Cultivating Brand Ambassadorship: Who Should Take the First Step?

Following up on our post on employee brand ambassadorship:

This month’s issue of The McKinsey Quarterly features a compelling new research article on what it calls enterprise Web 2.0.

In a two year-long survey of fifty early-adopter executives, McKinsey found that social networks, blogs, wikis, and internal information markets have fast become go-to tools for a new kind of corporate environment. However, the survey also revealed that some companies have stumbled outright: more than a few managers have had a tough time figuring out how to encourage meaningful Web 2.0 participation internally.

To its credit, McKinsey has identified a set of management imperatives for using and championing social networks and other new technologies effectively. We were excited to see these imperatives fleshed out since they’re relevant to cultivating employee brand ambassadorship on social networks. Indeed, we might refine these business recommendations — here, we’ll simply focus on one of them — in order to demonstrate the success factors that get your employees to become your long-term brand enthusiasts.

Imperative #1: Bottom-up culture needs a catalyst. It goes without saying that social networks like Facebook are decentralized by nature. Different spokes of user contribution — everything from a comment submitted to a video shared — constitute the elements of viral growth by which content is shared freely and openly.

Unfortunately, the decentralized nature of new technologies can sometimes fool an organization into thinking that their adoption involves an automatic process. Build an open blog or an internal wiki, and no doubt your employees will post on it. Send around that new video from marketing, and no doubt your colleagues will do the same. More often than not, though, it simply doesn’t work this way.

The significance of having brand champions (or brand catalysts) on your team is fairly obvious. What’s somewhat less obvious, though, is the absolute, prior importance of who your brand catalysts really are: it’s vital that you choose the right people to generate some initial momentum for your marketing messages.

For instance: If your youngest employees are the ones spreading your brand messages on Facebook, then that’s one (potentially effective) thing. But it’s a different thing entirely to have your enterprise’s CEO be that no-holds-barred ambassador on Facebook himself/herself. While the former reflects an arguable expectation, the latter signals to your employees a powerful commitment to organizational innovation.

So, when thinking about how to use new technologies within the enterprise, it’s a good exercise to ask and answer: Who are our brand catalysts? Who can be convinced to become our company’s brand catalysts? And who, if they jumped onboard, would positively surprise and inspire?