In this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn't work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital "surface area" of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution.
"Employees are the brand at IBM" said IBM's Ethan McCarty. But isn't it true in a lot of companies?
Are your employees thought leaders then? Or rather, what are you doing to develop - and show - their thought leadership?
As Burgess develops in his talk, there is a clear synergy between developing employees into thought leaders and building the corporate brand.
But how can this be achieved?
As shown in this topic, thought leadership is highly connected to knowledge. Empowering employees to share their knowledge easily and in an engaging and rewarding way therefore becomes critical:
- easily because they don't have (much) time,
- engaging because they won't do it if it's not impacting,
- rewarding because that's what's in it for them.
Aggregating, promoting and spreading that knowledge through collaborative content hubs like the ones Scoop.it Enterprise offers that show the collective curation work of your brand's employees is one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand: by promoting them.
A win-win deal for all.
"A social employee... is engaged... they believe in the values they work for... employees are the brand of the company..."
Inspiring talk that shows how to achieve synergy between the personal brand of the "social employee" and the corporate brand. This coincides with another trend I see, which is that individuals see themselves less and less as (lifte time) employees, and more and more as autonomous professionals with a strong personal brand, embedded in a lasting professional community. In that perspective the employer and his corporate brand are only temporarily relevant to the professional "social employee": the professional will contribute to it with his own personal brand, but the employer and the corporate brand are only passers-by, only relevant for the time that the professional wants to work for the employer.