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I was approached by a colleague the other day who expressed his frustration that he seemed to be the only one in his organization that was actively interested and involved in social media and networking, although his company had established guidelines for participation and goals for their use of various channels.   He is charged with developing strategies for his division of marketing and I challenged his assumption that he was the lone participant.   He wanted to know how he could get more people engaged in the various activites that we suggest are stages and components of the social media portion of an integrated marketing strategy.  Given the demographics of the employees of this high-tech consulting firm, after five minutes of discussion, I was able to point out a number of places and opportunities for him to find new, engaged, and influential participants for his challenge.  During our chat, it struck me that as “out-of-the-box” as we may think we are being when we begin to embrace social media for our B2B marketing and sales processes, we may still be turning to our traditional content providers, customer consultants and engagement specialist, and other points of contact for content, feedback, input, and exchange.   We are forgetting that the words “media” and “networking” are prefaced by the word “social” in this new arena and that many of us have been involved in digital networking opportunities with colleagues, customers, and varied others long before YouTube and Facebook.   With that in mind, here are some suggestions about mining your existing, but perhaps hidden social content engineers:

1. Survey ALL employees about their use of Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Yammer, Ning, chat rooms, blogs, etc.   This is NOT a Big Brother exercise and you should probably make that clear if you are intended to embrace a more open approach to sharing information.

2. Make suggestions about interesting and relevant Linkedin groups, blogs, communities, etc. that you think may include communities with whom you want to have dialogue and encourage employee participation.

3. Ask for feedback from employees about the “buzz” to which they have tuned their digital ears.   Provide ideas for responses or direct them to your internal communities for information, data sheets, suggestions for help.

4. Include your internal communities and constituents as part of your metrics and measurements for your social media and networking strategy and success. If an employee as an individual makes an innovative suggestion about the use of your own solutions to a community to which she belongs, using her corporate email alias or association or not, it can be as impactful and responses can be as useful as if it were from an outsider.

5. Consider non-traditional internal constituencies.   I had the opportunity to interview the VP of Marketing for an electrical components distributor who mentioned that one of his warehouse employees told him about a contractor network that has had a lot of comments about his company recently.   I suggested that he include his warehouse staff as part of his marketing strategy as the community members are his companies clients and prospects and from the discussion threads they were seeing, having them participate in the dialogue could be an extremely fruitful and rewarding technique without significant added expense or too heavy-handed of a sales approach. 

6. Include Twitter addresses, Linkedin url’s and other digital community contact information for ALL employees in email signatures, on business cards and other collateral.

7. As you establish your social media and networking guidelines for employees, ask for appropriate representation about the company but don’t be too restrictive.  Keep the SOCIAL in the approach and allow the digital conversation that any employee might be having broaden and deepen the relationships they are establishing with the entire company.

A quote that is attributed to Jay Baer really caught my attention as being relevant for this topic:  “Remember that in social media, everyone’s a teacher and everyone’s a student.”

We never know where the next great idea might be coming from and the digital conversations of our employees OUTSIDE of sales and marketing may be the richest and most honest source of how our solutions and products are received and perceived.

Warm regards,

Lisa

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