Influential Marketing Blog

Q&A: Real Tips On Using Social Media To Promote An Event

Several months ago, I agreed to be part of an interesting social media event called the Corporate Social Media Summit that will bring together a big group of companies to share real stories about how they are actually using social media. Today I thought it would be interesting to ask a few questions to the main organizer of the event, Nick Johnson. He has been really active in using social media to promote a social media conference (go figure!) ... and here is his honest take on what has worked and what hasn't in his efforts so far. Read to the end for an exclusive discount code for readers of this blog as well.

1. If you had to describe what makes this event unique in 140 characters, could you do it?

Exclusive focus on CORPORATE concerns on social media for marketing/comms.  Some of the best corporate practitioners are sharing expertise. Boom! 2 characters to spare!

2. You have been actively using social media to promote the event itself, can you share a few lessons you've learned along the way?

The biggest lesson is that if you’re using social media for marketing, conventional marketing messages simply do not work. I spent a lot of time experimenting with what sort of message got the best response – it’s always easy to revert to the basic ‘salesy’ format of message (“What a great event! You really should come!” etc.) and I was guilty of that a few times. But I soon stopped – the response is really pretty poor, and rather than engage people, you alienate them. For a fledgling company, that was something we couldn’t afford to do.

Your readers will have heard this a million times, but using social media successfully is all about the content. To really get your message out it’s imperative you share information that people find useful and interesting.  I got a ‘White Paper’ on written – focusing on case studies of 7 key examples of corporate social media use – and I distributed it, for free, via Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook/Scribd/Slideshare etc.

It was a bit of a revelation – people really valued the content, they passed it on to other people, they ‘retweeted’ messages, and they engaged in discussions around the key questions in the document. It really helped to get the Useful Social Media brand recognized, and helped me put together a community of people that were interested in this topic – people that I could then suggest attend the conference.

3. The Useful Social Media blog (great title by the way) has been a place where you share the results of your efforts very candidly - was it hard to decide to be so open with performance, and would you do it over again if you had a choice?

To be honest, it was a bit of a scary thing to do. But I thought that if USM was to be taken seriously in this space, we’d have to engage and share. It’s no use us putting out products telling people that social media is all about sharing, and being open, and engaging in debate if we just sit on the sidelines and ignore our own advice.

So we took the plunge and I’m pretty glad we did. I’d been wondering what sort of content I could put together that social media professionals would value. I mean, we’re new in this space and people are quite rightly going to be skeptical of any information we put out there – there’s no track record - I’m no Brian Solis (or Rohit Bhargava) - yet, at least..

But sharing, openly and without censorship, the progress I was making with my marketing campaigns, and the sort of figures I was seeing when I compared social media to other marketing channels seemed like it might be pretty useful. It was info I had at my fingertips, and if I could use it to engage an audience in this space then brilliant.

Fortunately enough, from the comments I’ve had it seems like it might be working! Whilst I have (rather shamefully) not updated that part of the blog for about a month, there is a BUMPER set of data on it’s way…

4. In your experience, what makes an event more or less "useful." There are clearly lots of events out there which don't focus on this either in their content or even in the way they are produced.

Well no conference can be all things to all people. Trying to do too much will leave you with a vague mess of an event.

We decided very early on that we needed to zone in on one area, one group of people we wanted to appeal to. We decided to focus, exclusively, on the needs of big businesses. Social media has revolutionized the marketing/communications landscape for big brands, and you can see with various high-profile cases (Habitat/Twitter, United Breaks Guitars) that they sometimes have a bit to learn.

That focus was key – we knew who our audience were and we’ve made every effort to ensure that this conference speaks to them, as clearly – as usefully – as it possibly can.

Whilst this is a new venture for us, I’ve been running business conferences for a while, and I’m aware that a corporate audience will find it most useful to hear from their peers. After all, it’s their peers that know the problems they’re facing – and may well have solutions that can be implemented in their own businesses.
There’s no chance I’m going to criticize the content of other conferences in this space – there are some great events out there – but I think we’re the first to focus so exclusively on a corporate audience. And bring together such a great line-up of corporate speakers who can really give practical, relevant insights to their fellow corporates.

5. What are you most excited about at the upcoming Corporate Social Media Summit?

Well it has gone really well so far, so the thing I’m most excited about is seeing everyone turn up! We’ve got a really great group coming along – there are about 120 attendees confirmed now, and it’s a pretty great list of businesses. For someone pretty new in the space, it’s going to be a huge kick meeting these guys.

If you want a specific session that could be interesting, I think I might just go for our opening ‘super panel’ on day two. We’ve got Bill Tolany (Head of Integrated Media at Whole Foods Market), Heather Oldani (Director of US Comms for McDonald’s) and Amy Powell (Senior Vice-President of Interactive Marketing) all coming together to discuss ‘how to win friends and influence people’. It’s a pretty broad remit, but they’re three experts at the top of their game and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they’ve got to say.

BONUS - Any discounts or freebies you can offer to readers if they still want to register?

Quote RBNJIV2 when you book and Nick will automatically knock $200 off the pass price!

Verizon Asks: Are We Really Friends With Our Friends?

An often quoted stat about the new reality we lives in today points out that 20 years ago the average American had less than 25 friends. Today the average American has more than 200. Of course, we all realize on some level that this blossoming of friendship doesn't equate to having 200 best friends. In fact, the ties we have to the outer fringes of our social network may be very thin indeed. That's the subject that an interesting campaign launched by Verizon is trying to explore.

Rather than trying to get you to "defriend" the people you don't think you know, the campaign asks a much more interesting question. If you had the chance to meet your online friends in real life, would you learn they were really your friends, or little more than strangers? To find out, the company found a girl named Rosa and decided to send her on a journey across the US to connect with her online friends in real life. They armed her with a KIN, a new phone which seems to be either made by Verizon, Sharp or Windows (they don't really say) and recorded video of her travels.

It's a marketing campaign that fits squarely in between the concept of a documentary and a social experiment, but it works because you want to know what Rosa will discover. Not only for her, but because it has some meaning for each of us who keep these virtual relationships and wonder what they really mean. It's not that often that a marketing effort can turn the lens back onto a cultural phenomenon that we are all living through right now. This succeeds brilliantly at that and is worth watching.

From a marketing point of view, however, the campaign equally brilliantly demonstrates how a lack of connection can make life confusing for a consumer. Details like the KIN Studio or the KIN Spot are features that sound important, but are shared on Facebook without any real explanation of what they are or why someone should care. Ultimately the Facebook page relies on product imagery and placement to make you aware of the product and make you want one.

The connection to how the phone might actually help you better filter your network or find out who your real friends are (both things the campaign focuses on) are missing to connect the phone to the bigger message they are sharing.  What this leads to is that the campaign may stay in people's mind for the questions it raised and the story it focused on telling, but the phone (and company behind it) will be easily forgotten - like a subtle product placement in a TV series that you might notice, but never really makes much of a difference.

5 Marketing Techniques Luxury Real Estate Agents Use

Not all of us are in the market for a 40,000 square foot villa in the hills of California. In fact most of us probably aren't, so the world of luxury real estate is one that seems like an exclusive mystery. It is a shame that few of us do get to experience this world, because when it comes to marketing there is a lot that anyone could learn from how luxury real estate and real estate agents in particular run their businesses. What they know about marketing and sales is based on what they have had to learn to make those multi-million dollar home sales. Here are just a few of the lessons you could take from the world of luxury real estate:

1. Focus on your personal brand to demonstrate credibility. One thing that just about every real estate agent does more than almost any other industry (apart from entertainment) is focus on their personal brands. Often you see the story of the agent's career and how he or she made it to that point. You can read what they are interested in and how many medals of honor or salesperson of the year awards they have won. All of this is designed to give you a sense of who they are before you consider working with them. In the world of real estate personal branding has everything to do with your reputation ... and that reputation is a big part of how you can get deals done.
2. Better target your communications to save yourself time. How many ads do you see for luxury real estate crammed into the yellow pages? Or through a banner ad on Forbes.com? Most advertising when it comes to luxury real estate comes from custom regional magazines, luxury publications and other highly targeted sources. Why? Because one thing that luxury real estate agents understand is that hitting the wrong consumers will result in one big downside: they will end up wasting their own time. So the advertising is a function of selection because they only want to reach people who are real prospects to potentially purchase a home from them. They don't care about reaching millions or even about reaching thousands. They care about reaching the right dozen people, period.
3. Use professional imagery to sell. We generally know about real porn, and food porn, but luxury real estate publications are an entirely different category that could almost be called house porn. They feature lustworthy images of houses, villas and mansions that most people only dream about even walking into. And all of it is listed alongside a tantalizing price that would buy you the rights to claim ownership of that dream, if you had the money. The imagery sells the houses and encourages you to dream.
4. Promote the community you will be joining. When you buy a luxury property, you are not just buying your own property but also entry into a particular neighborhood and even a way of life. As a result, you want to know who else lives in the neighborhood and more about the community you will be joining. It may not mean you'll be best friends or even interact with those others, but just knowing about the community and what you are part of gives you an important story that you can share with others and help you to feel a sense of belonging in the community which could be a powerful motivator to purchase.
5. Throw in an unexpected benefit/offer. One thing I love about luxury real estate is that the "freebies" are often completely unexpected and sometimes irrelevant things, but could sway the right buyer. For example, I saw one property listed where purchasing it would also mean that the title of "Count of Carbona" would convey to the new owner. So not only do you buy a new castle - you get to be a Count too. Another property offered up a garage full of exotic cars along with the house. When you are buying a luxury property, those small things may not add up to a significant portion of the cost, but could mean the world when it comes to helping a customer establish an emotional connection with a property based on more than just hard details like the bathroom count or location.

Some of these lessons are likely the same that other real estate agents use, but if any of you reading are working in the world of real estate, I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. What other marketing lessons do real estate agents know that other businesses could benefit from?

Miss USA & The Ongoing Rebranding of Michigan

I have to admit I didn't think much of Michigan the first time I visited there. There is no shortage of not-so-great media coverage about the state and being a typical east coast kid, raised in the Washington DC area I never spent much time anywhere in the middle of the country. So when I started travelling to Detroit both for family reasons (my wife's family lives just across the border) and work reasons (Ford is a client of Ogilvy) it became my excuse to get to know the city better. I learned about the large Arab and Indian population living there. I saw another side to the city that went beyond the automotive museums and car-making heritage. And I experienced the intense pride that so many people living there share in a place that many people around the country just don't understand.

Over the last few years, Detroit and Michigan in particular have become a snapshot of America as it is today and as it struggles to become in the future. Politicians stumped there for votes in the Presidential election and President Obama still finds reason to make his way there. If there is a heart of America, at least one of the arteries would run through Michigan. On a much smaller scale, the state has found the spotlight in social media as well through events like BrandCamp University put on by a small group of entrepreneurs who believe that everything they do reflects on the outward perception of their home state. 

Tonight Rima Fakih, Miss Michigan 2010 and a Lebanese-American won the crown of Miss USA and again gave Michigan a chance to brand itself as something more than the hometown of American cars. Individually, these random things may not seem that significant or grand ... but when it comes to place that many people think they know, sometimes it takes an Arab-American beauty queen, a viral cross country drive, and a unique event to demonstrate that things are changing. There is a spotlight on innovation that is also helping to reinvent the role of entrepreneurship in the state.

Though many other states spend millions on tourism campaigns designed to change perceptions, the people of Michigan seem to be taking this task with energy, innovative ideas, and limited funding from any government source. Think what you may about Michigan's role in the global economy - but from a marketing point of view I would choose a group of people with passion over a short term marketing campaign any day. Though the state is certainly not reinvented yet, I suspect this won't be the last you'll hear about the rebranding of Michigan - or the ongoing daily things that "Michiganders" will be doing to help make it happen.

SBF: 3 Ways To Kill And Reinvent Your About Page

As a marketer, I am fond of analytics. When it comes to the web, though, one thing I realize is that it is easy to have way too many of them and not really know which to focus on. Some of the most tantalizing metrics, for example, like number of impressions don't usually tell you as much as something more obscure, such as how long someone spent on your site and your top "exit page" - that is, the page that someone looked at last before leaving your site. Among those hidden metrics are the amount of people who visit your site and end up quite rapidly on your About Us page.

This is the page that introduces your company and in my experience also tends to be one of the most neglected pages on company websites. It is easy to think that this wouldn't really matter much, but when you look at your analytics and page visits, you will probably be surprised to discover just how many people end up on that page. Actually, if you paid attention to your own web browsing, you wouldn't be that surprised at all. See, we all want to know who we are dealing with. We seek to know and understand the backstory of a company, as I have often called it. The backstory matters, and it is not just your analytics or number of visits to your About Us page that prove that.

There are many ways to improve the backstory of your organization, but the one I will focus on today is how to reinvent your About Us page to be a better introduction to your company. The following are three tips on how you can make that page really do its job and sell the promise of your company and why a customer might want to work with you:

1. Create better and more human writing. Marketing writing is easy. All you have to do is use lots of words that seem like they feel "professional" and talk about your products or services in the abstract sense. The problem with that kind of writing is that it is too detached. No one responds to marketing writing. The writing they do respond to, though, is the kind of writing you watch on TV or in the movies. Screenwriting. So to make your About Us page better, you need to think like a screenwriter. This means that you write in a style of something you might actually say out loud. The best marketing writing is written to be said, not to be read. So give it a try, and then use the simple test of reading it out loud. If it sounds strange or unnatural, change it.
2. Use video to share your personality. Once you improve the writing on your about page, you might realize that it could be even more powerful to share an introduction to your company over a video. This could be a video of the founder, or a series of interviews with employees or even with your customers. Don't worry if the thought of online video seems to complicated to do yourself ... there are a host of companies like www.turnhere.com who can help you create a video to sell your business for a very reasonable price.
3. Leverage slide presentations you already have. If a video seems out of reach for budget or other reasons, you might also try to create a slide presentation to sell your business. Depending on the type of business you do, this might even be something that you already have in Powerpoint that you use when you make sales calls in person. By using a site like Slideshare, you can now upload that presentation and embed it into your homepage with just a bit of cutting and pasting. The benefit is that you can tell your story in a more visual and logical way, and perhaps even open the door to sales without all the effort. With Slideshare's new lead generation feature, you can even measure the leads that your slideshow brings into your business.

Finally, for an example of a great About Us page, check out this page from Poken.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature on this blog to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

Book Interview: 5 Questions With John Jantsch About The Referral Engine

This is the first in a series of posts I have wanted to do for some time, interviewing authors about the big ideas that have led to their books. Here are 5 questions I asked John Jantsch about his new follow up book to Duct Tape Marketing, and how he would describe the big idea of the book to anyone interested in learning about it. It's a short and sweet interview, but hopefully gives you some more insight into the book. Look out for more of these in the future and let me know what you think!

And if you'd like to pick up a copy of The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business To Market Itself, you can do so here. I only intervew authors who I respect and would wholeheartedly recommend their books, and I definitely think the world of John and what he has been able to achieve offering small businesses a smart and efficient approach to creating better marketing.

1. What's the big idea of the book in less than 140 characters?

Referrals won't happen unless you're referable, but they happen even more with a systematic approach.

2. After reading the book, what is the best compliment or review that a reader could give to you and to the book?

This is more than a marketing or referral book, it's an entirely new approach to building a business.

3. Chances are you probably looked at lots of books before writing this one - what is one unique thing about The Referral Engine that you think sets it apart?

Most books tell you the tactical thing you need to do to get more referrals. This book allows you to build an authentic culture around the customer experience and tap that unique culture with a tactics approach that fits your organization.

4. What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing The Referral Engine?

Nobody talks about boring businesses. Actually, I knew that, but I was surprised at how many businesses underestimate just how boring their business is.

5. As an eventual second time author myself, I'm wondering ... is it harder to write the second book, or the first one?

I think it was for me. At some level I was writing Duct Tape Marketing for twenty years. In The Referral Engine I had to work harder at extracting stories and examples that could help illustrate things that all of us have learned over the last couple of years.

7 Reasons Domain Names May Not Matter As Much As They Used To

For as long as most marketers can remember, getting a good domain name was a prerequisite to anything you were going to do on the web. Without a good domain name, no one would be able to find your site, or recall your campaign to get them to visit your page. Domain names were worth paying thousands of dollars for, or even potentially changing the name of your business to something that you could actually get the domain name for.

To a degree, this is still true. As a marketer, I certainly still preach the importance of a good domain name and counsel my clients to make sure they can get one. Still, it is not the necessity that it once was. In fact, there are plenty of times now when you can succeed without having the best domain name. There are several factors pointing this decreasing importance that you should consider before launching a mega-search for the ideal domain name:

1. Link Shorteners - Thanks mostly to Twitter, but also social media sites as well, link shorteners like Bit.ly or TinyURL.com are making actual URLs almost irrelevant because they mask actual URLs and convert them into short versions that are much better when sharing a link in a place with a 140 character limit.
2. Social Media Homepages - More and more frequently we are starting to see brand direct people to their social networking profile on a site like Facebook as a destination rather than a brand homepage. When people visit a social networking site directly, their first impression doesn't involve your website (or its URL), and this is increasingly common.
3. Creative spelling - You could fill a book with how many new popular sites there are which feature what might kindly be called "creative spelling" of common words or even made up words. Flickr, Dopplr, and Bing are just a few examples. Either way, there is a much broader creative license to choose a unique name that works than there ever was in the past.
4. Growing consumer sophistication - Another element helping to lessen the importance of getting domain names with certain extensions (such as always getting a .com name) is that consumers are growing increasingly familiar with other versions of domain names. If your primary site is on a .org, .gov, .edu or .net extension - it is much more likely today that consumers will remember and use this instead of just focusing on .com and assuming it is part of your name.
5. Power of search - Continual improvements in search algorithms and usage of search engines means that even if consumers remember just a part of your name, they are far more likely to type that into Google along with your location or anything else they remember to find your site. Certainly having a good domain name can help with search, but there are other ways to make sure your site is search optimized and it doesn't all hinge on your domain name.
6. Rise of online marketing - As more and more marketing dollars shift online, this also reduces the relative level of importance of your domain name. Having a great easy to remember domain is important if you are putting it on a billboard that people drive by at 65 miles per hour. It is less important if you are using a higher percentage of your promotional budget to drive people to click a link online which will directly take them to a page (usually without ever showing them the URL they are going to until they reach it.
7. QR Codes & Visual URLs - The symbol of the growing popularity of "visual URLs" are QR codes. These are two dimensional bar codes that can be scanned in (usually by a mobile phone or other such device) and it allows you to visit a specific site without ever entering a URL. In the near future, we will likely see other ideas like this to help people navigate their way to online destinations without ever having to share an actual URL on a keyboard.                          

Periodicals, Constituents & Comorbidities: How To Avoid Confusing Your Customers With Lingo

Every industry has its own lingo. There are accepted words that everyone in the industry understands and that have become so pervasive that they become hard not to use in normal conversation. Librarians and bookstores call magazines periodicals. Politicians call people constituents and doctors or nurses call additional diseases or conditions you might have in addition to your main condition comorbidities. In each case, the industry has created words that make sense to those within it, but sound strange, complicated and even scary to those outside.

This is not just about industries. Companies have their own lingo too. One of my tech clients calls powerpoint presentations "foils" and several others call launching a product or service "activation." Part of getting to know a client as a service provider is learning and sometimes using their lingo. When it comes to customers, however, it should work the other way around. The challenge for any marketing team is to figure out how to reduce their own lingo and instead use words and talk in the way that consumers will more easily understand.

Here are a few tips to help you do that:

1. Build awareness of lingo usage. Saying something out loud and using a natural voice can often help to eliminate some of this lingo usage, because you would realize that you are using it as you converse. This may work for some of the less ingrained types of lingo, but not if certain words or ways of describing things are more deeply rooted.
2. Create a list of "bingo words." The only way to inspire people within an organization to become aware that they might be using internal lingo with external people is to create a highlighted list of most common words that are used within your company. This means you will need to actively start listening to how others in your team describe things and keep this list over a matter of weeks. Once you have a reasonable number of words on it, you can start to share those with the team and build awareness among them of the fact that these might not make sense to outsiders.
3. Find frequently used alternatives. One of the best tools to help you see what words people might actually use to describe something is Google's Keyword Tool. This is a part of the Adwords system that gives you the ability to check and see what words and phrases people actually use to search (and therefore are more likely to understand in conversation). Sometimes you can type in your own internal word and get suggestions for alternatives. Otherwise, you can plug in the closest alternative and get suggestions based on what people actually search for.

Using these suggestions can help you to identify and bring more awareness to people within your organization of the language they are using which might be making it hard for your consumers to understand and interact with you. It is a subtle thing, but the more you can talk in a way consumers understand, the more easily you can connect and engage with them.

An Inside Look At Kodak's New Fairly Priced Ink Campaign

Sometimes you just have to love a marketing campaign that starts off with what many people might call an oxymoron. Fairly Priced Ink from Kodak seems like that kind of effort when you first hear about it. After all, when have you ever known printer ink to be anything close to "fairly priced?" As it turns out, it is that unexpected positioning that is at the heart of what makes the "Print And Prosper" campaign so interesting. I learned about it a few weeks back from a post on one of Kodak's team blogs and shelved it to eventually write about in more detail for some of the marketing lessons it offers.

Here's my take on this campaign and 5 lessons that are worth taking from it:

1. Skip the catchy campaign name. 

I have certainly been in my fair share of meetings where any campaign idea needs to have a catchy name. Sometimes the names work and sometimes they don't. For this campaign, Kodak could easily have gone with something more marketing-like such as the "inkvolution" or "inkalicious" (don't laugh, you know you've heard of these kinds of names before). Instead, they used a phrase that we could all understand ... "fairly priced ink." In a split second, you know what the campaign is about, and as I said before, your curiosity about how such as thing could even exist would likely cause you to dig deeper to learn more. Marketing mission achieved.

2. Offer a visual comparison. 

In order to deliver on the idea of having fairly priced ink, it is important to define what UNFAIRLY priced ink looks like. On the site there is a very smart feature where Kodak puts their ink cartridges alongside others from other manufacturers and not only shares much many more pages you can print with their ink, but also how their ink is streamlined across all their printers so you could interchange them without having to buy entirely new ink cartridges. Putting the cartridges right next to one another makes it clear how you can save across printers and offers a proof point to their own authenticity and "fairness." 

3. Give consumers a tangible number. 

The premise of fairly priced ink, on the bottom line, is that you will save money. Of course, to make this real for a consumer, it helps to be able to share exactly HOW MUCH money they will save. Through a handy calculator tool on the site, you can figure out exactly how much you will be able to save and even take that and put it on a badge that you can download and share on your blog or profile on a social networking site. Though I'm not sure who would be so proud of saving $30 bucks on ink that they would post it on their blog - the idea that you will save so much by switching to Kodak that you might just want to broadcast it comes through loud and clear. Ink3 Ink2 Ink4

 

4. Create a bigger movement. 

To make the individual experience part of a larger collective, the site also features an interesting creative way to amplify all the people who visit that site by giving anyone a chance to join the movement and add their story to "America's Ink Stain." The map on the site shows a collection of people who have shared what they would have spent with the money that they could have saved on ink. The real result is that all these collective experiences add fuel to the idea that you are overpaying for ink right now and missing out on all the experiences that you could have had with that money instead. 

5. Integrate the product information. 

The last but crucial point to make is that this is not just a feel good branding or awareness campaign. The site also features information on Kodak's line of printers and real information on how to get one. Instead of shying away from including product information, the site includes it front and center without taking away from the intent or power of the site.

 
NOTE: Kodak is currently a client of Ogilvy (my employer), however I have not worked on any paid efforts for the brand, have not been compensated for this post in any way and identified the topic and chose to write this post without any prompting from the brand or team members associated with it.

SBF: 5 Ways To Find And Use Employees To Speak For Your Brand

You might have noticed a trend in more and more marketing, where large brands are featuring real people and actual employees in their ads. The end of the new Intel ads feature employees singing the well known "Intel bong" - the four note chime at the end of their ads. Best Buy uses their employees in their ads wearing their trademark blue polo shirts. The entire Domino's pizza new campaign about their revamped pizza is using real employees. IBM and GE also feature employees prominently in their advertising, with IBM's Smarter Planet campaign using the tagline "I'm an IBM'er."* If you combine this trend with the use of consumer generated advertising that we have seen in recent Super Bowls and even reality television, it's clear something is happening to the world of advertising.
 
Why all this sudden fascination with real people, and employees in particular? It turns out that companies are finally starting to realize the truth about their employees... that they are not just workers hired to diligently perform a task. In the best cases, those employees can be the best spokespeople for your brand. I have frequently called them "accidental spokespeople" and finding ways to engage them more in your marketing can help you build credibility for your business, increase your employee loyalty and even generate more sales. Here are five ways that you could consider for finding and using your employee spokespeople.

1. Find the vocal enthusiasts. Many times you can find the most vocal of your employees already online talking about what they do and what your company does. This could be on an online review site, or as part of an online community. Apart from looking online, you can also find them through more traditional means. Their names may show up over and over on customer surveys or close more business than other employees. Often your most vocal enthusiasts will also be your best employees.
2. Bring their voices together online. In order to generate the maximum effect for your business online, you need to find a good way to aggregate these voices together. If some of your employees are on Twitter, consider asking them to use the same naming convention for their accounts (such as @bobatyourcompany). Then you can create a list of all of them together. If they aren't actively online, you might consider creating a video series of interviews with them or just filming what they do and bringing it together into a YouTube channel. However you do it, creating a hub for these voices is important.
3. Establish some core principles. Once you start to demonstrate that you are supporting these activities from your employees, you'll need to set some core guidelines for what is acceptable and what isn't online. This should start with some basic guidance on transparency (always be up front about your affiliation), off-limit topics (talking about other employees, sharing trade secrets or company financial data), and voice (share a real person's authentic voice online). For your industry, you may want to add other principles, and this can be a work in progress - the important thing is that your employees know what their boundaries are, and what is considered crossing the line.
4. Make sharing part of their job. Having passionate employees who want to share online is great, but to sustain it you need to try and make sure that they are not overloaded with other facets of their "real job." This means somehow making their social and sharing activities a part of their job that they are measured on and incentivized for as any other part of their jobs. This could include financial reward, or some type of recognition within the company. You could also use privileges such as getting to attend conferences or be part of special teams as well.
5. Help them train others. The last point in getting value from internal employee spokespeople is trying to use them to ignite a spark within your company to get other employees to be more vocal about where they work and what they do. This could be started through some sort of internal training or mentoring program and usually involves a dedicated process on a revolving basis to find employees who are good candidates to become spokespeople. In the best case scenario, what starts with one or two vocal employees will become a company-wide trend that turns all your employees into some of your best spokespeople.

*Disclaimer - IBM and Intel are clients of my employer [Ogilvy] and I have worked with both companies on marketing strategy and/or campaigns.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature on this blog to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum Blog.

Also, apologies for being a bit late this week in getting this post out - Small Business Friday came on Sunday this week ... but I'll be back on schedule next week!