I recently received a number of 'confidential' messages via social media from a number of extremely concerned employees from a well known British Retailer, and this retailer is just one of many that are finding things difficult in today's digitally connected socially savvy world we all live in.

They (employees) had responded to a recent blog about how companies are happy to 'advertise and promote' themselves on social media, but very few of them appear to have a 'listening' approach built into that strategy. 

The comments I got were very much echoing the same sentiment by sharing there concerns as an internal problem, they all said the same thing that "those in the boardroom are not only disconnected to its customers, but also from its employees".

As with old school corporate messages, and the associated obligatory website your brand is no longer what you tell us it is, its what we determine it is via a number of different touch points, and most of those are happening in the social media space. 

This type of old school leadership just doesn't cut it in today's digitally savvy world, to not trust your employees and share information that can help move your company on is downright 'leaderless' in my opinion.

I found this really interesting article (link below) that talks about 'Diversity' and employee empowerment, something we strongly resonate with here at DLA Ignite, it goes on to say;

Your company culture forms the basis of everything you do. No matter how much time or how many resources you plow into marketing, if your audience and customers don’t align with your key values, your success will be limited.

Company culture and brand are now merging and some experts already consider them to be synonymous. To put it another way, your branding and content marketing strategy can’t be separated from your company culture as a whole.

Employees who work in a trust-based company culture are 8x more likely to say they’re proud to share where they work, which helps to promote the company brand.

However, less than half of the employees surveyed for a global study say they have “a great deal of trust” in the company they work for. This lack of trust is due to unfair compensation and sparse opportunities for promotion, lack of leadership, and a work environment that’s not conducive to collaboration.

For brands to succeed in the new era of influencer marketing, where their advocates are their own employees rather than celebrities and social media personalities, it’s vital to build this culture of trust.

At DLA Ignite we specialise in helping companies and the internal 'Change Makers' deliver on all these points, and I'm pretty sure we can help you as well. We have a tried and tested methodology, we hold you and your colleagues hand throughout, ensuring we not only 'teach' you what to do, we also make sure its firmly embedded into your firms DNA.

We don't do retainers, we are not an agency that creates and produces copy/content or sells ads for you.

We are active 'practitioners' of what we do, we already know and can evidence the ROI of a robust and internally aligned 'Social' strategy.

Part of that evidence it that you are reading this blog, just like many others - including your competitor!

We also don't do outbound pushy, salesy marketing, so if you would like to explore more, please contact the author of this blog.