Social Media + Engaged Employees = Big brand wins

A happy employee is a great online and offline brand ambassador and enthusiast. Unhappy employees are also brand ambassadors but not necessarily the kind you want representing your brand. Especially with today’s wide access to twitter, facebook, blogs and other social media platforms, be it on smartphones or other environments, you want him or her engaged positively with you.

So how does employee engagement affect your social media presence and how does social media affect employee engagement?

The first part is fairly straightforward: If your employees aren’t happy at work, they won’t be likely to have good things to say which will reflect badly on your brand. This doesn’t have to come from official channels as anyone can use search functions to see what is being said. Another major issue is that employees who aren’t engaged won’t necessarily be quick to respond to issues raised by the brand’s communities whether they interact with them directly or not. And they might not be all that helpful or friendly either.

The solution?

Whilst your first instinct may be to put a restrictive social media policy in place and to sack all employees who don’t conform, this probably isn’t the best way to deal with it. For one thing, it’ll just make things tense around the office. More importantly, this isn’t really addressing the issue.

As a business, you need to be able to respond quickly and effectively to the feedback you get from your communities, be it through social media or otherwise. You also need to provide a positive brand experience for your communities.

The pressure with social media is twofold:

1) The expectation of responsiveness:

According to a recent RedWriteWeb article, 74% of social media users expect cries for help to be answered within an hour!

In order for this to happen, you need employees who care about your success to participate in effective processes, which are best designed or modified in consultation with those who are employed to run them. It’s not enough to have a great communications strategy. If you cannot respond effectively on the whole, all you’ve got is a talking head doing nothing behind the scenes. Eventually, even the biggest brand enthusiast gets discouraged if they can’t get anything done.

2) The word spreads quicker

Because of the emphasis on sharing in social media, the word spreads much quicker, especially when it is bad. Not only that, it is much easier to find what people are saying about your brand. All you need to do is search, be it on Google or inside the individual platforms to see what people are saying about a brand and if your employees aren’t enthusiastic about your brand why would anyone buy it? Nearly half of the respondents to a razorfish survey in 2008 said they made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media site. Who better to advocate for your product than every single one of your employees?

Having good relationships with your employees and empowering them to use social media to talk about your company is only going to help you! And the prouder they are the more engaged they’ll be and the more likely they will be to talk about you online AND offline.