Last week I was involved in the Nomadic Marketing course at the UCT Graduate School of Business. I always find this course fascinating and learn new stuff every-time I participate, but marketing-based courses always get me thinking about one of the reasons we first set up World Wide Creative.
Prior to my life at World Wide Creative, I was an HR manager with Marks and Spencer in the UK. During a difficult time at the end of the 90’s, it really became apparent that the message being sent to the staff was very different to the message being conveyed to the general public. Marketing departments quite often seem to focus on the external and forget about marketing internally to staff. When we started World Wide Creative, we wanted to remember this and continually find ways in which we could facilitate the process.
With social media technology we now have some fantastic tools at our disposal to help bridge that gap and ensure a consistent message is sent to both the customer and employee, and that both get involved with your brand:
1) What is your team doing? Use Twitter to let your team know all the important moments that are happening in your company.Those things that you might not post on your blog or send out as an email.
2) What is your team saying? Use a blog for your staff intranet. It can incorporate rss feeds for for industry related news, provide communication for social events, as well as a platform for gauging opinion on new ideas or internal policies. For this to work really effectively, you need to find a “champion” within your organisation that will take the blog under their wing and encourage others to get involved.
3) How is your team collaborating? Your Training/Knowledge Library can utilise Wiki technology. Create a collaboration of information rather than old style one-way learning from a video made in the 1970’s. Also get your team to bookmark new resources using Del.icio.us and it becomes a collaborate learning experience.
4) What are you saying to your team? Sending newsletters is not really Web 2.0, but still effective if used in the right way. Make sure you send your company newsletter to your staff as well as your customers. Even better: get your staff to contribute.
So don’t forget your staff! As the guys at Fresh Consulting say:
‘Happy Staff + Happy Customers = Happy Company’
