Original Post: How To: Establish A Social Media Culture In Your Company, Willis Wee
A strong social media culture is beneficial for any company. But for those who still need reasons:
(1) An aggregated effort by the entire company can greatly increase your company’s online presence. This essentially translates to free publicity.
(2) Being social media-ish, consumers tend to associate your company with words like ‘cool’, ‘fun’, ‘approachable’, ‘lighthearted’ and ‘friendly’. Now who doesn’t like to do business with someone like that?
(3) If implemented successfully, it keeps your company committed and better bonded as a team.
Below are 5 ideas to help you achieve these benefits.
1. The Basics: Official Blog, Twitter and Facebook
To be social media-ish, your company has to lead its people by example! The basic ingredients must be there: Blog + Twitter + Facebook Page. They will act as your social media “headquarters” and plant your company’s flag in the social media world.
Blog: Keep this open to all staff and allow them to write with few restrictions. Submission of original posts should be done by a blog team to keep the style consistent and have inappropriate material filtered. Keeping the blog post short and sweet is key.
Twitter & Facebook Page: Either the CEO or a dedicated social media person should take charge of the official accounts. This will avoid communication breakdown and help maintain consistency.
2. Create videos if possible
Try capturing random happenings in your company. A video tells us a lot about how staff feels about the company. Obviously, the focus should not be on your product. Catch this funny example by Zappos:
Does Zappos look funky and friendly to you? This should attract some potential employees and keep existing staff committed.
Oh and don’t forget to share your videos through your blog, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook page.
3. Get them to use Twitter
Getting your employees to use Twitter with (or without) a company designed background is a good strategy to establish your presence on social media. Also, the company naturally becomes a community where staff is comfortable to share and connect in.
This idea came from Zappos, which has a leader board to rank its employees according to the number of followers they have.
With that said, don’t force your employees to be on Twitter. Let such activities be voluntary.
4. Let them tweet peacefully
It wouldn’t be called a social media culture if employees are banned from using it. Allow your employees to Facebook or Twitter at certain periods of time.
Even if you don’t, your employees are likely to use them secretly. So why not just give them the authority to do so openly? If they are not going to act like mature and responsible adults, why hire them in the first place?
5. Use social media business cards
Bring social media offline! Let your employees introduce themselves in a cool way by using social media business cards to connect with potential clients. If that doesn’t get them following you on Twitter or adding you as a friend on Facebook, I don’t know what will!
