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#mood #(◕︿◕✿)
Week 5
So today I decided to go back over the rio commission I had been working over the past few weeks and clean up some the detail. One thing that I didn't of was the cowbell within the drum section of the chorus I removed these. I also made use of the random velocity tool to add a sense of a human playing an instrument.
You can see the screenshot at #randomvelocity #logic. I also added more flutes near the end to create a greater texture of the woodwind as that is the solo instrument of the outro.
Past that I also decided to start work on another project, of which I thought the "Joystick jams - Create studios" would interesting to try. I would like this project to have instrumentation wise kind of an plastic pipe sound like that in mario, or an electronic brass sound. I think the structure should be repetitive so I'm envisioning an kind of melody that is modulated through different keys.
Other than that here is the work I have to show of some ideas is #spacesound. Which uses an reverse-effect synthesizer
I also hope to research the music of some games apps over the next week.
5 Scarily Bad Brand Personality Traits to Avoid This Halloween (and After)
Each fall, young people across the country brainstorm for weeks to come up with the best, funniest, and/or most provocative Halloween costumes. Scary ghosts and monsters, celebrity doppelgangers, recreations of fictional characters, viral internet phenomena from the previous year – they are all fair game for the last night of October.
But for your company, creating an engaging and positive brand is a year-round pursuit. If you develop this image with a consistent approach, your customer base will continue to grow as people get to know you as a company and feel comfortable doing business with you. If not, the results can be, well, scary. Here are some branding pitfalls to avoid throughout the year.
Brand Arrogance
Every once in a while, as individuals and as businesses, we allow vanity to reign supreme. Everyone wants to be the smartest one at the party. This is part of human nature; it’s expected and understandable. When it comes to building your brand, however, arrogance is something you need to be constantly on guard for. Coming across as arrogant to your audience will leave them feeling less and less comfortable doing business with you. Studies show that consumers prefer interacting with companies that evoke an emotional response. Constantly pumping up your own ego doesn’t accomplish this – genuine human connection does. Approach each interaction with your audience as an opportunity to interact with them on a human level and demonstrate actual value. Forgetting this simple principle can quickly lead to scaring away qualified leads, and your numbers will suffer as a result.
Technologically Behind the Times
Another easy way to frighten away your audience is by appearing out of touch. Technology governs all of our interactions in 2015, and consumers have developed refined expectations for how those interactions should unfold. Ecommerce, for example, is becoming a necessity for anyone in the retail industry. Busy consumers want flexibility and value more than anything else, and having a smooth, functional ecommerce option will provide them with that. When user experience during these transactions is lacking (glitches occur, security is breached, path to completion is vaguely defined, etc.), you’ll be lucky if the user even finishes the purchase at hand, let alone comes back and promotes your brand as a return customer.
Inconsiderate
Depending on your company’s size and industry, there could be thousands of transactions with potential customers occurring on a daily basis. As a business owner, it’s important to prepare your staff for all of the human-to-human contact these interactions will bring. In the moments when the people you employ are in actual contact with customers – whether it’s face-to-face, over the phone, or even online chat help options – they need to have the desire and know-how to provide sincere, helpful service. While there are inevitable hiccups and unfortunate negative experiences that occur, your response to them can be just as important as your preparation for them. Give your employees the freedom to use their best judgment when resolving these issues, but also incentivize behaviors that result in a positive interaction. Most customers will not only forgive a brand if its employees go out of their way to right a wrong, they’ll feel even more inclined to return as a customer. On the other hand, if the same employees are indifferent to those concerns, you can kiss those customers (and the revenue they represent) goodbye.
Dullness
No matter what industry you are in, dull is never a good look for your brand. Think about the path your customers take before deciding whether or not to purchase from you. Likely, this path involves deciding between your product/service and a litany of competitors. If what you are offering to them – and, equally important, how you present it – doesn’t stand out from the pack, you’re bound to lose out to those competitors who took the time to develop a unique brand identity. Creativity isn’t reserved for painters and musicians; you can incorporate it into all of your business and marketing decisions. If you work with a marketing agency for some of these needs, stress to them how important it is to you to avoid dullness in your brand’s imagery, tone, and message. Even if you don’t, there’s plenty of easy and inexpensive ways to keep your brand fresh. Embrace the sense of humor of your employees and don’t be afraid to lift the curtain on what goes on behind the scenes. Consumers feel more comfortable doing business with a company that’s willing to poke a little fun at itself, and a great way to do this is creating fun videos with your employees and disseminating them across social media channels.
Too Big to Be Human
There’s no reason to hide success – as an individual or as a business. You and your employees have worked hard to create a viable business model and execute it, so be proud of it. But from a branding perspective, increased success means new challenges – especially when that success comes quickly. If your brand has incorporated elements of ‘down-home’ authenticity and ‘mom and pop’ sensibilities, you’ve likely benefited from how endearing those ideas can be. As the company grows, however, those claims may start to seem insincere and hollow. So think about where your business is along that arc and adjust accordingly. Size isn’t a bad thing; it just means your message should be adjusted to reflect a different kind of authenticity. Even major brands can achieve a successfully authentic brand message, but they do it by highlighting individual examples of good customer service and positive interactions with customers. The key is to focus more on humanization (incorporating individual personalities of your employees is typically a great way to start with this) and less on size. One thing is for certain – a brand that comes across as too big to feel human is one that will scare away far too many of your potential customers.
At the end of the day, every company has a different approach to creating their optimal brand. The common denominators between successful brands are sincerity and consistency. Keeping these tenets top-of-mind while making branding and messaging decisions will go a long way towards keeping your customers happy and not scaring them away.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Scarily Bad Brand Personality Traits to Avoid This Halloween (and After)
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Author Mike Whitney
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5 Things Angels Look for in an Investment Opportunity
Are you thinking of approaching an angel investor to put money into your start-up or to help you scale up?
Before you start contacting local angels, you should understand what they look for so you make sure you are approaching the right angel groups and providing them with the information they need to make a “go” investment decision.
How do you know if you fit the bill?
Before looking at the specifics of any investment opportunity, angels will determine if there is a fit with their investment approach.
Some angels invest in companies only in their state or region, while others invest only in certain industries: the most popular being health care/life sciences, enterprise software, internet marketing, mobile apps and related technology, and clean tech/renewal/green energy.
Some have other criteria like investing only in women-owned businesses or companies founded by military academy grads and veterans. Others are interested only in companies in particular development stages: seed, A round, or B and later rounds.
If the angel group is actively engaged in their investments, they may require a board of director’s position.
About 95 percent of the 565,000 companies started each month will be operated by their founders for many years (startups.co). Angels are not interested in these companies. They’re interested in the remaining 5 percent that have an exit plan, since this is when they get a return on their investment.
All angels will ask you about your exit plans — when you intend to sell your company and cease involvement in your creation.
Once a fit is established, angels will look at the following five factors for each investment opportunity.
Keep in mind that while the factors are similar across angel groups, each will have its own idea on the importance given to each. Be sure to think through each of these factors so you are prepared for the questions ahead of you.
Factor 1: Management and Management Team
Is the founder/CEO tested in the current company?
Does he/she have a strong CV with relevant experience?
Is the founder/CEO coachable?
Does the founder/CEO have experience starting, growing, and exiting companies; in other words, is he/she a serial entrepreneur?
Has the management team worked together before, especially in difficult situations?
Do the other management team members have strong CVs with relevant experience?
Factor 2: Product or Service
Does the product or service have a clear and tested value proposition with multiple customers?
Does the product/service have some market traction? Is it more than just an idea?
Are favorable customer experience references available?
Factor 3: Competitive Landscape
What are the barriers to entry by competitors?
Is there any enforceable intellectual property?
How long would it take a well-heeled competitor to copy the product/service and obtain market traction?
How many viable competitors exist?
Factor 4: Market Attractiveness
Is the addressable market several billion dollars?
Does the company have the potential to make $10 million in annual sales? How long will it take?
How much market penetration can be achieved in the first year?
Factor 5: Financials
How long will it take the company to be cash flow positive?
What is the magnitude and stability of cash flows?
Is the current company valuation attractive and justifiable?
Assuming the company achieves its milestones with this investment, when and how large will the next funding be?
Have the founders, family, and friends already invested in the company? Are all current investors participating in this round?
Ready to start your search for the perfect investor?
Most angel groups have a website listing their investment approach, members, and often the names of their portfolio companies.
Here are a few other resources to help you narrow you search:
Angel Capital Association: This trade organization for angel groups lists members by state and accredited platforms.
Angel List: This and other such platforms connect companies seeking funding and angel investors.
You can also perform an online search for “angel groups in your state/area” or “angel groups investing in your business sector.” And ask your lawyer and accountant for their recommendations.
Key Lessons
Angels have different investment approaches; find one that matches your situation.
Provide angel investors with the information they need to make a “go” investment decision.
Looking for more business planning advice? Find all of Hal’s business advice on the Constant Contact Blog here.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Things Angels Look for in an Investment Opportunity
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Influencers or Advocates: A Fork in the Road for Brands?
The term word of mouth has been a long held marketing tenant of basic “mom and pop” businesses. The notion that there is hidden value in someone outside the business who would take it upon his or herself (with no assurance of personal gain) to promote that business is lost on the cynical in our field. The biggest hurdle to many who have questioned the advocates “buy-in” has been the absence of an ability to track the ROI once they’re travelling that path. As we all have witnessed, however, that is changing. The central questions posed are that of influence vs. advocacy and cultivation of digital word of mouth as a strategy.
Most of us have observed or participated in the rise of the professional celebrity as influencer on behalf of a product or point of view. To be clear, the influencer does this only when it benefits his/her celebrity directly or carries the promise of a reward. On the other hand, the advocate, in it’s purest form, is a natural born brand evangelist. This brand believer touts that idea or thing with no expectation of payback, other than your commitment to listen. His/her only reward is satisfaction in knowing they were genuinely helpful with their message carried by the weight of trust and familiarity.
While it is true that influencers can affect the behavior of a larger following, it is done with a motive that does not move those seeking unbiased, informed referral. Further, the influencer does not connect with those seeking direction or advice on a personal level. And after that influencer has adopted a number of products or causes, their association carries little more than that of the celebrity endorsement on TV. For anyone who has seen a well-known sit-com star taut reverse mortgages or out of work actress rave about a new skin cream you’ll know this approach is losing its appeal to an increasingly sophisticated and informed audience.
The advocate is different in that he/she advocates for a brand out of genuine belief. This kind of authenticity becomes priceless, as they not only become a sales force, but a feedback loop on product positioning. The familiarity of an advocate translates into trust, that in turn generates demand and conversion levels that the mere influencer cannot reach. I’m observing a new group of collaborators that are, for the first time, committed to the digital application of Word Of Mouth. Their intent is to find, recruit, engage, and retain advocates from their clients’ customer base first, and then from profiled segments of the greater buying public. Conversely, while many will enlist the help of a turnkey marketing software platform as a knee jerk reaction, few first grasp the power of brand expansion or the lacking of quantitative reach. In an era when quantitative analytics drive many marketing policy decisions, the real work and reward comes from converting someone’s “like” to “love” in keeping the pipeline primed into the future.
I want to raise the question of differences in content used and disseminated by influencers and advocates ( and I will address it in my next post if possible). For now, I’ll simply support my argument by describing the content shared by influencers as passed along, while that of advocates is largely user generated and highly personalized. I’m not suggesting an all or nothing choice of direction between influencers and advocates, as the line between them does sometimes appear blurred. In fact, there are platforms and influencer networks that recruit future advocates unintentionally. We’ll take them anyway we can.
The bottom line is that supremely satisfied and engaged customers are the most powerful marketing force we have, but are largely overlooked or marginalized. Once engaged, how they are treated will have a profound effect on unexpected content such as favorable product ratings, countering unfavorable reviews on third party review sites, and improving SEO.
A brand must find those existing advocates that are already here. By surveying a company’s segmented database and engaging with Q & A’s on social media platforms, we’ll begin to get a sense of who they are and what they need. Additionally, we’d be best served by turning our advocates into content creators by making useful, relevant materials easily available. We have to make sharing that material through the voice of our customer easier to use as well. Lastly, we have to be ready to amplify their voice and leverage their messaging by strategic placement in a future customer’s purchase journey. I mentioned earlier that fork in the road decision we could make as to influencer or advocate. For many the choice has been the influencer as broadcaster because advocates were difficult to measure. But I can’t stress too strongly that successful outcomes in a qualitative approach such as advocacy marketing depend on credibility and authenticity. Pre-defining KPI’s for you brand advocacy should be tied to long term campaign goals. But, no matter the purpose, studying the nature of your current customer engagement will allow us to correctly interpret attitudes, preferences, and willingness to advocate. The more people feel part of some company brand, organization, or cause, the more likely they are to commit to your program. I advocate for a brand I may never own. In such a circumstance, what is my value in conversion? The answer: quite a bit! Because I’m intensely interested in its development and success, I build a narrative around that product through differentiation with people who could be buyers.
Any business who can count on as little as 10% of its customers being advocates sees a very high multiple return in marketing dollars spent compared to that of paying an influencer for reach. If Peter Drucker is credited in saying that “The purpose of a business is to create a customer,” surely the quote of Shiv Singh applies to that of advocacy in that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.”
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Influencers or Advocates: A Fork in the Road for Brands?
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How to Use Deep Links to Improve Mobile Engagement
For many app developers, the only thing harder than getting users to install their app is getting them to continue using it. Branch is a great tool for driving continuing engagement over the entire user lifecycle, from onboarding to retention to re-engagement. Integrating the SDK and turning on deep links is the first step. Here are a few things we’ve seen drive successful user engagement for our partners.
Tips to Improve Mobile Engagement, Retention, and Re-Engagement
Customized onboarding builds loyalty
User retention begins at user acquisition. The hard truth is that most app downloads are shortly followed by an uninstall. This initial usage hurdle is nearly as big an obstacle as getting the user to download in the first place. Branch helps you get past that first big hurdle by giving you tools to make the initial experience more compelling.
Every install that comes through a Branch link has a JSON object (basically a list that’s easy for a computer to read) passed into your app from our server as soon as the user launches for the first time. It includes how the link was created, who created it, and any campaign information or tags that were embedded. For a link created and shared by an end user, the social context we’re passing into your app is absolutely invaluable.
Gogobot uses this information to customize the account creation screen- a picture of the user who sent the invite pops up and the incentive that the new user was promised is displayed. Their conversion from install to account sign up increased 78% as a result. This drives engagement in the short term and sets the tone for what users can expect from your app.
Customize the user experience post-install
Customizing sign up is very powerful, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine you’re a book seller and you know that your new user came in following a link to one of Ursula LeGuin’s books. Right off the bat, you know that this is a user who is interested in science fiction and fantasy and who appreciates female writers. You can use that information to better select which books you show them.
Combining Branch data about which books they interact with (sharing, clicking on shares from friends, driving their friends to install, etc) with the data you already have about their in-app behavior provides a treasure trove of opportunities to customize their experience and provide lasting value. That value is what will keep current users active and help you re-activate and re-engage users who fall off.
Here’s data from three Branch partners comparing the 1-day, 1-week, and 30-day user retention for users who came in via Branch links vs others:
An educational app
An e-reader app
These numbers didn’t happen by accident – the more you leverage the available tools to make your content relevant and valuable the stickier your app will be.
Social context and sharing for organic engagement
Speaking of social data and sharing, there are few tools as powerful for driving re-engagement as positive reinforcement by friends and peers. By making it easy for people to share and rewarding them for doing so, you embed your app into the user’s social sphere.
iHeartRadio (which streams radio stations from around the world) has done exactly this by allowing their millions of listeners to share not just their app but specific stations. Suddenly, radio stations are no longer limited to a single geographic area and friends who grew up listening to the same stations can still engage with those stations – and each other – even if they no longer live anywhere near each other. All of that interaction drives users right back into the app, over and over again.
Re-engage mobile web users to drive them back to your app
It’s relatively easy to drive web traffic because the ecosystem is mature and visiting a web page is low cost to the user – they don’t have to install anything and they can easily click away. At the same time, once they’ve made the decision to install a mobile app and gotten past the initial learning curve, mobile apps are stickier than mobile web. The recent white paper by comScore reinforces this point. Treat your mobile website as the top of your user acquisition funnel and leverage it to drive users to your app.
So far so good – but how to get those mobile web users to change their habits and start using your app instead? Automatically redirecting users who have your app installed into that app when they visit your mobile site is a poor tactic that can backfire – especially if your mobile app doesn’t have all the same options and functionality as your mobile site. Users will often uninstall apps that do this because it denies them access to the missing functionality.
In an ideal world, one would start by making sure your app has at least as much functionality as your mobile website, but at a minimum you can avoid loss by allowing users to make the choice themselves. Smart banners are an easy and non-intrusive way to prompt users to open the content in the mobile app without being pushy. This can help users get into the habit of going to the app and drive long-term engagement.
Use Branch links everywhere
Branch links work everywhere, from email newsletters to SMS to in-app messaging.
Users on desktop can be directed to the web content or prompted to text themselves an install link. Branch links embedded into the messaging in your A/B testing platform of choice can include embedded information about which version the user interacted with so you can optimize more quickly and accurately.
You can also use Branch links behind the re-engagement ads offered by many of the mobile ad networks. Our intelligent routing makes sure that users who still have your app go directly to the promotion content and users who have uninstalled and decide to give you another try get the best re-onboarding experience possible.
As a bonus, your mobile content can be automatically added to Spotlight search for iOS users and Google App Indexing for everyone else, so when your users search on those platforms, your content will appear and they can re-engage immediately.
What are you waiting for? Get started!
Have you had fantastic success or epic frustration re-engaging your users? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How to Use Deep Links to Improve Mobile Engagement
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Meet the 5 Types of Customers, From the Gandhi to the Trump
In 1949, the American scholar Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This landmark book argued that despite being separated by vast distances of time and culture, mythological stories around the world share a number of common characteristics, especially within the class of myths he identified as “the hero’s journey.” These parallels include some archetypal characters—such as the wise sage and the trickster—that typically befriend or thwart a hero during her epic quest.
Every day in enterprise contact centers around the world, brave customer service agents (CSAs) engage in a hero’s journey of their own, encountering all manner of people in their quest to deliver a great customer experience. Just look at the trials and travails recounted in Reddit’s “Customer Service” and “Tales from Call Centers” chronicles. And like the characters of mythological lore, the types of customers engaging with an organization’s customer service department tend to correspond to a few distinct archetypes.
Here we’ve highlighted five of the most common. If you see yourself in one of the following archetypes, you can at least be assured that you’re not the only one:
1. The Gandhi
Following the example of the renowned Mahatma Gandhi, this customer impressively abides by the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence, no matter how dissatisfied she may feel by the customer experience she’s having. The Gandhi is every CSA’s dream, the kind of customer who keeps calm, friendly, sounds genuinely appreciative, and makes an agent love coming to work every day. She may even take to social media to tell others about what a great customer experience she had, rallying others to support a good company or cause.
2. The Scholar
The Scholar knows her stuff and may have once spent a summer working in a customer service role herself. When calling her internet service provider, she’ll have already tried to reset and reconfigure her router, and tech support agents can expect that she may ask to be escalated to “tier three” or a manager if she senses she knows more about how to resolve her situation than the agent she’s currently engaging with. Fortunately, the Scholar is generally reasonable and usually needs just a bit of extra help to get an issue resolved.
3. The Gollum
Much like the cave-dwelling creature of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the Gollum is a sneaky customer, keeping agents on their toes throughout chats, calls, emails, or sometimes, confoundingly, across multiple channels at once. This is the kind of customer who tries to find a way out of paying her cell phone bill, explains her situation in the form of extended riddles, or insists that her discount code should remain valid even weeks after its expiration date. Agents must always beware of the Gollum.
4. The Drone Pilot
This customer probably doesn’t wear black leather jackets and aviator glasses, but she’s still cool as a cucumber as she launches strategic, calculated complaints and inquiries from a safe distance and precisely targeted for maximum effect. Rising out of the ranks of the Keyboard Warriors, the Drone Pilot can issue a single strike—a tweet tagging the right audience, an email to a CEO—that sends entire contact centers and PR departments scrambling to take cover. Only the most proactive customer service can prevent a Drone Pilot encounter.
5. The Trump
Much like a certain U.S. presidential candidate, the Trump is famous for being unabashedly outspoken, belligerent, and used to getting her way no matter what it takes. Every CSA knows what it’s like to deal with the Trump, and although she typically hails from America, where “the customer is always right,” even agents working in India or the Philippines have learned to bend over backwards to appease her. In fact, it usually takes a manager just to get her to stop shouting. Only other aggrieved customers support the behavior of the Trump.
The Five Archetypes in Us All
While small pockets of the consumer population embody each of these customer archetypes in their pure form, those purebred types tend to be the exception. As an average customer, you’re more likely to express the qualities of each of the five types of customers at different times, depending on the circumstances.
Sometimes those circumstances have nothing to do with the organization we’re contacting for customer service, but more often than not these archetypes overtake us in direct response to the specific customer experience we’re having. It’s therefore up to any organization to deliver the best customer experience they possibly can, proactively and consistently.
After all, no one wants to see a Gandhi turn into a Trump.
U.S. Navy photo republished here under CC BY 2.0. Donald Trump photo by Gage Skidmore, republished under CC BY-SA 2.0.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Meet the 5 Types of Customers, From the Gandhi to the Trump
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Author Tom Huston
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5 Reasons Why Training Employees To Use Social Media Is Good For Marketing
This week Hootsuite made a pretty significant announcement confirming their move into the employee advocacy space with the launch of their new solution – Amplify.
I’ve blogged extensively about employee advocacy for many years and I’ve been in the driving seat when it comes to launching such a program within a complex multinational organisation.
As a practitioner in this space, I can honestly say that the tool alone will limit the potential success that can be achieved through employee advocacy.
Protecting The Brand & Building Thought Leadership
Training employees on the responsible use of social media protects the brand from employees sharing information (often unintentionally) that they shouldn’t have done about their work or the company.
At the same time, it can massively impact the brand in a positive way. If employees are able to build their personal brand online, they can establish themselves as thought leaders in a niche area that can help influence and educate potential buyers.
When buyers find an “expert” or “people like themselves” more credible than the brand CEO it’s time to rethink the brand social media strategy.
By enabling employees to become ‘social’ with their own personal brand, you create a wealth of opportunities that you could only dream of with your brand channels. I know because I’ve seen the impact.
Through my studies and observations, I have found that socially trained employees…
1 …Are More Likely To Share Branded Content In my experience, when you educate employees on the importance of having a personal brand and building their network first, they are 3x more likely to start sharing content than those that haven’t been given that context. By the time you introduce social sharing into the training model, employees will understand how this will impact their profile. They will have done the basic ‘profile’ updates. They’re in a place where they’re READY to start sharing and they know what to share, how often and to which channel. They are confident.
2 …Will Yield More Impressions Typically a trained employee will yield 3x more social impressions per share than a non-trained employee and this is mainly because they have invested time in building their network first. I always emphasise the importance of building and nurturing a strong network around your personal brand. Once you’ve achieved this you’re ready to start sharing. For example, it makes no sense to jump into sharing content if you’re only connected to 20 people on LinkedIn.
3 …Will Increase Your Engagements Naturally, if you’re gaining more impressions you will attract more engagements including likes, comments and shares. I’ve found that trained employees will generate anywhere between 30-50% more engagements than non-trained employees and this is because they know what kind of content works well on which network. They know how to encourage engagement.
Most employee advocacy tools will often have some kind of gamification mechanism built-in. I suggest not incentivising on “number of shares” but “number of engagements” since really encourages your employees not to spam their network but actually engage their network.
4 …Will Generate More Clicks Marketing will understand the importance of this one because in the paid media world, every click costs €€€. In my experience, employees who share content generated 50% more clicks than when I shared the same piece of content via branded social channels. WOW!
Employees who were social media trained generated 2x the amount of clicks than employees who weren’t trained.
This has a lot to do with making sure that the content is relevant for the employee’s personal brand and that it’s good content. Well written, full of useful insights and easy to read. Poor content won’t fly with your employees…or on any social channel for that matter.
By the way, it doesn’t always have to be branded content. Best-in-class community managers will follow the 4-1-1 rule. Four pieces of non-branded content to one piece of non-sales branded content and one piece of direct ‘sales’ content.
5 …Will Create Content For You Finally, recognise thought leadership potential within your business. On average 26% of the B2B marketing budget is set aside to create content (blog posts, ebooks, white papers etc) and yet research shows that buyers are becoming less trusting of brand content and more trusting of content from peers and experts.
Some of your employees may express an interest in becoming online experts. Be sure to invest in them – fast track them through your social education program.
Pull them into your monthly social listening meetings and discuss topics that are trending. Feed them social trigger alerts that you’ve received. Enable them to create content and amplify that content via the brand channels.
So why should marketing lead this change? Two reasons:
First, Marketing should recognise the incredibly powerful potential that a community of employees will bring when they start advocating on behalf of the brand.
Second, the Marketing department is normally accountable for the online brand. Community managers know what kind of content gets the best engagement. They know how often to post and the most appropriate time to publish. This “community” intelligence is useful when training employees to build their own brand online.
If you enjoyed reading this post and would like further information on social media training for employees, then please reach out to @sarahgoodall at Tribal Impact – a social business consultancy that transforms communities into social brand advocates through training, tools & content.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Reasons Why Training Employees To Use Social Media Is Good For Marketing
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Author Sarah Goodall
Type article
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