Periodically, we will convey a brief, subtle point that can have a broad, profound impact on your business.
Twitter. It has become the epicenter of real-time search, and at over 100 million highly-influential users, it is currently one of the most effective ways to spread word-of-mouth marketing to your audience in a trust-based manner. There are now over 90 million Tweets that race across humanity every day.
Here’s the secret sauce: the magic isn’t in your Tweet itself; it’s in the retweet. Tweeting is linear. Retweeting is logarithmic. When you Tweet, you reach your followers. But when you Tweet something worthy of pass-along — something that resonates in the hearts of your recipients — you inspire them to retweet it, thereby making it exponential in its impact.
Take away: Tweet things that inspire, uplift, entertain or inform. And limit your characters to 120, so that people can RT in a single click without having to edit.
There you have it: your “Social Media Pro Tip of the Day!“
Having a corporate social media policy in place is no longer an option. As social media becomes more pervasive — and, oh my is it ever: with an estimated 420,000 joining the “conversation” everyday — your brand can either win big. Or lose bigger.
One titillating Tweet, one puerile post, one vile video can spread like a Southern California wildfire and burn down a brand.
An office worker was fired after her employer discovered her sex blog. A waitress was fired for venting about a customer on Facebook. A woman lost a job offer at Cisco because of something she said on Twitter. These incidents illustrate why it might be wise to create a social media policy for your employees.
A social media policy is a simple, yet profoundly important document: an official company statement governing the activities of your employees within the social media landscape.
Many companies ask us if they ought to allow their people to engage in social media. Our response is a categorical “yes” with two critical caveats: choose your participants wisely (as they will effectively become brand ambassadors) — and have them abide by your company’s social media policy.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com has unequivocally shown that creating a culture — and more specifically, a relationship culture — can build brand equity and tangibly boost company valuation. Let me say that again: build a relationship culture and you build company valuation. A recent study revealed that consumers were actually paying more for the same shoes on Zappos.com than they were on Amazon.com! In an era of comparative shopping, I find that remarkable. But, it’s also understandable. Consumer expectations are shifting. People are willing to pay more to brands with which they feel an emotional connection. You do that by building a relationship culture. And, you do that by allowing your best people engage in social media.
That said, a social media policy helps guide that process efficiently and effectively, while minimizing potential issues.
“I’d say there are two broad reasons for having a social media set of guidelines for every company: crisis management or brand opportunity,” says Mario, community evangelist at LinkedIn. “Social media may be a huge opportunity for your employees to help build your company’s brand, but let’s not forget that there also exists a tremendous risk for individual employees to inadvertently damage the company’s brand and by defining a set of guidelines you help mitigate that risk.”
1. Craft Your Policy
According to Inc. Magazine, your social media policy ought to include the following:
- Remind employees to familiarize themselves with the employment agreement and policies included in the employee handbook.
- State that the policy applies to multi-media, social networking websites, blogs and wikis for both professional and personal use.
- Internet postings should not disclose any information that is confidential or proprietary to the company or to any third party that has disclosed information to the company.
- If an employee comments on any aspect of the company’s business they must clearly identify themselves as an employee and include a disclaimer.
- The disclaimer should be something like “the views expressed are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of (your companies name).”
- Internet postings should not include company logos or trademarks unless permission is asked for and granted.
- Internet postings must respect copyright, privacy, fair use, financial disclosure, and other applicable laws.
- Employees should neither claim nor imply that they are speaking on the company’s behalf.
- Corporate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc., could require approval when the employee is posting about the company and the industry.
- That the company reserves the right to request the certain subjects are avoided, withdraw certain posts, and remove inappropriate comments.
2. Muzzle Your Mavericks
Think of social media as word-of-mouth marketing moving orders-of-magnitude faster than you’ve ever imagined. A simple 140-character Tweet can race across humanity with blinding speed and unravel years of brand trust. To wit: “12:20am. Ted’s Tavern. Lost count of jello shots done. Booted. Rallied. More jello shots. Shout out to my emplower (sic), United Airlines! Booyah!”
Reserve social media participation for your best and brightest people who are willing to operate within the confines of your social media policy. This is a natural segue to:
3. Unfurl Your Talent
You have great people with lots of intellectual firepower. After they understand your social media policy, let them loose. Transform them into social media mavens, and your reach, exposure and brand equity will rise. Choose a small group of people to whom you would like to confer this privilege.
Create a list of your employees on your company’s main Twitter page, so that all of their Tweets are fed into one timeline. People are increasingly scouring company’s social media presences as part of their due diligence when making purchase decisions, so letting them see “behind the scenes” will help draw them into your relationship culture.
4. Police Your Policy
It’s imperative to incur the time and expense to craft a well-conceived social media policy for your company. This is not something on which you ought to economize or cut corners. Invest the time and money on a social media policy that is specific to your brand and your industry. It will cost you a few hundred dollars — and it may save you a few thousand (or more!) later on.
Additionally, it’s not enough to post a social media policy in the workplace. People need to abide by it. They need to look you in the eye and explain what it is — and that they will follow it.
A single errant Tweet can devastate a brand. Conversely, social media can generate exposure and build brand equity. A well-conceived, well-enforced social media policy will diminish the former and make the latter preponderate.
Does your company have a social media policy in place? Do you have any questions about what it should look like? Let us know. We’re here and, as always, we’re listening.
Vivienne is six. She is the light of my life. The. Light. Of. My. Life. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. And there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for…her baby brother, Turner! I feel like I’m always watching out for her, and she’s always watching out for him! It’s beautiful to behold.
Our home is filled wih light, love — and lots of laughter. I work from home and my wife is a full-time mom, so we spend quite a bit of time here. Our home is our literal sanctuary, our literal oasis of sanity amidst a world that seems to grow louder, more chaotic and more polluted each day.
My wife and I are always seeking ways to keep our home safe and clean and to do so in an environmentally-friendly way. That’s because we believe that this is not our planet. It’s merely on loan from our children and their children. We owe it to future generations to leave this world at least as nice as we found it.
When I first learned about the Activeion ionator — a device that cleans and sanitizes using plain tap water — I was naturally skeptical. When I learned more about the technology behind it, I was cautiously optimistic. When I used it, I was sold.
The ionator has made cleaning easier, more fun — and, well, just plain cleaner. I don’t want to “pass the buck” to the environment by using chemicals that clean our countertops but pollute our planet. Cleaning something only to leave a toxic chemical residue behind is antithetical to the very nature of the word “clean.” That’s just mortgaging our future. The Activeion ionator is one of the only cleaning products in the world that doesn’t have a chemical-related health warning on the label. That speaks volumes.
The Activeion ionator is a consummate people-product. It puts people first. This lovely little appliance keeps our home clean and safe for Vivienne and Turner. It ‘hates dirt and loves people.’ And for those reasons, I love it right back.
How it Works (and it does work!)
Activeion transforms ordinary tap water into a powerful household cleaner. It works without chemicals by providing a brief electrical charge to the water, which is passed through an ion exchange membrane on its way to the surface you are cleaning. This simple (but not simplistic) process is all it takes to kill more than 99.9% of harmful germs.
It is very solidly built, fun and effortless to use — and works flawlessly. We can now clean in a third of the time — and when we run out of “solution,” we mosey over to the tap and fill ‘er up!
My “Activeion Moment”
I will preface by admitting that this may sound trite. But it’s true.
When we first received the ionator, Vivienne had to try it — and she immediately started “cleaning” our dog, Buddy. She then metamorphosed into Snow White as she cleaned our countertops: (“I’m wishing, for the one I love, to find me….tooo-day!”). As she awoke from her fantasy, she asked what the ionator was. I explained: “It’s a new way to clean in a clean way. And that keeps us safe, sweetie.” She looked up at me with the deliciously pure sincerity of a 6-year-old and said:
“Papa, thank you for always keeping me and Turner safe.”
Thank you, Activeion, for helping me keep Vivienne and Turner safe.
A few weeks ago, our Business Development Director Brant Claussen came to me with an idea: “Eric, this may make you violently ill — actually, it will make you violently ill. But, what do you think of our taking on BP as a client?”
My first reaction was that Brant had been drinking Ouzo before noon and subsequently knocked his head on his outdoor grill.
We are fiercely-selective about those with whom we work: only the finest, socially-conscious brands and top-tier charitable organizations. BP seemed to be the antithesis of everything we are about.
Then, I had a spot of Ouzo and got to thinking. What if social media could help BP do more good in the final analysis? What if they committed to taking unprecedented action in the Gulf — and worldwide? It would help their brand, and it would help our world. Social media can elevate us to the best versions of ourselves if we do two things: engage honestly and listen genuinely. This may sound off-the-charts Pollyanna and idealistic, but I think there is some merit to it.
Social media grants extraordinary influence to ordinary people: influence that can often surpass that of mainstream media and corporations — for the first time in human history. That we know. One example: the most popular BP-related Twitter site is honchoed by an individual mocking BP’s handling of the crisis on roughly an hourly basis (“The good news: Mermaids are real. The bad news: They are now extinct.”) It has over 20 times the reach and influence of BP’s official Twitter site (“BP is committed to openness and transparency in our response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico”). Who would you rather follow?
BP — like many corporations — doesn’t quite grasp that they’re not remotely in control of the message — or the messengers. The harder they apparently try, the worse they definitely do.
In response to the @BPGlobalPR Twitter page, BP requested that the account holder “be asked to comply with Twitter’s guidelines regarding parody.” Before the ultimatum, @BPGlobalPR’s bio read: “Get BP’s message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!” Now, it reads: “We are not associated with Beyond Petroleum, the company that has been destroying the Gulf of Mexico for 51 days.”
When I learned that that single change reportedly added over 5,000 followers in 24 hours, I shook my head and laughed. BP is still using 1980s tactics in 2010. And it’s killing them.
But, we believe that in every challenge lies opportunity. I don’t think that BP is an inherently evil company. They provide the world with oil — oil, incidentally, that we all demand. They made a heinous, grievous, irresponsible mistake, and their efforts to contain it have been sheer buffoonery. But, what matters now is what they say — and what they do.
The Deepwater Horizon crisis presents the most daunting challenge in BP’s 56-year history. But it also represents their greatest opportunity: they can abandon the outdated, staid, anodyne communications of the past and embrace genuine honesty and authenticity. When BP Tweets things such as: “BP is committed to openness and transparency in our response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” that alienates the very people with whom they are trying to connect. Would the person who Tweeted that walk up to someone at a cocktail party and say: “Hello. Nice to meet you. I am committed to openness and transparency in the conversation that we are about to have right now.” It would sound robotic at best; psychotic at worst.
Social media is about one-to-one relationships built on trust and the human voice. Just as social media has led to a disastrous decline in BP’s brand equity, they can turn it around, if they do three things: fire their PR people, start speaking from the heart, unedited and unscripted — and go to eye-popping lengths to make the Gulf, and our world, a better place.
The public has always been forgiving of those who make mistakes; but they require an unprecedented level of humility, disclosure and authenticity in the response. Tiger Woods would have fared far better had he set up social media platforms and spoken from the heart. He would have likely salvaged millions of dollars in sponsor contracts. More than that, he would have done the right thing and won back a lot of people’s respect. Instead, he spoke through his lawyers and press people — and it made him a laughingstock.
So there. We are thinking of taking on BP as a client. Is Brant crazy? Are we crazy? We want your input; we put huge stock in what you have to say. Please let us know what you think. As always, thank you.
