social employees Archives | Page 2 of 3

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.

Work your core: Proven principals to drive Employee Advocacy results

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

How many hours of social media training are enough for social employees?

There is no right answer to this question. The number of hours of social media training required depends entirely on the individual, for two reasons:

Each person comes into social media training with a different level of understanding, skill and practical application of social capabilities.
Each person is unique in the way they learn, some requiring more time than others.

So saying any given number of hours is sufficient is the really the wrong question. The notion of setting the clock and saying everyone should be able to get this in a set amount of time is pretty dangerous concept. Let’s play this out a little further …

Early adopters of social who’ve built a significant presence and social currency on their own prior to the training, may need very little training. While those starting from scratch and/or have many doubts about the value of social to begin with (these are the ones who come kicking and screaming into the training), may need much more, that is … if you convince them to being trained in the first place.

When building a training curriculum start by teaching:

The value of building trust and credibility online and how it can be used to engage with colleagues, partners and customers to establish or nurture relationships.
Help your employees understand the shift in the way people seek and consume information. And, how the most sought after sources are actually credible and trustworthy experts in their field. The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer is a great study showing this trend.
Explain the way humans communicate has changed dramatically as a result of social capabilities, our world becoming increasingly more social every minute and earned media sources remain most credible, the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey provide more details.
Help them to understand how their personal engagement can benefit them professionally, as well as benefiting the company or the customers they serve.
Be clear about the level of effort and commitment required to develop an effective online presence.

One size fits all training in a set amount of time with certification is a recipe for disaster. As cited by Gallup Leadership research:

When leadership fails to focus on individuals’ strengths, the odds of an employee being engaged are a dismal 1 in 11, or 9%. But, when . . . leadership focuses on the strengths of its employees, the odds soar to almost 3 in 4, or 73%. When leaders focus on and invest in their employees’ strengths, the odds of each person being engaged goes up eightfold.

I recommend a training program include an assessment of the employee from which they can plot the course that’s right for them. Consider approaching the assessment and personalized planning through the following steps:

Inventory each participant’s social presence to understand the social venues they use and how they use them.
Understand each person’s motivation for getting involved and remaining engaged in social media.
Assess the employee’s preferred online behaviors to determine the employee’s comfort level with various methods of engaging online. For example, do they only read what other people publish? Do they comment on other people’s content? Or do they create content on their own?
Determine the most effective ways to mobilize each employee according to their strengths and preferences. Also determine how you will empower them to utilize their skills, preferences, and strengths.

A social employee training curriculum needs to begin with an overview of the benefits of participating, clearly defining the expectations, time commitment, training support provided and the milestones, goals or desired outcomes your expecting them to drive. For example, our program focuses on 3 key themes Go Social. Stay Safe. Be Smart.

Go Social: Collaborating via social computing to pioneer intellectual capital and drive innovation that matters for clients and the world
Stay Safe: Practicing secure computing – building trust by taking personal responsibility to secure IBM, our clients and colleagues
Be Smart: Building and sharing insight and expertise, and exercising good judgment

We’ve created over 60 courses available on the Digital IBMer Hub, IBM’s employee training portal, to educate our 430,00+ employees on Social Business best practices. Nearly 200,000 courses have been completed.

This is a tremendous opportunity for the employees, but they may not see it right away. If they don’t see the value for them personally and what they’ll get out of it any amount of time is a waste.

This post was inspired when I served on a panel today at the Social Media Today “Social Shake Up” event with Richard Margetic, Director, Global Social Media, Dell and Sandy Gibson, CEO, Elevate, our panel moderator was, Greg Shove, Founder and CEO SocialChorus. The panel was called “Throwing Open the Floodgates: Empowering Employees” – here’s a brief descriptor: The rise of social media means that employees can become engaged with their customers within their individual capacities. But of course that’s easier said than done. Well ask four important questions: What are the floodgates, what does through them open mean, what are the risks and rewards of dong so and finally, how do you best throw them open?

Our panel moderator, Greg Shove, asked us an interesting question …

“How many hours of social media training are enough for your employees before your brand considers ready to participate in social media?”

Richard, responded explaining the Dell Social Media and Communities University (SMaC U) program requires 8 hours of training before any employee can receive their certification and use the @Dell identifier an officially represent the brand.

Social Workforce Enablement System Components

What support do your employees and partners need to effectively engage in social to represent your brand?

I’m a passionate believer that sharing knowledge & expertise is a key driver of effective social engagement and it is imperative when establishing personal & brand reputation. Our CEO Ginni Rometty, recently said it like this: “In a social enterprise, your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart on others.”

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring how IBM’s Expertise Enablement System compares to other leading brands that are vested in supporting a social workforce. This exploration led me to define a set of common components any company will require to drive successful engagement through social. I thought I would share these components here to inspire others who are working on developing such a system for their workforce. If you have additional ideas please share them with me!

Must have common componentry of an effective social business employee enablement program, include:

Organizational Alignment and Cultural Support from Senior Leadership: Executive commitment and open leadership is key to employee adoption. It is the leadership that sets the cultural tone for the organization. If the leaders embrace social and demonstrate that they practice it, not just talk about it, employees will adopt the company’s social business agenda and follow it’s organizing principles.
Training: Publicly-facing employees require training to ensure a consistent level of interaction quality.
Listening & Analytics: Social listening can enable activation, allowing employees to be responsive and even predictive with their actions. Deeper analytics provides employees and the company with an understanding of social engagement as compared to competitors and brand goals.
Content: Employees who create quality user-generated content stimulate interaction and discussion within their networks. Those who maintain a sustained commitment to such engagements are more likely to be recognized as an authority & become influential around their area of expertise.
Measurement & Reporting: Employee enablement KPI’s must be tied to business goals. Provided on regular basis, these analytics help employees understand their network engagement effectiveness and allow them to make informed decisions that improve future performance.
Platform: Curation and selection of appropriate social networks & venues ensures employees are engaged where their constituencies are likely to be participating & seeking expertise.
Governance: Ensures that each component of the Enablement system is on-point and in compliance with company standards & security requirements

What are the common components of social empowerment systems at your company? Please share them with me, so I can learn from you!

Show me. Guide me. Let me.

An approach to building a training curriculum to improve employee engagement through social media.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve worked with our internal communications & training specialists to lead the develop of an education curriculum to advance employee skills in the area of external social media engagement to benefit our customers and our brand. In this post and several to follow, I’ll share our approach in hopes of helping other brand marketers contemplating building such an education curriculum.

Getting Started

Before you begin creating any materials, it’s important to conduct listening research to understand which venues your customers are most engaged on. Knowing this will help you prioritize the training modules that need to be developed. For example, since IBM’s a large B2B in the tech space, we have specific focus on professional social networks, User Groups, Tech Forums & Communities and Tech related blogs so we’ve prioritized training on these venues. You’ll want to support your employees to advance skills on appropriate venues where your customers & prospects are more likely to connect & develop relationships. Stay away from developing training about the latest tools, there will be several hundred new ones introduced in the next few months and you won’t be able to keep up with them or the enhancements made post release.

Outline clear learning objectives

Once you’ve prioritized the venues important for employees to engage in, you’ll want to map out a curriculum that can accommodate various skill levels from beginner to advanced and begin segmenting the skills each module will deliver. For example:

Blogging 101: The Basics

Learning objectives:

Identify the basic features of Blogging and its terminology
Select a hosting platform for your blog
List techniques to create compelling blog content
Describe the guidelines and policies for Blogging specific to your brand

Blogging 201: Intermediate – How to Plan, Maintain and Optimize your blog

Learning objectives:

Identify the need to schedule blogging on your calendar
Demonstrate how to create compelling content
List techniques to optimize your blog for search engines to grow your audience

Blogging 301: Advanced – Differentiating and Promoting your Blog

Learning objectives:

Identify how to differentiate your blog and promote your expertise
Grow your blog followers and connections
List tools to help you measure your influence

Training Approach: Show me. Guide me. Let me.

We use a progression of simulations under the framework of Show me. Guide me. Let me. This approach gradually helps learners develop the skills they need to engage in social media on behalf of IBM. More specifically:

1. Show Me (Demonstration): Video simulations demonstrate the steps of procedures to learners, while also showing text that describes the process. Audio is often also provided to explain the steps to learners.

2. Guide Me (Guided Practice): Learners participate in the simulation by clicking the tools they would use in real life, but the tools are simulated. Throughout the simulation, text or audio guides learners through the process within a safe environment where learners can make mistakes without interfering with actual customer information in a live system.

3. Let Me (Assessment): Learners click through a series of steps within lab exercise to achieve desired results, but no guidance is provided during the exercise. Learners rely on their knowledge attained in steps 1 and 2 to complete the simulation. This is the most effective way to know whether learners understand the process.

Training delivery methods

It’s not always feasible to host on-site training. This was the case for us because we’re a global brand, so we use web based collaboration tools like IBM Connections and Smart Cloud to deliver the training. Hosting a series of community based lunch & learns in which the presentation was shared by the trainer during the first 30 minutes and then was opened up for questions and discussion the last 30 minutes. Throughout, participants and moderators are actively using text chat to provide input and ask questions or provide answers. We also recorded each session and made the modules available on our internal intranet portal called the Digital IBMer Hub. Employees to access the modules on demand at a time that is convenient and replay as many times as they like.

Given the quickly evolving nature of social and digital media, you will need the ability to quickly create and distribute training or education to your people—especially as new channels, best practices, or policies emerge or fade. This approach could easily be used to train employees who are active in social media and also to keep them continually equipped with the latest information about your brand.

Building the IBM Brand in the Social Sphere

I’ve traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark to speak at the IBM Smarter Business Event.

This is my first time here and it’s an amazing vibrant city, full of old world charm and tourists from around the globe. I was lucky enough to have some time when I first arrived to tour a bit and take some snapshots to share with my family, friends and co-workers back in the US.

I’m excited to present work I’m leading, more specifically the IBM Select Social Eminence Program. This initiative empowers employees who are world-renowned for their expertise, experience, and reputation to more effectively share their knowledge across the social web. This is one of many social enterprise programs in IBM’s digital & social marketing strategy.

Skab verdens stærkeste brand, Susan Emerick, IBM US from IBM Danmark

Also presenting is my esteemed colleague Christian Carlsson @chris_carlsson, IBM Digital Leader of Denmark. He’ll be sharing Social Business Recipes from IBM’s Social Business transformation.

Favoritopskriften på Social Business, Christian Carlsson, IBM from IBM Danmark

While Christian and I have met virtually many times via collaborative communities and have shared ideas over the phone while web conferencing, there’s nothing like meeting in person face to face.

I’m also looking forward to is talking with our IBM Customers who are keen to understand what IBM’s doing to become a social business. It’s a journey, one that I’m passionate about and have been involved with shaping for a number of years.

After that, I’ll lead a discussion with MBA students about the importance of building & sustaining your personal brand online. Share tips on getting started, how to make connections with those who share your interest and provide some recommendations on what not to do.

For those attending the event, I look forward to meeting you! For those following the event, I’ll share my perspectives via Twitter #sbdk #socbiz @sfemerick

Performance Guru Advocates the Human Side of Social Business

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.”

Techie Uses IBM developerWorks to Build Social Eminence

Nigel Griffiths eats, drinks and sleeps Power Systems. Around 15 years ago, this IBM performance guru located in the United Kingdom authored a free utility he called nmon (short for Nigel’s Monitor), which can be used to monitor and analyze performance data on AIX and Linux systems.

While never officially supported by IBM, the tool captured the attention of performance specialists throughout the world to the point where today, Griffiths estimates, it has between 20,000 – 30,000 users. As nmon’s popularity grew, Griffiths was faced with a problem: how best to support this burgeoning community. “And so to communicate with them better, rather than e‑mailing them all,” he explains, “I started to get involved in developerWorks …” Thus marked the beginning of Griffiths’ journey into using developerWorks and its extensive social media capabilities.

A growing awareness of users’ needs

Griffiths first step was to create a wiki which he used to provide documentation and downloadable binaries for nmon. From there, he started a forum to answer questions from users directly and get answers to them fast. But he soon discovered that he was also fielding questions about Power Systems performance in general, and he noticed that many users were confused about how the machines work and how to get the best out of them, “Everyone wants their machine to go faster”.

And so Griffiths began blogging on developerWorks to allow others to benefit from his AIX and Linux expertise. He even made a few embedded videos. “I have the luxury that I work in advanced technical support, so I work on new things that are happening, new machines that we are bringing out with the latest technologies,” he says. His rule of thumb in deciding what to blog about: when he comes across content of interest to him, chances are that lots of others will be interested too.

The reader reaction and comments he’s generated from his blog entries have helped Griffiths escape what he calls “expert blindness”. He points to IBM clients just starting out and how they often struggle with things that he thinks are blatantly obvious. “That makes me rethink the way that we’re putting these things over and it reminds me that … there’s always some new guys that need a bit of help,” he says.

Griffiths has also found that customer tech people value interacting with IBM tech people and are impressed when contact is made, which helps increase brand awareness and purchase consideration among IT decision makers.

Griffiths is now using Twitter @mr_nmon to get the word out about his blog postings and to follow other leading performance experts. Currently, he follows 12 other techies inside and outside IBM whose knowledge he respects. “I usually find maybe one or two things a day that I think, oh, that’s useful, that would take me ages to work out. Or, I’ll file that one away, that could be useful in a project in the future,” he says. He also likes to re-tweet those items to the 400 or so people that are on his Twitter list, so they’re aware of the good stuff that others are doing.

Finding your own way

Griffiths’ advice to others considering social media: “Find out what approach to social media works for you.” For him, it’s about spending a few hours each week sharing expertise so people don’t have to find things out the hard way.

While leery about becoming too well known, Griffiths acknowledges that his reputation as a performance guru has grown considerably since he started blogging and tweeting. And his moderated use of social media shows that you don’t have to jump in with both feet to be really effective and make a contribution.

A quick look at developerWorks

Since 1999, IBM developerWorks has been the IT industry’s most comprehensive source of technical content for the developer community, focusing on IBM software products, as well as open-standards technologies such as Java, Linux, XML, Web development, and more. Four million IBM and non-IBM developers, IT professionals, and students in 195 countries use developerWorks each month to learn about advances in IT and open standards, develop and showcase their experience and skills, solve problems, and work collaboratively with experts and peers.

Today, the platform provides an extensive and well-managed set of social capabilities specially designed for business, which include wikis, blogs, forums, bookmarks, groups and profiles. Recently, developerWorks received the Forrester Groundswell Award and the AMI SMB Social Media Award in recognition of its effective use of social media.