Branding is key to any organization. 1) Employees can become brand warriors. 2) Tapping into the social media network of employees. Merge the two and you will get effective and cost efficient model to popularize organization brand.

1. Branding through
Employee & Social Media
Tapping employee social network
Making employee brand ambassadors

2. In December 1996 Hotmail had 500,000 registered users – less than a year
later they had over 12,000,000 users. This astonishing growth rate was down
to the fact that every single email sent from Hotmail included a small advert
promoting the service in the footer. That is the power of leveraging the
network.
One of the first examples of viral marketing

3. Agenda
Objective: Brand building
Who: All employees
How: Leverage Employee social network
Delivery channel: Social Media platforms
Why: Its simple, relatively easy, zero cost & highly effective
Lets tell others why employees are
proud of the place where they work

4. Concepts : Power of Networking
Six degrees of Separation (log v/phi X log squared 1/phi)
any two people are on average
separated by no more than six
intermediate connections
Time taken for spread of gossip =
estimate of time (log v/phi X log squared
1/phi); v is the number of vertices of
communication; phi stands for
conductance.
Greater Reach & Faster Reach

5. Leverage Social Networking
• Social media platforms
• Create company profile on social media platforms
• Ask employees to have their presence on major
social media platforms
• Ask employees to embrace the company profile :
like , follow , comment , tweet , retweet , post
But we need to do more……..

6. Not everything gets heard
• With so many updates on Social Media
platform, your messages will get lost
• Your messages might also get classified as junk
by audience
• Your network might simply classify as
‘irrelevant’ and hence ignore the content

7. How to ensure that messages are read
• Focus on content
• Make it relevant
• Tweak the content based on audience
Your company got USD 100 M funding. If you are technical person, talk about how the investment will fund in future technologies. If
you are biz dev person, talk about how this will help grow / enter new market
• Build interest
• Don’t repeat
Don’t publish messages every minute / hr / day just for sake of publishing messages. Publish only when there is important message
which you think will attract attention
• If possible, use neutral 3rd party references
Your company got USD 100 M funding. Don’t simply publish this message. Publish the link of Forbes magazine where this
news is covered
• Use pictorials if possible, marketing people
always believe more in pictures than in words.
• Finally, create audience

8. Build Audience
All companies have customers.
Lucky companies have fans.
But the most fortunate companies have audience.
- Jason Fried, David Heinemeier
Hansson
co-founder, 37signals
rubyonrails
You can buy a 10 sec prime spot on TV but that does not guarantee to grab attention.
When you build audience, you don’t have to buy people attention, they give it to you.
Share information that is valuable and you will slowly build a loyal audience who will get the
word spread out and will wait desperately for your next post

9. Building an audience
HOW
Speak
write / blog
Teach
how you did that
Show behind the scenes
Document – ppt / doc Tell experiences
tweet
make videos / brainsharks / whiteboards
WHAT
Reveal inside the black box
open the secret like chefs
share updates
upload on open source - github
most importantly - share freely

10. Focus on WHAT
How to build / to do / to deploy / etc
Why to do in particular way / use this framework / etc
What it takes to do / solves this problem / etc
Examples:
Share, teach, tell – TED
Behind Scenes – Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers on Discovery
Pain one goes through in making something – Jackie Chan movie end scenes
Don’t worry even if its in raw format, people still will love it

11. What takes to Deliver ?
Content
Documentation
Finishing
Publish
A great content material
Document it using any of available media
Make it appealing to users, they should understand what
you are trying to say.
Publish it to make it available to all

12. Making it simple for the audience to
comprehend
Follow ‘Rule of 4’ levels -
Start with 1-3 WORDs to tell the topic
Highlight the topic in 2 - 5 SENTENCEs
Summarize in 5 - 10 LINEs
Detail out in 2 - 3 PAGEs
Wherever possible use pictorials like graphs, numbers, charts, images to start at
level ‘0’

13. Motivate employees to be
BRAND AMBASSADORS
• We all are “brand warriors” or “brand
ambassadors”
• Lets use social media so that we are the ones
conveying the message about our company
• Its not just the Marketing, HR and PR
departments whose job is to brand the
organization
• A hired model will not be able to create the
connect with the organization
• Employees live the brand, they can tell the brand,
they connect with the brand, and are considered
genuine

14. Think like a Brand Ambassador
and you will become one.
vishwadeep.anshu@gmail.com