I was honored to be interviewed by Kathleen Norton-Shock @katensch, one of the founders of Diva Tech Talk a specialized podcast that highlights women doing wonderful things in the technology arena. This series was created to inform and inspire women of all ages to succeed in professional and life missions that are technology-driven.
I hope my episode lives up to this aspiration! You can access the blog and podcast interview recording here:
From executives of technology corporations to scrappy entrepreneurs, women are making a huge impact using technology, and in the technology sector today. Yet, the number of women in technology careers is still much too small. To communicate the strong value that women bring to the field, Diva Tech Talkfeatures interviews with female technology leaders, and emerging leaders; and highlights issues and trends in technology. I’m grateful to be considered amongst this esteemed group of leaders!
Follow the @DivaTechTalks series on Twitter for a regular dose of inspiration!
So much goes into building and sustaining a successful employee advocacy program, yet one of the most commonly overlooked steps is determining how to evaluate and measure the varying degrees of engagement amongst program participants. Without a measurement framework, you will not be able to evaluate against transparent criteria and provide the appropriate level of reward and recognition based on the efforts each individual puts forth.
Here are 3 tips on establishing criteria for measuring Employee Advocacy program engagement:
Evaluate the degree to which they perform activities aligned with the Employee Advocacy Program’s goals
Evaluate the degree to which employees are engaging in the content (commenting on it, linking to it from their user generated content i.e. blog posts) and the degree they’re sharing it with their networks
Evaluate the degree to which employees demonstrate ongoing interest in being part of and advancing the program, this could demonstrated by consistently attending to program update calls, active participation in communities, providing peer-to-peer mentoring support to colleagues
For more guidance on measurement approaches and how to build out a mentoring program where employees who advance their commitment and adoption can become mentors of others to coach/train — reference Chapter 5 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth.
Successful employee empowerment begins with a plan, yet all to often critical planning stages are overlooked, and rushing to execution is the norm. The following 3 critical planning steps are an essential foundation for a successful employee advocacy program:
Build a plan that considers: 1. Business alignment 2. Team design 3. Role design
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail
Business Alignment
In order to understand the current state of your employees in social media, ask the following questions:
• Which business topics will your employees discuss online?
• To what extent do your employees discuss topics related to your brand in social media?
• Do they have the expertise to discuss these topics in a knowledgeable manner?
• In which venues do they discuss those topics?
• Where do they participate most actively?
• Which target audiences engage in those conversations with employees?
• Do employees represent your brand, or only themselves, when discussing the topics that matter to your brand?
• To what extent do employees publish versus listen?
• Do they have a degree of authority among the people in their online community?
• To what extent do your competitors’ employees possess authority in the same online communities?
• How would you like the above factors to change?
• How much would it be worth to your brand to change the factors above?
Answering the above questions and creating an inventory of engaged employees helps you to understand what you need to do.
As you work to determine the organizational goals that your program will support, collaborate with the leaders of the business units or functional teams that the program supports. And help them to understand how your program can help them to achieve their goals. Then determine the order in which you will take the steps to implement social media empowerment for people in their organizations.
Specifically, you will not be able to deploy this program to the entire organization at once. Instead, prioritize internal teams for enablement, and manage expectations with their leaders. Ensure that everyone understands when you will be able to support their goals and empower their people in social media.
Team Design
Once you understand the organizational goals that you need to support, you can think about how you will organize your teams to achieve those goals.
For example:
Will you empower one person per subject area, or multiple people per subject area?
Will you empower people in one location, or across global regions?
How much time commitment can you expect from each participant?
This will depend largely on the extent to which their management supports their participation. To what extent will your organization’s marketing, PR, and brand staff participate in the program? Will they provide support, tools, or content to the people you empower?
Role Design
During this step, you will define the roles and domains of expertise that you wish to activate in social media. Your selection criteria should be based on your program requirements and the business outcomes you plan to support.
Employees must be segmented to determine which training, support, and tools they require and receive. Employee segmentation also determines the policies, rights, and privileges that apply to each employee. Some job roles may not be appropriate to activate or may require restrictions on their social media activity. For example, employees with access to the private data of your customers may need different tools than people with no such sensitive access.
See Chapter 6 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth for more information about protecting the safety and security of employees, customers, and your organization.
Determine which roles in your organization are able to support brand outreach based on goals of your program and the extent to which each employee is expected or allowed to participate. Then, prioritize the segments of your employees and define the order in which you will empower each role type. For example, you might choose to empower product managers first, then product development staff, and market researchers last.
Finally, based on the information above, define the roles that socially empowered employees can play within your program. Specify how a role will be different when supporting marketing goals versus supporting recruiting goals. Perhaps they will use different tools, they may need different skills or experience, and they might set different goals for professional development.
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 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 between employees and their audiences, so it does nothing to help employees create a differentiated and effective presence online. At the program level, design your training and support in 3 stages: Prepare, Manage and Reinforce. From an Individual level, program participants will advance along a continuium at their own rate and pace based on what they commit to. More details can be found in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth
In general, the greatest potential value of socially empowered employees can be achieved only when the brand aligns employee activities in social media with brand goals. And you should do so across the organization.
As stated by Danna Vetter, Vice President of Consumer Marketing Strategy at ARAMARK: “Each of our businessesthat are active on social has different strategies to meet their business needs. So the metrics we use to determine success vary by strategy. We expect employees to set goals and objectives to meet their business’ needs, just like they would in any marketing campaign. Our job is to give them the opportunity to be successful and provide them the tools that allow them to be.”
Brands that build the competitive advantages of socially engaged employees quickly encounter a host of internal and external challenges, including potential conflict between brand goals and the employees’ personal goals for their own professional reputations. Often, those two sets of goals may not align completely, and it takes some effort for the brand to keep it all working together.
As a follow up installment to my last post titled: Employee Advocacy: Program engagement doesn’t imply program success, I hope this follow up installment provides you considerations that will help you better understand why starting from the frame of reference of employees is critical.
Considering the vantage point of the employee, why is this so important?
In order to truly encourage employees to engage in an employee advocacy program, you must start with defining and demonstrating how actively engaging in the program will help them increase their visibility amongst customers, influential decision makers, colleagues and industry influencers. Yes, that’s right, I also said demonstrate. That means you’ll need to develop case studies / real examples for employees to reference to help them get the picture.
Start by designing education and support materials around common questions and objections employees have. If not answered from a benefit or position of value, employees will not adopt.
When you design the program with these objections/questions in mind you’ll learn more about what employees are experiencing and you’ll be able to so when they’re raised we have a module/guide to address them in a playbook. This playbook becomes a helpful reference as you extend the number of program managers and participants. You can evolve it over time. Consider deploying a learning hub with a forum component that allows you to gather feedback and field questions. If employees are heard and secure support when they ask for help, they’ll increase their engagement.
Be sure to educate them so they understand how engagement will help them work more effectively, efficiently and last but not least – – how they’ll get recognized for their efforts. It truly is a critical foundation that many brands miss when designing employee advocacy or social selling programs, often thinking that gamification or leader boards are all it takes to drive engagement. While these may help, I’ve learned that the most important and highly regarded form of recognition employees seek is visibility, you can read more about that in this post: What’s the #1 incentive employees seek from an Employee Advocacy program?
So what are the most common questions employees may have? Here’s a few examples, that’ll help you get started:
Why is engagement on social (for business/professional) something worth my time?
Why me? Isn’t this kind of engagement for an intern who knows how to engage on social?
Why should I focus my time on this when I have all these other pressing demands in my job role?
Which then leads into several other questions such as:
How do you define “engagement”?
What is expected of me?
How will I be measured? Compensated?
What are the guidelines?
What training is provided?
Will I be assessed for this?
Is this mandatory?
The key here is to define the value proposition from the vantage point of the employee who will in the end be the lynchpin of the programs adoption and engagement success. The answers must be defined as benefit statements for the adoption and engagement … such as the benefits of:
How sharing and receiving knowledge helps them access to new ways of thinking, access to answers for challenges they’re grappling with and learning from someone who’s already figured it out
The benefits of being positioned as a thought leader, networking and relationship development, and how they’ll tap into the intellect of influential prominent thought leaders that are paving the way
The program foundation must include guidance for employees, a playbook that anyone in your company can tap for engagement guidance, it includes such topics as:
Policies
Procedures
Access to FAQs and directions for access to “go to contacts” for further help
Brand engagement guidelines
Safety and Security
Disclosure
Basic training portfolio
Consider tying adoption and engagement to the basic competencies for staff development and assessment. For example:
Certification of completion is tied to learning/training objectives for all employees and is tied to skills development requirements, qualifications and assessment criteria used by HR and Management in the review, talent advancement and acquisition system.
Focus on adoption and engagement for key segments of your employee population that will help achieve the highest priority business goals first, then expand from there.
It’s essential to have a core team that will actively manage the program and provide support to employees as they advance along the journey. If you need further guidance, reference the second chapter of my book: The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, “Help you people do well” which explains how to establish a program framework which provides the foundation for your people to create and nurture relationships that drive engagement and create business value. Specifically, you’ll better understand how to plan the roles and skills needed, then attract, onboard, support, and measure the people whom you empower in social media.
I’m asked repeatedly, “What’s the secret to driving employee engagement for employee advocacy programs?”
The reality is, there is no secret recipe. In this post I’ll share a few thoughts which I hope aide you in evaluating the design of your Employee Advocacy program and help you make the necessary adjustments to drive more employee engagement.
To be sure we’re on the same page, let’s start with what I mean by “Engagement”. My starting premise is that the employee has already agreed to:
Participate in the employee advocacy program
Has been through the pre-requisite on-boarding, training and certification steps required to be officially granted program participant status. This means, they’ve been fully trained and equipped to engage across the social web, they understand the companies guidelines, policies, governance model.
They know their role and how their engagement aligns to helping the company achieve specific goals.
If you need further guidance, reference the second chapter of my book: The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, “Help you people do well”which explains how to establish a program framework which provides the foundation for your people to create and nurture relationships that drive engagement and create business value. Specifically, you’ll better understand how to plan the roles and skills needed, then attract, onboard, support, and measure the people whom you empower in social media.
Program engagement doesn’t imply program success.
Employee engagement in the program is a means to an end. Constant, high engagement is a condition for a successful Employee Advocacy program, but it’s not enough.
Unfortunately, program engagement rates are sometimes considered as the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for the program’s success. As a result, program managers are tempted to adopt tactics that will artificially boost engagement in the program. Stop right there! Increasing the amount of activity will not impact achievement of program’s goals such as driving an increase in lead generation or increased prominence and ability to influence to drive consideration, preference and choice of your brand’s offering.
To address this, make sure that you are clear on how your program defines program “success” standards:
Align the Employee Advocacy program’s goals with business objectives
Define the Employee Advocacy program’s success in terms of business impact (sales, conversion rates, cost savings)
Establish meaningful business KPIs for program’s success, which are trackable and quantifiable
Link performance assessment of Employee Advocacy program managers to achievement of program’s goals (aligned with business objectives), not to program engagement KPIs
The basis of the word “engagement” means commitment. Approach engagement and adoption from the value to the employee in service of customers and your business will benefit.
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
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?”
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 Earthsee 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!
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)
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.
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
In a world where information continues to explode, people still trust people. In fact, research from Edelman and Nielsen continue to show that people are more likely to trust information from an organization’s employee or from someone they perceive to be like themselves, than from an organization’s official communicators, web site or sponsored content.
If your content marketing plans do not include some level of empowering employees to publish in social media, you may be missing a huge opportunity to build trust with your audience.
The Practice of Effective Social Business Program Management
Social gives you the ability to connect human beings with one another and ignite conversations around shared topics of interest relevant to your brands priorities. So if you’re thinking about social as just another channel to push content through, think again.
As you build your social program, identify insights and key learning’s from your listening research. Evaluate the ecosystem of people and connections. Think through how you can create a presence that will appeal to those you want to build relationships with and who would be best suited to be the focal point. Most likely, it’s not a marketer. Rather, focus on encouraging dialogue with your employees who have expertise to share. These leaders will not only have valuable knowledge, they also hold the promise to become the most trusted and credible within a relationship.
Like any other tactic or channel, social should not be approached independently but with an eye towards fulfilling your larger objectives. As you begin to think about your social plan ask yourself what role it will play in achieving your overall goals? Defining and identifying realistic ways to measure success are critical steps in creating the framework for a successful program.
Another crucial element in the early stages of developing a social program is performing listening research – this is how you get to know your audience and come to understand where they like to spend their time online and what kinds of content and tactical approaches they are most likely to respond to.
A change Agent – The emerging role of the Social Business Manager
Social business management is undertaken by people who create and engage in social digital experiences on behalf of your brand. At IBM, there’s a new role emerging, the Social Business Manager. This individual not only collaborates closely with the extended marketing management team to provide oversight for all aspects of a social business program including social listening research, planning, engagement and measurement. They also act as a change agent.
They’re driving cultural change and adoption of social through their commitment to:
Work with employees as a relationship manager and coach
Provide direction to employees on relevant influencers, external brand champions, partners and competitors within specific topic area. Help employees establish priorities which relationships to focus on.
Provide supporting assets, program guidance, training and critical feedback to those employees engaged in social outreach
Through some early pilot work I’ve been leading, we’re able to quantify that engagement with influential experts in social media is 135%* more effective at generating sales leads than traditional digital marketing tactics. Another way of saying this is, trusted SMEs who share their expertise online are 7x more likely to drive initiations with a call to action (offer) when compared to other digital marketing tactics in the same period.
This is a win-win for the brand and employees. The employees benefit from building their professional reputation and increasing their visibility in their field, while they drive the brand’s influence and support lead development in the market.
If you’re approach social as just another channel for marketers to manage and push content through, think again.
Martin Packer describes himself as an “IBMer, Mainframe Performance Guy and zChampion, who gets to think about lots of other stuff.” And if you’d follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook or read his blog, you’d soon realize that characterization fits him to a T.
Martin’s involvement with social media began 25 years ago, when he first joined IBM and was introduced to its VM forums. Used by the technical community to talk internally about VM operating system issues, Martin quickly discovered two things. “Firstly, I could get discussions going on technical topics and, secondly and perhaps more importantly from a social perspective, I could find like-minded people in the company,” he says.
The forums provided Martin with a vehicle to grow professionally and gain stature as a mainframe performance specialist. They also gave him the impetus to establish his own voice within his community. “In 2005, I became aware of IBM’s internal blogging site called Blog Central. I guess I was a late adopter of blogging as a technique, but I took to this one quite readily and that really was where I got started with blogging and then with micro-blogging through Twitter and a lot of other social applications,” he says.
Today, Martin’s principal social applications are: IBM developerWorks, his Mainframe Performance Topics blog that’s open to IBM and non-IBM developers alike; he’s on Twitter @martinpacker, where he has close to 1,300 followers; LinkedIn where he continues to grow his professional network with those who share common a interest in mainframe performance topics and Facebook, where approximately 50 percent of his 300-plus friends are customers, IBM developers, consultants and other people in the field.
How does Martin make use of these different applications?
“Well, it’s horses for courses,” he explains. “I got heavily into Twitter because a lot of what I had to say was very brief. I didn’t want, for example, in a blog post to develop an argument over several column inches just to deliver a one-sentence payload. So, for me, Twitter works very well. It’s not as rich a medium as Facebook, so where the richness of medium is required, I think Facebook is better.
“But I’ve returned to blogging this year because I’ve realized there are some things I want to explain and discuss in much more detail and blogging is the right medium. … I think it’s a case of you use the tool depending on what you’re trying to do.”
On mixing personal and professional
Martin is not averse to mixing in non-technical discussions and comments. In fact, he sees it as a way of bringing his community closer together. “We get to find common ground,” he says. “For example, it might be taste in music or movies or books we’ve read, or maybe personal philosophy. So I have found that it’s really helped in getting to know customers and other IBMers and consultants in the industry much better and, hopefully, the same has worked the other way around.
“Other people have been able to get to know me better, to build common cause with me better, and that’s the way it seems to work.”
This eclectic approach of just being yourself is what Martin calls ‘authentic voice’ — “talk about stuff you want to talk about in ways you want to talk about it, using the media you want to talk about it in.” And it appears to have served him well in advancing his credibility and social eminence.
For example, when he speaks at conferences or visits with customers, “I’m seeing more and more people say to me I actually read your blog article on this very subject the other day,” he says.
Advice for beginners
Martin recommends that people find the medium that works best for them — “it’s probably several media” — and determine where the community they feel most at home with resides. Once people get started, he says, they’ll figure out how much time they want to devote. “I don’t really schedule time for social networking,” Martin says. “In fact, I regard it as interstitial. It’s stuff I do on and off throughout the day and maybe the night, as and when the mood takes me.”
Prove value to your stakeholders, or your program will be short lived
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
