provides a whole new meaning of “working your core”. These concepts will help you strengthen the results which your employees can drive by creating advocacy for your brand.
The target zone: Start small, be specific, choose wisely
Just like in a core body workout, seeing incremental results for the time and effort you put in, inspires you to keep with it. The same is true for building a employee* advocacy program for your brand. Start small, by choosing the best suited employees and partners, who will help you achieve and demonstrate incremental results more quickly. Be specific and choose wisely by applying the 1% rule (“90–9–1”) to your program recruiting. Focus on recruiting the best suited 1% of employees who have demonstrated they understand the value of building their reputation & are keen on increasing their visibility, committed to providing value to their network and sustain that commitment over time. Provided you’re conducting social listening, these select few are likely to naturally emerge in the social listening research as prominent and trusted experts in a topic that’s relevant to your business development goals. Use this intelligence wisely. Once you’ve prioritized this 1%, then set your sights on expanding to the 9%.
Consider establishing criteria which program participants must meet, here are a few examples I’ve found to be a winning recipe:
• A solid social footprint. Individuals that have worked to established a solid social footprint on their own and are focussed on participating actively in key social venues which are most relevant to the topic and/or network of interest. • Accessible. Individuals who’ve proven to be natural collaborators and are comfortable with making themselves available to their network. They focus on responding & engaging in ways that provide value to their connections. • Actions speak louder than words. Those that sustain engagement over time, are committed to sharing their expertise and helping others by demonstrating community leadership skills, drive superior results. They know well that it takes time, a commitment to consistency and engagement isn’t a hit-or-miss, occasional activity. They don’t just say they “get it”, they act on it. Engagement is a critical skill and is prioritized as an approach to the way they work.
Improve Reach: Focus on quality over quantity
At every stage of the customer experience, customers can talk about your brand within social media. As a result, you must nurture relationships in social media throughout the customer experience. Your employee advocates must be able to reach key target publics at each stage, get them engaged with your content, and motivate them to advocate on your behalf.
This is not easy to accomplish. It requires a focus, not just building a network for sheer volume, but rather building a quality network which shares common interest and benefits from the information your employees share. When your employee advocates nurture ongoing relationships with your audience in this way, they establish relationships with what we call a “social core”. The social core are simply people whom you reach, and have opted in to engage with you, and who would most likely advocate on your behalf.
Ultimately, the social core becomes an asset of the brand. An asset that you should mobilize your employees to nurture and build over time. In addition, you should continually evaluate and measure the health and strength of your social core so that you can continually improve the degree to which you are making it stronger.
See more details on these concepts and frameworks in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth – Chapter 5: You’ll measure new things in new ways
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.
Employee Advocacy is getting a lot of hype lately. So what’s the secret to empowering social employees to be engaged in social media to benefit your brand? Here’s a short video from today’s 3M Think TANK, hosted by Greg Gerik where following Brian Solis, I present a few concepts from our new book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth:How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media
