Social media-activating-your-employee-ambassadors william-toll

Energize and Incentivize Your Employee Brand AmbassadorsPresenter: William Toll Marketing Consultant Twitter: @utollwi

William Toll Twitter/Skype: @utollwi Marketing & Product Management Executive •1999 ValueWeb (Now Hostway) •2002 NTT/Verio •2004 Affinity Internet (Now Hostway) •2006 Intermedia.NET •2008 NaviSite (Now a Time Warner Cable Company) •2011 Yottaa •2012 ProfitBricks

Commerce is a social construct

Alaskan Dude

anyjazz65

zoetnet

Khym54

Mehfuz Hossain

People Buy From People, Not Companies

Avrenim_acceber

Billions of Minutes Monthly

Social Is Everywhere!• German Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs than they do any other online category of sites, a total of 12.7 billion minutes in May 2011. (Nielsen)• UK Internet users visited 229.6 million pages on Tubmlr #2, after Facebook 20.2 billion page views. (Nielsen) http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/

The B2B Buyer’s Journey Has Changed B2B Content Marketing B2B Socially Influenced Transactions Social Media (Online MediaSupporting Social Interaction and User Generated Content)

B2B Buyers and Decision Makers:Their Journey in in 2012

Today’s B2B Buyers Are…• Empowered – Content Marketing Is Educating – Social Media Is Facilitating – 80% research before engaging with a vendor – 50% Expect a Response via Social Media• More Skeptical – Only 31% Trust Industry Analysts – 29% Peers – 8% Vendors http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/02/cfo- content/ Maritz Research http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want- responses-to-tweeted-complaints-but-what-about-solving- real-problems/

2012 B2B Prospects JourneyProduct Product ProductDiscovery Selection Referral• Awareness • Content • Evangelism• Search Consumption • Referrals Results • Decision Support

It’s Always About The People Viewed 3,434 Times # of Followers: 58 Top answer has 30 votes http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best- cloud-computing-platform-for-a-startup

The Benefits Are Clear For Organic Search Results #1 Organic Result Two Social IDs listed with result.

Google’s Socially Influenced Search Results Try it! List your social accounts with your Google profile, then search for a keyword in your industry.

Cloud and Web Hosting Customers Talk Participate or ignore. What will work better for your brand?

People Share With Their Business Network Try It! Search LinkedIn “Status Updates” See who is sharing your posts, articles and press releases with their business network.

Why?• 66% of those who have Tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company? Do you want your company to be non-responsive? Maritz Research http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want-responses-to-tweeted- complaints-but-what-about-solving-real-problems/

Your Competition Is Doing It…

Example: Twitter and Media Influence Media and Analysts recognize active brands and employees.

Your Employees – A Great Brand Ambassador Team

Employees – Your Best Brand EvangelistsLoyal, passionate employees bring a company asmuch benefit as loyal passionate customers. –They stay longer, work harder, have morecreativity.They also bring more great employees - it’s acontinuous stream of benefits. Robert Markey co-author of “The Ultimate Questions 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World”

Service Providers and Brand EvangelistsCompany Twitter Followers Twitter Followers Twitter Followers Company Employee EmployeeAmazon Web 17,722/955 Jeff Barr 12,475/9,687Services Werner Vogels 34,873/6,068Equnix 3,217/2,085 Sam Johnson 5,453/41,180GoGrid 9,386/3,388 Michael Sheehan 7,713/28,179Joyent 9,175/3,048 Jason Hoffman 4,009/11,868Network Solutions 9,599/25,489 Shashi Bellamkonda 18,524/77,078Rackspace 23,994/7,536 Robert Scoble 270,172/59,312Telex 2,005/1,727 Joe Weinman 2,778/4,125Virtustream 801/527 Ruven Cohen 28,385/16,057 Employee engagement and reach is greater than the brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the cloud/hosting space.

Cloud and Web Hosting Vendors and Brand EvangelistsCompany Twitter Employee on Twitter Followers/Tweets Twitter Followers/TweetsAlertLogic 825/1,388 Misha Govshteyn 909/1,173CA_Cloud 2,238/1,468 Andi Mann 5,158/17,042CloudStack 3,052/360 Joe Brockmeier 3,581/15,237CloudScaling 2,307/707 Randy Bias 6,821/14,323EMC @CloudEMC 2,102/755 Christopher Kusek 21,040/56,233Eucalyptus 2,501/533 Marten Mickos 8,062/3,089Juniper 17,792/3,080 Christopher Hoff 9,745/64,244Mimecast 1,667/1,875 Justin Pirie 4,335/9,378OnApp 897/1,539 Ditlev Bredahl 7,992/4,167SuperNAP 354/98 Mark Thiele 2,255/19,108Vmware Service 2,244/2,904 Joe Bgauley 3,174/15,149Provider Employee engagement and reach is greater than the brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the cloud/hosting space.

Why? – Google Knows Your Network…And Who Has Influence… Google knows who and how I am connected. Google knows who has influence. http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

Why? – Revenue, Lower COCA, Churn and SEO Your Web or Cloud Hosting Site Gets Traffic From Social Signals Increased Sales, Visitors Share Higher Your Content, Conversions, Promotions, More Referrals Support Pages Friends/ Followers: Click Links and Share more

Who is doing it well?Web Hosting & Cloud Examples:

HostDime

SoftLayer

Name.com

Dell’s Cloud Computing Efforts38

HostDime and Name.ComHostDime has 7 employees that have access to post on Twitter andFacebook – from Marketing, Sales, Client Relations andManagement. @DanSilber and @vikkiorlando lead the efforts there.Name.com has a Community Evangelist, Jared Ewy @namedotcomHe is working on a policy to get more employees involved. He says,the key recommendation is to make sure they “be themselves andconverse”.Name.com Example of success. They helped a customer get theirdomain back from someone in the Ukraine. This was done via a“Stolen Domain” effort using Social Media.

Social Media Employee Brand Ambassadors:An Action plan:

Your Brand Ambassador Social Media Plan • Where are they? • Be Human • SharesListen • What are Engage • Be Inspire • Referrals they Responsive • Rewards saying?

How To Implement: Listen •Discover where your #B2B buyers are talking. What social networks are they on?Listen •What are they saying? Reviews? Recommendations? •How are they saying it? What words do they use? •How connected is their community? How influential are they?

How To Implement: Engage •Your employees and customers are part of theEngage community – encourage them to participate. •Guide your employees. •Participate in the conversations. •Offer help, advice, service. Don’t sell! •Be human. Be authentic, don’t mask your identity. •Be transparent! We all make mistakes, own up to them.

How To Implement: Inspire • Make it fun, make it social. • Add sharing buttonsInspire • Enable reviews, foster methods for generating user generated content • Surprise them! • Create inspirational video content • Create promotions and contests for customers to join • Be transparent – buyers love to see the story from the inside • Reward your employees that engage! • Give them points, days off, recognition or $$ • Never give up! Silence is defeat! • Build trust and passion or your brand will die.

A Role For All Employees Urgency Sentiment Channel Content Influence Role Product Marketing Customer Care/Ops Strategy Message Response

How to Get Started• Listen – decide where and what voice will work• Ask for volunteers – don’t force employees to participate• Let them pick their networks – let employees decide where they will participate• Guide them on a “public persona”- teach them the norms and boundaries• Work-Life Balance Discussion – review the benefits, show examples• SEO Keywords – share the words that matter, remind them to use them naturally• Content Calendar – share the PR/Content calendar• GaggleAMP – use a tool like GaggleAMP or HootSuite• Reward them – Points? Recognition? Days off? Money?• Rules – Publish a Social Media Policy that makes sense for your business.• Disclosure – Make sure employees understand the law• How to Ask For Help – Remind them how to reach out for help• Crisis Plan – Have a plan for outages or when brand reputation is at risk

Tool Example GaggleAMP – A Great Service To Manage The Message Pre-write the messages, enable employees to share all with a “gamification” and analytics focus for ROI tracking.

Social Media Policy Examples

Examples: Doing It RightListen Tweet received In response to content I shared with my social network.Inspire Tweet received in response to a Tweet about some direct mail I received.Engage Tweet received in response to a blog post I wrote with a question on GaggleAMP’s roadmap.

Is your Web Hosting, Cloud or Vendor businesssocial?What is working for your business?

Thank You William Toll Twitter/Skype: @utollwi william@williamtoll.com

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Social media-activating-your-employee-ambassadors william-toll

by William Toll on Jul 22, 2012

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Social media-activating-your-employee-ambassadors william-toll Presentation Transcript