I’m sure you’ve heard the line that the best customer is an existing customer. Well it’s true and this logic can be extended to your employees and/or your most loyal followers within social communities when it comes to amplifying your social programs. Think about it, for a company, employees are family and rabid customers are advocates. The two groups, when leveraged in the proper manner, can have an amazing impact on the amplification of any social program. The thing is that most companies aren’t yet in a position where they can mobilize their most valuable assets. Let’s look at the common barriers of each.
Mobilizing Advocates
The key to being able to mobilize your most loyal community members is knowing who they are. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, or a private label community, one needs to be able to quantify who the most boisterous and influential members are, have the ability to segment and contact them, and mobilize them through programs that they find engaging and rewarding. At the current state of the industry, this is easier said than done, however, I’m confident that 2012 will bring with it new tools to further define and mobilize social influencers. But, the tools are only half of the equation. A company needs to have internal systems, processes, and programs in place to harness the power of its advocates.
Mobilizing Employees
Getting employees involved in driving company wide social efforts and amplifying social programs is a must for every company. As mentioned above, employees are a company’s most valuable resource, but how many global companies do you know that are truly mobilizing their employees to amplify their social programs? The reason is that most companies are not organized to do this. Companies are lacking the infrastructure and protocols to pull off a coordinated effort in mobilizing their workforce. For starters, every employee in the company should be aware of the company’s social efforts with access to a global calender of all upcoming programs, including program-specific asks of the employee. Moreover, employees need to be made aware and educated of the impact that the company’s social efforts have on the company’s bottom line and therefore their job and career opportunities as the company drives towards its objectives. I could go on and on with high level advice here, but I think you get the point. Imagine if a company such as Bank of America that has 100,000 active employees on Linkedin gets each employee to promote the launch of a new social program through their Linkedin feed. Or, what if every employee Likes the company’s official Facebook page. The reverberations of these two actions would be profound for a company with the scale of Bank of America.
The common thread in the above is that most companies are not organized in a way where they are able to take advantage of their most prized assets. At Dachis Group we’re organized as a social business and pour every ounce of our energy into helping the world’s leading companies become social businesses. Look to these two activations strategies to become starting points and table stakes for Fortune 500 and Global 1000 brands in 2012.
This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.
