7 Ways to Shape Your Employees as Brand Ambassadors in Social Media

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Think about a moment when you had a customer track you via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to resolve their problem or a moment when an acquaintance asking for your advice about a brand that you work for. When you encounter one of these moments, that is the time when you became a brand ambassador.

Social media has changed the traditional opinion for customers engagement. You can no longer become faceless corporation  that only relies on a customer service hotline to answer customer complaints. Nowadays, almost all of your employees can be tracked down and identified from social media. Smart businessmen must embrace the power of social media by training up all of the employees and build a strong network of brand ambassadors. Here are seven important ways to build a solid social media ambassador program for your employees:

  1. Make a social media customer engagement policy. Look what Intel, Coca-Cola and Dell have done.
  2. Establish the first generation of your brand ambassadors. There are many options for you: marketing team, customer service, sales, or what? Ask for some volunteers then arrange the right people as needed.
  3. Add social engagement’s performance indicators for each brand ambassador’s performance plan. Make sure this is also an indicator of the executive team. If the CEO has these KPIs in the plan, then it will be a clear organisational priority.
  4. Train your employees. The training program should cover the basics like media training, including how to response external enquiries, what to say or what not to say, etc. More advanced programs should include an understanding of social media (facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Forums, etc.), the tone of voice, the ability to correctly identify themselves as company employees, the difference between personal and professional social media, and so on.
  5. Give a clear tiers of engagement, since not all brand ambassadors are equal. Consider providing more intense training for employees who become a front liner and meet the customers directly or those who have high profile roles, like the CEO, Marketing Director, Head of Sales Department, etc.
  6. Make sure you have strong links back to the rest of organisation, like HRD (for job enquiries), Customer Service (for customers’ complaints) or Sales. Studies have shown that 47% of people want customer service through social media, so it is necessary for your brand ambassadors to know how to respond to service-related problems.
  7. Rolling it out for all employees. Do this only when you’ve got it right with the current brand ambassadors. Dell is doing it right and has over 10,000 employees trained. It means you have 10,000 brand ambassadors who are actively engaging customers.

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