Rachelle-Spero-Partner-New-YorkThis is a follow up to Rachelle Spero’s previous blog post: Social-Enabled Enterprise for Employee Engament.

The corporate adoption of social technologies for employee engagement is a complex issue as many companies still struggle with how best to activate employees externally to help the company build trust, credibility, reputation, awareness, authority, education or relationships with key audiences. The most successful global companies are able to adapt to this reality when they transform their internal communications mechanisms from one-way transactions to multi-directional engagement from the inside out. The problem is the time and resources required to keep up the conversation and engagement across social channels.  This kind of transformation requires support from senior management as well as a clear roadmap internally on how the organization will transform to a social-enabled enterprise. Here are some steps to help corporates get started:

  • Create an enterprise-wide engagement process: Conversations within social media channels are global, public and permanent. Team structure is crucial to executing a storytelling and engagement strategy successfully across social media. Map out and gain consensus on resource needs, roles, responsibilities and accountability for engaging and maintaining online communication with stakeholders. We then help to develop a newsroom-like model for mining storylines, creating content and engaging influential audiences to advance the corporate narrative.
  • Active employees online: The corporate reputation of a company is weighed by multiple voices within the organization, not just the C-Suite. Increasing employees’ familiarity with the company story and empowering them to be ‘part of the solution’ can reduce risk and improve engagement online. Companies can transform their social media communications by mobilizing a core group of self-directed and self-sustained employees to help drive engagement across social media to build relationships with key stakeholders, advance the communications priorities and develop credibility for the business. There are many business-to-business companies that have been using their employees to build trust, earn respect and drive engagement with key audiences online for years including – IBM, ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Unilever, and Caterpillar (CAT).
  • Strategically engage: In certain cases, and with the appropriate resources, there are opportunities to strategically engage with a carefully mapped network of online influencers. Our work in this area is focused on securing opportunities for subject matter experts to engage with key opinion leaders across relevant social channels.

At the end of the day, a successful employee engagement strategy will build a network of company ambassadors who help communicate the narrative and advance specific storylines to target audiences from the bottom up. In addition, this network will be your best defense in a crisis situation.

 

Rachelle Spero is a Partner at Brunswick Group who specializes in online reputation management, social media strategy and digital storytelling.

Heidy Modarelli handles Growth & Marketing for IPR. She has previously written for Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, The Next Web, and VentureBeat.
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