Energize and Incentivize Your Employee Brand Ambassadors

Presenter: William Toll Marketing Consultant Twitter: @utollwi

Marketing & Product Management Executive

• 1999 ValueWeb (Now Hostway)• 2002 NTT/Verio• 2004 Affinity Internet (Now Hostway)• 2006 Intermedia.NET• 2008 NaviSite (Now a Time Warner Cable Company)• 2011 Yottaa• 2012 ProfitBricks

William Toll Twitter/Skype: @utollwi

Commerce is a social construct

Alaskan Dude

anyjazz65

zoetnet

Khym54

Mehfuz Hossain

People Buy From People, Not Companies

Avrenim_acceber

KCODE

Billions of Minutes Monthly

• German Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs than they do any other online category of sites, a total of 12.7 billion minutes in May 2011. (Nielsen)

• UK Internet users visited 229.6 million pages on Tubmlr #2, after Facebook 20.2 billion page views. (Nielsen)

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/

Social Is Everywhere!

B2B Content Marketing

Social Media (Online Media

Supporting Social Interaction and User Generated

Content)

B2B Socially Influenced

Transactions

The B2B Buyer’s Journey Has Changed

B2B Buyers and Decision Makers: Their Journey in in 2012

Today’s B2B Buyers Are…

• Empowered– Content Marketing Is Educating– Social Media Is Facilitating– 80% research before engaging with a vendor– 50% Expect a Response via Social Media

• More Skeptical– Only 31% Trust Industry Analysts– 29% Peers– 8% Vendors http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/02/cfo-

content/

Maritz Research http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want-responses-to-tweeted-complaints-but-what-about-solving-real-problems/

Product Discovery• Awareness• Search

Results

Product Selection• Content

Consumption

• Decision Support

Product Referral• Evangelism • Referrals

2012 B2B Prospects Journey

It’s Always About The People

Viewed 3,434 Times# of Followers: 58Top answer has 30 votes

http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-cloud-computing-platform-for-a-startup

#1 Organic ResultTwo Social IDs listed with result.

The Benefits Are Clear For Organic Search Results

Google’s Socially Influenced Search Results

Try it! List your social accounts with your Google profile, then search for a keyword in your industry.

Cloud and Web Hosting Customers Talk

Participate or ignore. What will work better for your brand?

People Share With Their Business Network

Try It! Search LinkedIn “Status Updates” See who is sharing your posts, articles and press releases with their business network.

Why?

• 66% of those who have Tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company?

Do you want your company to be non-responsive?

Maritz Research http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want-responses-to-tweeted-complaints-but-what-about-solving-real-problems/

Your Competition Is Doing It…

Example: Twitter and Media Influence

Media and Analysts recognize active brands and employees.

Your Employees – A Great Brand Ambassador Team

Robert Markey co-author of “The Ultimate Questions 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World”

Loyal, passionate employees bring a company as much benefit as loyal passionate customers. – They stay longer, work harder, have more creativity.

They also bring more great employees - it’s a continuous stream of benefits.

Employees – Your Best Brand Evangelists

Company Twitter Followers Company

Twitter Followers Employee

Twitter Followers Employee

Amazon Web Services

17,722/955 Jeff BarrWerner Vogels

12,475/9,68734,873/6,068

Equnix 3,217/2,085 Sam Johnson 5,453/41,180GoGrid 9,386/3,388 Michael Sheehan 7,713/28,179Joyent 9,175/3,048 Jason Hoffman 4,009/11,868Network Solutions 9,599/25,489 Shashi Bellamkonda 18,524/77,078

Rackspace 23,994/7,536 Robert Scoble 270,172/59,312

Telex 2,005/1,727 Joe Weinman 2,778/4,125

Virtustream 801/527 Ruven Cohen 28,385/16,057

Service Providers and Brand Evangelists

Employee engagement and reach is greater than the brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the cloud/hosting space.

Company Twitter Followers/Tweets

Employee on Twitter

Twitter Followers/Tweets

AlertLogic 825/1,388 Misha Govshteyn 909/1,173

CA_Cloud 2,238/1,468 Andi Mann 5,158/17,042

CloudStack 3,052/360 Joe Brockmeier 3,581/15,237

CloudScaling 2,307/707 Randy Bias 6,821/14,323

EMC @CloudEMC 2,102/755 Christopher Kusek 21,040/56,233

Eucalyptus 2,501/533 Marten Mickos 8,062/3,089

Juniper 17,792/3,080 Christopher Hoff 9,745/64,244

Mimecast 1,667/1,875 Justin Pirie 4,335/9,378

OnApp 897/1,539 Ditlev Bredahl 7,992/4,167

SuperNAP 354/98 Mark Thiele 2,255/19,108

Vmware Service Provider

2,244/2,904 Joe Bgauley 3,174/15,149

Cloud and Web Hosting Vendors and Brand Evangelists

Employee engagement and reach is greater than the brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the cloud/hosting space.

http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

Why? – Google Knows Your Network…And Who Has Influence…

Google knows who and how I am connected. Google knows who has influence.

Your Web or Cloud Hosting Site Gets Traffic From

Social Signals

Visitors Share Your Content, Promotions,

Support Pages

Friends/ Followers: Click Links and Share

more

Increased Sales, Higher

Conversions, More Referrals

Why? – Revenue, Lower COCA, Churn and SEO

Who is doing it well? Web Hosting & Cloud Examples:

HostDime

HostDime

SoftLayer

Name.com

38

Dell’s Cloud Computing Efforts

HostDime and Name.Com

HostDime has 7 employees that have access to post on Twitter and Facebook – from Marketing, Sales, Client Relations and Management. @DanSilber and @vikkiorlando lead the efforts there.

Name.com has a Community Evangelist, Jared Ewy @namedotcom He is working on a policy to get more employees involved. He says, the key recommendation is to make sure they “be themselves and converse”.

Name.com Example of success. They helped a customer get their domain back from someone in the Ukraine. This was done via a “Stolen Domain” effort using Social Media.

Social Media Employee Brand Ambassadors:An Action plan:

• Where are they?

• What are they saying?

Listen• Be Human• Be

ResponsiveEngage

• Shares• Referrals• Rewards

Inspire

Your Brand Ambassador Social Media Plan

Listen

• Discover where your #B2B buyers are talking. What social networks are they on?

• What are they saying? Reviews? Recommendations?

• How are they saying it? What words do they use?

• How connected is their community? How influential are they?

How To Implement: Listen

Engage• Your employees and customers are part of the

community – encourage them to participate.• Guide your employees.

• Participate in the conversations. • Offer help, advice, service. Don’t sell!

• Be human. Be authentic, don’t mask your identity.

• Be transparent! We all make mistakes, own up to them.

How To Implement: Engage

Inspire

• Make it fun, make it social.• Add sharing buttons• Enable reviews, foster methods for

generating user generated content• Surprise them!

• Create inspirational video content• Create promotions and contests for

customers to join• Be transparent – buyers love to see the

story from the inside• Reward your employees that engage!

• Give them points, days off, recognition or $$

• Never give up! Silence is defeat!• Build trust and passion or your brand will

die.

How To Implement: Inspire

RoleContentChannelSentiment

Urgency

Product Marketing Customer Care/Ops

Influence

ResponseMessageStrategy

A Role For All Employees

• Listen – decide where and what voice will work

• Ask for volunteers – don’t force employees to participate

• Let them pick their networks – let employees decide where they will participate

• Guide them on a “public persona”- teach them the norms and boundaries

• Work-Life Balance Discussion – review the benefits, show examples

• SEO Keywords – share the words that matter, remind them to use them naturally

• Content Calendar – share the PR/Content calendar

• GaggleAMP – use a tool like GaggleAMP or HootSuite

• Reward them – Points? Recognition? Days off? Money?

• Rules – Publish a Social Media Policy that makes sense for your business.

• Disclosure – Make sure employees understand the law

• How to Ask For Help – Remind them how to reach out for help

• Crisis Plan – Have a plan for outages or when brand reputation is at risk

How to Get Started

Tool Example GaggleAMP – A Great Service To Manage The Message

Pre-write the messages, enable employees to share all with a “gamification” and analytics focus for ROI tracking.

Social Media Policy Examples

Tweet received In response to content I shared with my social network.

Tweet received in response to a Tweet about some direct mail I received.

Tweet received in response to a blog post I wrote with a question on GaggleAMP’s roadmap.

Inspire

Engage

ListenExamples: Doing It Right

Is your Web Hosting, Cloud or Vendor business social? What is working for your business?

William Toll

Twitter/Skype: @utollwiwilliam@williamtoll.com

Thank You