Page 123 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Other external voices

Outside your agency, spokespeople for your company can serve as SMM voices.
For example, if your company uses a celebrity or a series of celebrities to promote
products and services, they too can serve as SMM voices. These celebrities can
engage with your customers and build enthusiasm for your products and services.
But each time you use an external SMM voice, keep in mind that they may not be
as loyal to your brand as you may like them to be. They could be representing
other brands as well as your own. If you have an independent expert serving as an
SMM voice, keep in mind that she may not always be available to participate on
your behalf when you need her to. Often when external SMM voices are used,
they’re used in conjunction with internal ones and not in isolation.

Crowdsourcing SMM Voices

with Guidelines

For all the strategies that you may put into place to support your SMM voice, you
need to do still more. If you’re a large company with hundreds or thousands of
employees, you can’t stop your employees from participating in the social web.
Just as you cannot stop an employee from talking about your company at a dinner
party, you can’t prevent him from talking about you online. That’s not necessarily
bad: The more people who know your brand and talk about it favorably, the more
it can help you. But it’s important to establish some guidelines so that your
employees know how to talk about your company online.

Employees care about their companies, and they’ll welcome the guidelines. They’ll
see it as a way for them to better represent the company in the public domain —
that is, of course, as long as you don’t make the guidelines too restrictive and
incorporate feedback. If you develop the guidelines in isolation from your employ-
ees, ignoring how they typically participate online and want to represent your
company, you’re sure to face backlash. It is also important to design the guide-
lines to be adaptable based on how the social web is evolving and how behavior is
changing on the different social platforms.

Before you write the guidelines, be sure to check whether your organization has
any existing guidelines and policies that can serve as a starting point.

CHAPTER 5 Developing Your SMM Voice 107