Employee Branded: Employees As Fans – #TruLeeds
I’ve always been puzzled as to why so much non-confidential employee communication goes on behind closed doors. I really like Rypple as a feedback tool for internal comms, and platforms like yammer provide a much more social and interactive intranet, but how much of the communication that goes on here is confidential, and how much is a missed opportunity for great employer branding?
If your employees talk to each other in public and share their daily chit-chat, photos, videos and congratulations to colleagues, birthdays, births etc, how effective could this be in giving a real insight in to the workplace.
It’s no secret that I’m a champion of Facebook fan pages for building public communities. To make a fan page a community over a notice board, certain things need to be achieved.
The content needs to change regularly, not just be business announcements.
Be social in content style and postings.
Have regular contributors, likes and comments beyond the administrators postings.
Have social features like chat, livestream etc.
In addition to this, it helps if people can, if they choose, apply for jobs or buy product/services.
The challenge then is to get the internal marketing right. You want people to sign up for the page because they want to rather than because they have to. targeted ad’s together with internal e-cards or invites will help with this. Give your brand advocates something to share and they will. Encourage them to post their work/branding content in the group first and share from there. This not only puts the content in to their stream, but it also spreads the content under the community name. A welcome invitation. Once you combine employee community with a social referral app like Work4Labs, you get an idea of the potential and power of this approach.
To give you an idea of the possible each that can be achieved, Oracle Community, Oracle Sales Community and Oracle Romania recently launched. A video of the inside of the Dublin office as liked 27 times and viewed over 1000. When you consider the average Facebook user has 135 fans, then that’s 135 x 27 as a possible reach for simple branding content. The most shared content is face pictures and video, and there is opportunity throughout the day to create this content and get it shared, all with your fan page attached.
Oracle have taken a proactive approach to these employee focussed fan pages. There has been training for anyone who wants to be involved on what makes good, sharable content. Theres no real rules or restrictions, just common sense guidelines and a healthy respect for the global brand. Recently, the community were even asked to vote for the design and functionality of the mobile app they liked the best. Again there was plenty of feedback and shares from those who will be the eventual users. Theres even a plan for a social event to coincide with social media day on the 30’th. I’m sworn to secrecy so keep your eyes peeled.
Hats off to the Oracle team, in particular social champion and serious grafter Klaudia Drullis, the real community DJ and powerhouse. It’s a pleasure working with this team, Oracle have a real open mind to social and recognise the real potential.
I’m going to be talking about becoming employee branded at #truleeds on Friday. You can still get a ticket if you hurry!
What do you think is the best way to get your employees active in employer branding? love to hear your thoughts.
Bill
LINKS:
The Oracle Community On FaceBook
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