Social Media Recipe for Success
Mix in your Most Valuable Asset: Smart Employees

By Holly Berkley

Photo Caption: Mix up a recipe for social media success by allowing your most creative, passionate and knowledgeable employees to engage with customers at the right time.

It still amazes me how many corporations actually block social networking sites during work hours. According to a 2011 openDNS study, 14% of companies blacklist or block FaceBook from company computers – compared to only 1% blacklisting pornography sites.

Keeping employees from engaging on social networks can prevent a company from leveraging its most powerful asset – knowledgeable, creative and passionate employees.

When you allow employees outside the marketing department to get involved in online conversations, your brand has the ability to provide real insight and valuable conversations on projects and expertise related to your business goals. These conversations naturally go beyond pushing a PR crafted mission statement. These conversations help humanize your brand and build real relationships with customers, vendors and partners in a way that direct mail or other one-way conversation channels just can’t.

So unless your employees and partners are engaged in top secret projects, let them talk about it! Allowing your employees and other stakeholders to share openly about projects and experiences they are most passionate about, lends itself naturally to exciting, genuine and viral content on the social web. And everyone from project managers, customer service reps, to human resources can get involved in the social space.

Companies like Zappos boast more than 500 employees using personal Twitter accounts to help promote the company’s ideals and products. And Best Buy bravely empowers more than 150,000 of their employees to join customer conversations throughout the social web.

Photo Caption: Put it on paper: make a social media action plan before anyone in your company engages on the brand’s behalf

But before allowing employees to tweet, post or comment on your company’s behalf, take time to develop a social media strategy and set of clear guidelines to best fit your company’s values, goals and mission.

In fact, no one in your company should be unleashed on the social web without a plan, crafted in sync with the goals of your marketing, sales, product development and PR people. Just as corporations have brand guidelines establishing logos, colors and tone of voice, they should also take time to craft social media guidelines that any employee who engages on the social web should adhere to.

Nokia, the mobile phone manufacture, requires employees to complete a six-part social media certification before they can become active on the social web. While Best Buy is able to successfully manage thousands of customer service and tech reps using social media through ongoing training and conferences.

Smart companies that allow driven, passionate, creative and knowledgeable employees to partake in social media on the company’s behalf, have taken time to train staff on social media best practices as well as develop guidelines for when employees should engage in social media, and when they should simply listen. These primary ingredients are a smart company’s recipe for social media success.