Let Your Best Brand Ambassadors Speak!
Guestblogged by Jennifer Crossen
As professional communicators, we are taught to control the message, limit the spokespeople to those trained and credible enough to deliver our carefully crafted corporate message.
But blogs have changed this.
While not for every company, blogs are an incredibly powerful communication tool when put in the hands of the rank and file. The leveraging of blogs for the PR department and executive suite should be reconsidered and instead, the value of empowering your hundreds or thousands of brand ambassadors to speak their minds and hearts about their lives and your work should be evaluated.
But what if they share all your secrets? Tell your customers how they really aren’t respected? What about controlling the message?
Your company culture will be a big determinant here: if your culture is closed and secretive, this will never work. But if you can stand to hear the good and the bad, within reason (more on this in a moment), the blogosphere and your customers, partners, investors, will be better for it. Because blogs are all about being real, transparent, accessible. Who has more of these qualities than your front line brand ambassadors? Especially when your company or value proposition is complex, these daily touchpoints for your brand can be the clarifying experience your potential or current customers need.
Microsoft is a good example. Once a secretive company thought to be the second coming of the evil empire, it has embraced blogging by its employees, in fact, has encouraged it. With limits (again, more on this in a moment), employees blog about their work, projects, and lives. They also do a fair amount of criticizing Microsoft or addressing criticism already out there about the company. This is OK. As a tool for engaging in a dialogue, blogging should address the good with the bad or you lose that transparency and credibility. You're quickly branded as PR party line and deemed irrelevant.
One thing you need to do before you send your employees on their way with links to www.blogger.com, is a little document that spells out what your company’s policy is about blogging, just to be clear, so that new product prototype doesn’t find its way onto the web before it should. Some good ones to review and possibly repurpose for your situation are Yahoo’s or Sun’s.
Some Microsoft blogs of interest:
Marketing and Recruting Blog
Robert Scoble’s blog
Mini-Microsoft
Jen Crossen is a Senior Account Executive at Townsend Inc. in San Diego. She is a seasoned PR professional who helps clients build their brands by using innovative brand-building ideas.