Turning employee participation into brand ambassadorship: Some tips for digital marketers

This August, MarketingProfs published an in-depth case study on Serena Software’s Involver-powered video campaign on Facebook. Among other findings, the analysis emphasized the efficacy of using Facebook as a pure B2B marketing tool, as validated by the over 8,000 business-minded folks who were intrigued enough by Serena’s video campaign to click through to a special company landing page.

We love Serena’s story because it provides the kind of elegant problem-and-solution statement that our enterprise and consumer-facing customers immediately understand. In this case, the key problem had to do with marketing distribution: Serena needed to reach thousands of potential customers using video, but it didn’t want to limit itself to YouTube given the difficulty of finding and attracting segmented audiences there. (”I’ve uploaded my content — now what?”) The solution was the Involver platform: harnessing Facebook’s 100 million+-strong user base and premium video syndication, Serena was able to target its video content at the right (and a receptive) business-professional demographic.

Four months after Serena’s successful, OMMA-winning marketing foray into Facebook, we’d love for someone to write a sequel to the MarketingProfs study. This time, ideally, the focus would be on the ways in which social networks can help generate and strengthen brand ambassadorship among one’s employees. More than an idea-to-be-tested, internal brand ambassadorship is present reality: we’ve seen it and we’re seeing it happen today in a lot of our campaigns.

Serena’s employees are a great example. From one angle, their involvement in their company’s Facebook campaign was a given. At the beginning of it all, the employees received an invitation to 1) join the campaign (the vast majority of them had Facebook accounts) and 2) share the campaign video. So it’s not a surprise that the vast majority of Serena’s folks followed through. (Indeed, Serena has been in the vanguard with social networks, having adopted Facebook as an alternative intranet in late 2007.)

Ultimately, company guidance led to the earnest championing of an exciting brand. A network of employee-influencers did its part in helping to generate tens of thousands of total video shares and news feed stories on Facebook — that’s tens of thousands of exposures of Serena’s fine-tuned marketing messages. In addition, these diverse influencers got to know each other via a lively discussion board, across different departments and staff levels.

All in all, Serena’s employees were able to engage with and learn more about their own key brand messages in a fun, motivating environment.

We’re reminded here of a dictum that we recently encountered again on the blog of social media expert and Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang: “Fish where the fish are.” Or, more exactly: “Fish where the fish like to swim.” It’s a principle that we discussed in our last blog post, but it bears repeating.

In their brand development boiler rooms, managers and marketers have a number of options to choose from. They can choose to privilege brand description one-pagers; brand seminars; positioning workshops; brand manuals; or design audits — and more likely than not, any one of these will be of some value to their organization in terms of educating employees. Outside of this, though, companies have a considerable opportunity to motivate, inspire, and boost the morale of their own employees through social networks — the preferred communicative channel for so many.

Want to cultivate brand ambassadorship within your own organization? We want to end this post with some concrete suggestions:

- Give your employees multiple tools for spreading your brand. While we highlighted video sharing above, there are usually many more dissemination tools for your employees to use on social networks. In the case of Involver’s video marketing platform, for example, brand ambassadors are encouraged and can easily post comments about why they love the mission/products/services of their company. The testimonials are presented right on our customers’ Facebook campaign homepages and the videos that get passed around to friends and colleagues.

These messages help convey and prove brand authenticity. More often than not, regular employees celebrating your company can serve as a powerful complement to marketing, advertising, and internal HR programs that are more overtly promotional.

- Don’t fear the claim that social networks are “too decentralized.” What if my employees don’t stay on message? What if they submit a testimonial that misrepresents my company’s value proposition? While these are reasonable worries, the thing to remember is that social networks like Facebook aren’t free-for-all’s. In the case of the Involver platform, our customers get to dictate the images and text that appear on their Facebook campaigns and interactive video player(s). They also have full power to approve or reject any comment, photo, or video submitted for public view.

- On social networks, let your employee influencers tell their personal brand story. Case in point — our customer Kiva is one of the most admired and trusted brands in the nonprofit world. This brand reputation is in large part due to Kiva’s revolutionary peer-to-peer microfinance platform. But it’s also a function of Kiva’s brilliant marketing strategy — one that allows and encourages Kiva ambassadors to speak for themselves. Here’s a comment left last week on Kiva’s Involver-powered Facebook campaign:

“I have just made my 100th loan with Kiva. In all those ($25) loans, during the last 2 years, I have never had one person default on me. It amazes how safe the funds are and that $25 can make a difference in someone’s life. If you are thinking of lending, please do so now. You won’t be sorry.”

Who wouldn’t want this kind of authentic (and enthusiastic) thumbs-up from their own employees?

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