Page 370 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

EveryoneSocial.com says that an employee advocacy program costs one tenth of
social advertising and is perceived to be more trustworthy. Make sure that you let
your staff know that their participation on social media channels is valuable.

In this chapter, you look at how brand advocacy has changed and why you want to
encourage your employees to become part of your social media marketing efforts.
In Chapter 26 see more on social media governance.

Embracing the Idea of Employee

Collaboration

Companies want their employees to collaborate, communicate, share, and organize
into communities of interest the way they do in their personal lives. There’s no
reason why your employees shouldn’t use intranet software built on these
consumer-oriented design philosophies, with the collaboration layer built into
the core.

The following sections include some recommendations for how you can get your
employees to collaborate and socially influence each other in positive ways. These
practices are a direct mirror of how you can engage with social influencers, too.

ENERGIZING EMPLOYEES:
IT’S NOTHING NEW

This isn’t the first time that energizing employees for social influence and knowledge
sharing has been discussed. Debates in the knowledge management community on
how best to get employees to collaborate date back to the early 1990s. For a long time,
companies saw the Holy Grail of knowledge management as the ability to capture
everything that was in an employee’s head in a database so that if the employee were
to leave the company, the company wouldn’t suffer.

This thinking evolved to the realization that no firm can truly capture the experiences
and knowledge in an employee’s brain, and by the time it did so (if that were even possi-
ble!), the information or knowledge would be stale. Since then, the focus has shifted to
energizing employees to collaborate, exchange information, and motivate one another
to increase innovation and employee productivity.

354 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM