The Social Employee: How Great Companies Make Social Media Work

Company

INTRODUCTION

You never quite know where the current is going to take you. In 2010, we founded Blue Focus Marketing with a simple purpose: to help brands focus on building profitable relationships and growing their business through social media engagement. Even at that time, social media tools for business and communication were already beginning to redefine every industry with which they came into contact. So powerful, so pervasive was social media’s forward movement that it began to take on a certain amount of inevitability. Whereas a few years prior, social media presented itself simply as a possible future, by 2010 it had become increasingly apparent that it was the future.

Unfortunately, everywhere we looked, brands were swimming against the current, exerting tremendous amounts of energy and resources simply to stay in the same place. From a business perspective alone, this short-term strategy for survival that completely ignored the larger social trends at play seemed like an incredible waste. In the midst of a recession, this not only seemed irresponsible, but unsustainable. As anyone who has ever tried it can attest, swimming against the current is exhausting. Stay at it long enough, and every last bit of energy at your disposal will be spent. We watched as brand after brand reached its breaking point, expending all resources before surrendering to the currents, and having nothing to show for it in the end. Some brands miraculously survived the process, but far too many simply didn’t.

The loss was senseless and unnecessary. It wasn’t that these struggling brands didn’t have solutions available to them—they did. The solution, social business, was there all along. For one reason or another, brand after brand dismissed it either as a fad or as an unworkable utopian fantasy. Of course, as the success stories in this book show, social business is neither of these things.

We’re Still in the First Inning

To a certain extent, we can’t fault any brand for showing reluctance to adapt. Change is scary regardless of what the circumstances are or what’s at stake. When it comes to adapting an entirely new way of doing business, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Even if the decision is ultimately misguided, most of us feel safer trying to stay the course and weather the storm.

In the case of adopting social business practices, it wasn’t just that this new way of doing things marked a fundamental shift in the way organizations would operate, it was the fact that the course toward this new horizon was largely uncharted. If brands chose to change, they were going to have to do it independently.

Even as this is being written in early 2013, most companies still face this stark reality. Only a very small percentage of brands have dared to venture into this new world. Our interviews with several of these brands clearly revealed their successes in the new world of social business; however, all were unanimous with their opinions that a great deal of work still lay ahead. In the game of social business, we’re still in the top of the first inning.

Despite this humbling realization, there’s no denying progress has been made. A few years ago, no one even knew the rules to the game, let alone what it would be called. Today, it is well known that the game is called social business, and most have agreed on a basic set of fundamental principles. Now that the basic principles of the game have been set forth, it’s time to play ball!

The Case for the Social Employee

This book is not an argument for social business. Many books published in the past few years have sufficiently cleared that ground. Those works, as well as the work of countless bloggers and thought leaders, have tremendously contributed to the themes we explore in this book. Now that the case for social business has been made, it’s time for us to carry the conversation forward in order to examine the primary driver of the social business—the social employee.

Just as baseball games are played by teams, those teams are comprised of individual players, each with a specialized role designed to help the team win. It’s been said that the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the individual players on the team. We see the social employee’s role in business in much the same way. This is not to say that winning the ball game isn’t a team effort—collaboration lies at the very heart of a true team effort. For collaboration to truly ignite throughout a social business by tearing down silos and driving innovation in new and surprising ways, individuals must be empowered with the right tools and training to build lasting collaborative relationships—whether those relationships are with coworkers, managers, or customers.

So why the social employee? What makes them so different from the employees of a traditional command-and-control organization? The answer to this question can be somewhat nuanced. Like most aspects of social business, these reasons often have to be experienced to be believed. It is our sincere hope that this book will take you through that process, regardless of whether you are approaching this content as an employee, an executive, a business owner, an industry analyst, or an educator hoping to prepare the next generation for a bold new world.

The simple answer, however, is that your employees are already on the front lines of your brand. Social media has redefined the way we treat each other as individuals, the way customers interact with brands, and the way employees interact with employers. Social employees matter because they already exist—regardless of whether the organizations they work for recognize them or not. As long as social media continues to play such a prominent role in people’s daily lives, social employees aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

For too long, the idea of the soulless corporation has dominated public perceptions of major brands. Social media practices argue that this no longer has to be so. In fact, this outdated perception goes directly against a brand’s best interests. Social employees are the windows into a brand’s soul. They are brand ambassadors to the public, building human relationships that are beneficial not just for the business outcomes produced, but for the emotional outcomes that are encouraged as well. Social employees give a brand its why, a reason for existence that extends far beyond the simple notion of profitability.

Always Evolving

When AT&T engaged us to become two of the first external bloggers on their Networking Exchange Blog in late 2011, we couldn’t imagine in what exciting directions this new venture would take us. At the time, we were happy enough simply to join another community of interest and expand the reach of our brand. As external experts, we were tasked with crafting blogs on social media topics in order to generate awareness of what this concept meant for business and foster social engagement. We didn’t realize at the time that our involvement would help put us at the very tip of the social media iceberg.

In addition to producing these blog posts alongside a select team of AT&T employee bloggers, in February 2012, Cheryl was asked to speak at the AT&T Networking Leaders Academy Annual Conference in Bedminster, New Jersey. While there, she delivered her talk, Expanding Your Influence: Lessons in Networking. As a result of our experience of blogging on behalf of AT&T, a seed began to grow in our minds, one centered around the concept of the social employee. Its first manifestation came in the Blue Focus Marketing post, The Rise of the Employee Brand,¹ and eventually sprouted and grew into the content of this book.

As social entrepreneurs, we made social business practices an essential part of our culture from the beginning. However, as was reinforced for us time and again through both our expanding role in the marketing community and in the process of writing this book, the needs of the social business are constantly evolving. While at the onset of this project we had spent a considerable amount of time expanding our networks and sharing rich content with our communities, we had never undertaken a writing project of this magnitude.

As many of our colleagues who have produced books can attest, the writing process contains a great deal of moving parts. Between coordinating interviews with representatives from several brands, communicating with our publisher, and actually writing the chapters, we knew that staying organized was essential for survival. To succeed, we had to make sure we practiced what we preached, adopting project management and organizational tools into our day-to-day operations. The adoption curve on the different platforms we utilized wasn’t always smooth, but the process afforded us valuable insight into what it meant to truly operate as social employees. We consider this experience an integral component of the final product, as it taught us how exciting it could be to operate in a business environment that was constantly evolving.

Dare to Be Disruptive

So with the wind at our backs, off we sail into uncharted territory, retracing as best we can the course of the pioneers who first cleared the way for us. Until social business adoption reaches its inevitable tipping point, we understand that arguments in favor of concepts like the social employee will continue to have their detractors. Every day we see executives, managers, and employees alike continue to drag their feet, wondering when this social media fad might play itself out. So far, it appears they will have to keep waiting.

To those detractors, we thank you for joining the growing conversation surrounding social businesses and their employees—a conversation in which we are merely a small part ourselves. Further, we accept your challenge: without dissenting voices, we would have little reason to try to justify our own thinking. We write this book as much for social business detractors as for anyone else. Even if after reading this book, you are still unconvinced of the power of the social employee, it is our hope you will at least learn something about the current business climate along the way.

This hope is what drives the challenge we present in this book: dare to be disruptive. Just as it is true that all new ideas need their skeptics, it is equally true that the status quo needs to be shaken out of apathy from time to time. It is a fact of human nature that many of us hold on to certain ways of doing things long after the favored approaches have outlived all stages of usefulness. In many cases, people forget the reasons the approaches were chosen in the first place.

Disruptive thinking drives innovation. It is a reminder that the why should always take precedence over the how. Not every disruption leads to the solution that may be sought, but it will usually teach something new along the way. As the swirling sea of the business world stretches out before us, there’s no denying we currently find ourselves in a state of flux. The status quo simply isn’t producing results quite the way it used to.

Whether the choice is made to become involved or not, it should be remembered that no one can swim against the current forever.

PART I

Weathering a Sea Change

CHAPTER 1

The New Normal–Even Change Is Changing

The whole world has gone social.

Well, perhaps that’s not entirely true. As far as the human race is concerned, the world has always been social. Humankind, after all, would not have lasted very long if early societies hadn’t adapted a spirit of collaboration, common purpose, and shared destiny. We are inescapably and inextricably linked together. We rely on these connections for just about everything, from interactions as simple as checking in with loved ones to activities as complex and multifaceted as coordinating social revolutions. We can no longer ignore the fact that social media platforms have fundamentally rewired the way we build relationships in the digital village.

While going social in itself may be nothing new, the nature of the term keeps changing. Each new interpretation manages to redefine the nature of change itself. Even change is changing, it would appear, and it continues to change so rapidly that it has become the only constant in a business environment driven by its need to accurately project the present into the future.

Discarding Assumptions

A fundamental assumption of marketing over the last century has been that brands were not only able to anticipate the changes new technologies and innovations would bring, but that it was their responsibility to drive those changes. Today, save for a few of the more prescient brands, businesses are still struggling to accept the idea that social networking platforms can—and do—offer a myriad of solutions designed to increase productivity and reduce costs.

The sense of urgency surrounding the role of social media in business continues to grow. Many brands have come to accept that social media is the way of the future, yet most don’t know how to take the first step in getting there. A deluge of books have appeared in the last few years to help guide businesses through this transitional period. All of these books were written by some of the most prominent thought leaders in the marketing community. They cite a wealth of research to demonstrate the ways a properly structured social business can not only bolster a company’s bottom line, but also help produce a culture of engaged brand ambassadors ready to shepherd their brand’s identity into the modern age.

This book benefits tremendously from the groundbreaking works of these authors. In the following chapters, we hope to add to the conversation with an in-depth exploration of what social business in practice looks like, and how these models affect employees on an individual level. We accept as fact the idea that social business is no longer just a good idea—it’s the reality of the modern brand. To put it bluntly, companies risk extinction if they aren’t having internal discussions about what social business might mean for their organizations as well as for their employees. The well-documented falls from grace of cherished, long-lived companies like Kodak and Hostess have demonstrated that every brand is vulnerable in the digital age.

The Social Employee: Coming to a Workplace Near You

If the stakes sound high, that’s because they are! Businesses that fail to adapt will lose the race to capture the modern brand’s most valuable asset, and the subject of this book: the social employee.

Many reading this book may be wondering: Why have we chosen to put so much emphasis on the social employee as an individual? Is it arrogant—perhaps even idealistic—to think that the contributions of individuals can have so much cumulative value for businesses, from the smallest start-up to the largest multinational corporation? Perhaps, but we’d like to think that we’re simply observing a growing awareness in the marketplace, and putting a name to a very real phenomenon.

Our friend and expert analyst Mark Fidelman put it best when he said, "The new workforce wants, even demands, to work for a social business. If you want to hire the best talent (especially the best young talent) you must demonstrate that you are a social business."¹ The reality that we’re seeing today is one in which the social employee and the social business is a package deal. Even in our relatively flat economy, companies are coming to the realization that today’s workers expect more out of their employers than just a steady paycheck.

According to the data of recent employee interviews collected by Forbes in an article titled 10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You, the divide between employee and employer is reaching dangerous levels:

Over 40 percent don’t respect their superiors.

Over 60 percent don’t feel their career goals align with their current job trajectories.

Perhaps most telling of all, over 70 percent don’t feel appreciated or valued by their employer.²

These statistics don’t bode well for employers. High turnover rates only consume precious time and resources—commodities that no brand can afford to waste in the current economic landscape. Of course, time and resources aren’t even the greatest commodities at stake—the employee is. Companies that fail to activate their employees in the social era don’t just risk losing their workers, they risk losing their best workers.

With this in mind, activating employees around a brand is not just a matter of employee retention, but rather a matter of unlocking an employee’s hidden talents. Social business models do much more than improve culture within a brand; they bring the many and varied employee skill sets and areas of expertise to the forefront—traits essential for driving both disruptive innovation and productivity.

This kind of thinking in the social era must comprise the DNA of a brand’s fundamental principles. As contradictory as it may sound, a brand must first set its sights internally in order to build trust in the marketplace and ultimately bolster its bottom line. According to Jennifer Aaker, General Atlantic professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business and coauthor of The Dragonfly Effect, You’re finding stronger brands are built inside out where the brand inside is so powerful, and then eventually that is disseminated to customers such that when customers hear about some brand action, it’s easier to trust that brand.³

We call this process employee branding. The more faith a brand puts in its employees, the more willing those employees are to represent their brands in public spaces and drive profits. We asked our friend David Aaker, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and vice chairman at Prophet, what the term employee branding meant to him.

Employee branding means getting your employees to know what the brand stands for and cares about. One test is to pose these two questions to a sample of employees: (1) What does your brand stand for? and (2) Do you care? If the answers are not forthcoming, you have little chance of brand building, creating on-brand programs, and avoiding inconsistencies in customer touch points.

As social media continues to grow in complexity, no public space is more important than the digital frontier. The social employee can offer a window into a brand’s soul, driving a brand’s reputation to new heights through rich engagement and authentic representation. Throughout the following chapters, we will explore what this new kind of employee looks like, the conditions in which they expect to work, and the need for strong leadership to define and build a culture that enables these employees to not simply succeed, but to thrive. But in order to get there, we must first take a closer look at the current business climate in which we find ourselves.

The Paradox of Change

For brands that haven’t quite put the pieces of the social jigsaw puzzle together, the unknowns inherent in change seem to be lurking around every corner, waiting to spring out and render those brands’ best laid plans entirely obsolete. In a 2012 blog post, John Hagel, cochairman at the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, acknowledges the sometimes bewildering nature of change, but points out that even within change, people can define constants to guide them through the process. My advice based on the experience that I have accumulated over the years: decide what isn’t going to change, especially in three key domains: principles, purpose, and people.⁴

We find no small coincidence in the fact that these three domains also account for the most essential pillars for success in social business. Hagel believes these traits fuel the passion of the explorer, acting as a north star, so to speak, as a person sets sail for unknown destinations. It’s not difficult to see how Hagel’s concepts of change can be applied to modern branding practices. As we explored the experiences of social employees at several leading brands, these themes cropped up continually. We believe they mark the essential difference between playing at social business and actually being a social business.

Hagel also stresses that, when a person sets sail under the flag of change, that person can’t—and shouldn’t—know their precise destination. Brands should absolutely establish the working conditions for their social journeys, but they should plan to be surprised by a series of new discoveries along the way. To Hagel, explorers have a clear and unwavering commitment to a domain of action that defines the arena [they] intend to play and grow in. That domain will undoubtedly evolve rapidly, often experiencing disruptive change, and the boundaries of the domain are likely to change over time.⁵ Applying this idea to social business, we can interpret the arena Hagel describes as one that arises out of a brand’s mission, vision, and values—elements that must be championed by every employee in a company, from the C-Suite down to the summer intern.

It’s clear that the journey toward building a business full of engaged, considerate employees cannot be made overnight. We can’t know where exactly this journey will take us, but we can expect to be profoundly changed throughout the process. We asked our friend, social media guru Simon Mainwaring, how brands can expect to plot their course on the social journey:

There is no map to follow or destination to seek other than the one companies set for themselves. They must be their own compass in a fast changing marketplace or leave themselves open to feeling overwhelmed or simply broadcasting their schizophrenia. So brands must chart a course based on their purpose, core values, and vision for what they will offer the world and bring that to life consistently across new media, channels, and marketing.

The course toward social business may not always be a clear one, but it will shape every aspect of business operations in the coming decades. As Mark Fidelman explains: The skills needed to succeed today are not being taught in the workplace, high schools, or colleges, as they were in previous ages. Instead, they are learned through experimentation, which yields both big mistakes and stunning successes.⁶

Whether in success or failure, the consumer world is watching. The experiences consumers have are ultimately what will justify a brand’s existence. The way a brand presents itself to the public reflects the way it takes care of itself internally. The social brand takes this philosophy to heart and understands that the best way to present a unified front is through impassioned individual effort.

So, before we set sail on this great adventure, it’s important to understand the nature of the seas on which we’ll be