Tag Archives: digital

Employees take control of social channels

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Posted by in Communications planning, corporate communications, Customer service, Marketing, Social media

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--Image courtesy of Mr. Lightman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net--

Image courtesy of Mr. Lightman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As companies work to craft ways to extend their visibility in the social space, they are turning more and more to their own staff. The notion of employees as brand evangelists is not new and of course is not limited to social channels. I wrote about this 2 years ago.    

In the marketing profession, companies, like IBM, are investing in retraining staff to engage with customers and prospects in the social space. As Ed Abrams, IBM midmarkets vice president discusses in this post, IBM has been training the marketing team to use social technology to not just fuel demand but to gain insights from dialogues occurring on social channels. “We have changed our marketing and communication team,” Abrams said. “We had to learn how and where to most effectively leverage all this social media capability. For example, we had people who were direct mail specialists but now are specialists in how best to use Twitter. It’s the evolution of marketing.”

Nike too decided it was time to have their own employees run with social campaigns and made headlines last week with its decision to bring social media in-house. It’s expected more companies will follow suit.

It will be interesting to watch how the agency relationship adapts to the increased confidence companies have with social technologies and their desire to own the conversation.

Three digital marketing resolutions you must make for the new year

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Posted by in Communications planning, Marketing, SEO and web analytics, Social media, Uncategorized, Writing tips

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You’ve got compelling content, a blog, a few Twitter handles and a Facebook fan page. Done. Well, not so fast. 

Are you sure your content is optimized for search?  Have you empowered your own employees with social media?   Have you integrated a social element in all of your marketing and PR activities? 

To get more power and reach out of your digital marketing activities, make a commitment to  integrate and  further institutionalize social media across all external communications programs.  Begin with these three resolutions: 

1. Create a social culture  

Make employees brand ambassadors. Get better at syndicating content across all of your social properties and empower employees to link, share and start the dialogue.  Have leaders lead by example and hold brand and marketing managers accountable for driving the socialization of content.     

2. Optimize for search

Do your writers and editors understand SEO?  Do they know how to craft a headline, write, and organize content so that it ranks well in search. Require all writers and editors, including contract ones,  to complete writing for SEO and search engine marketing training.

 3. Repurpose 

You don’t have to write a blog entry from scratch every time.  Slice up the big study your company just published and create an engaging series.  Summarize and link to bylines authored by employees, events, media mentions and create short posts to publicize speaking engagements, linking to photos, audio and video. 

Don’t stop here – read Pam Moore’s 2011 predictions why businesses will fail at social media and get to work.

Digital branding — Marketing can’t do it alone

17 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Marketing, Social media

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It’s true in most enterprises that marketing leads social web communications efforts. This doesn’t mean everyone else is off the hook.  For digital branding efforts to be truly successful, each person in the enterprise needs to play their part.   

Seed, lead and spread

Marketing managers create the digital brand and then seed dissemination of brand messages and digital assets.  But they also need to socialize content beyond corporate managed web properties.  As digital brand creators and curators, marketing managers need to issue a call-to-action asking leaders, employees and other influencers to link, comment, and promote on the social channels they personally own. 

I like to think of three digital brand management roles – creator, leader and evangelist. Yes, overlapping roles, but with some distinct responsibilities:    

Marketing managers are digital brand creators

  • They act as facilitator and curator of digital assets.
  • They plan, integrate and lead dissemination of digital assets.
  • They seed the online conversation.  

Managers are digital brand leaders

  • They inspire their teams to use social media.
  • They issue calls to action on new content.
  • They lead the online conversation. 

Employees are digital brand evangelists

  • They participate in social media.
  • They link to, comment on and share content.
  • They spread the conversation.      

How does your organization handle digital brand management? Are you getting people involved outside of marketing?

Explore more about social media marketing at Chris Koch’s B2B Marketing Blog , Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Blog and SEOmoz’s Social Media Markting Guide.

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