How Can Employers Help Their Employees Become Advocates For Their Brand?

Today’s #RockStarChat topic will focus on how companies can cultivate brand advocates and fans from their own employees.  Seriously how can a company hope to excite its customers if its own employees aren’t excited about working for the company?  We’ll discuss this at 1pm Central today, and luckily a few members of Dell’s Social Media and Digital team have volunteered to stop by and talk about how Dell does just this.

Basically, I think the process for creating fans among your employees is similar to creating fans among your customers.  First, you need to focus on ways to connect directly with your employees, and they to you.  There needs to be some way for employees to voice their thoughts, ideas and concerns to the company, and understand that their voice is being heard.

Second, there needs to be an effort made to connect employees to each other.  Many companies have started creating internal social networks that allow employees to connect with each other and ask work-related questions, help each other, or just talk about their life and interests.  These channels are vital to the employees as it lets them help each other (boosting productivity) but also hits them boost morale and their connection to their fellow co-workers.  If you already have a copy of Think Like a Rock Star, I talk about doing this in Chapters 7 and 8.

Those are just a couple of quick thoughts as I’m far more interested in hearing what y’all have to say about today’s topic.  But I do think that before any company can think about launching any type of program to cultivate fans or connect with brand ambassadors, it needs to invest in creating channels that connect their own employees.  To each other, and to the company they work for.

See y’all at 1pm Central, follow the #rockstarchat tweets on Twitter.