I'm reading Mark Schaefer's book "Marketing Rebellion" which makes a number of great points. People hate being interrupted. They hate being interrupted by advertising, the hate being being interrupted by cold calling, they hate being interrupted by unsolicited emails. Which is why we block this out of our lives.
2 Billion (yes Billion) people use ad-blockers. In the old days of cold calling, you would have called me every day for 6 months until I agreed to have a meeting with you. Now when you cold call me, I block you using simple technology on my phone. Did this to a cold caller yesterday. When you send me unsolicited emails, I just create a rule so that your emails in future will go straight to trash. I won't have to do anything.
What we are looking for as buyers is experts. People who can help us make our purchase. People we can trust. We also want to buy from people just like us.
Problem is that corporations get in the way, talking about how great they are, how they are number one, how they are market leader and of course, we don't believe them. We hate being sold to, being pitched to. The only unique any company has today is it's people. Now, I don't mean you empower those people to spread your corporate message, that is just as boring and uninteresting as you doing it.
I'm talking about empowering your people to talk in their own authentic voice about your products and services.
We were recently in Singapore onboarding our Asian team and out of the window was the Singtel building. Singtel have 35,000 followers on Twitter, which is pretty good. That's 35,000 people who are open to listening to the corporate message which is mainly about discounts.
But when you think about it, they have 4 million subscribers and 25,000 employees, it's a drop in the ocean. In fact you can see the opposite is true.
Now if you took the 25,000 employees activated 10% to talk about Singtel and they all had 100 followers, that's more followers than the corporate account has currently. The other thing with the 100 followers of the employees is that they will love and support the employees so are more likely to share that content.
That is why your company culture is critical in creating these empowered employees in understanding that marketing does not work anymore, and your customers are on social.
In today’s changing landscape, jobs are becoming less and less of a 9-5 construct; today’s workforce wants to find a job that’s not just a paycheck, but a passion. That’s great news for you as an employer. These types of employees should be inherently great candidates for employee advocacy or becoming your “brand champions” on social media. However, you can’t just expect that every employee will begin tweeting and posting things about your company as soon as they’re hired (nor should you want them to). You have to create an environment that inspires this type of activity in a positive way.
