If you're a small business, and you enjoy blogging about what you do, why you do it, and sometimes 'how' you do it can be a great source of 'story' inspiration for writing blogs and Vlogs, especially if you're a one man/woman band. 

After all the key thing you're 'socially selling' is YOU, and from what we can tell there are huge numbers of people on Linkedin doing a great job at this!

But what if your a more established, more conservative medium to large, or global company? 

With 900 million of the world's professionals registering their personal CV and career attainments on the site, LinkedIn has become a valuable resource for head-hunters and human resources departments.

But over the last three years or so, this once staid community billboard of career updates and business launches has seen a change in tone. Many posts have become more personal, featuring the emotional backstories of its members with accounts of childhood influences and admissions of failings and frailties.

"This is a far cry from the hard-sell approach beloved of many corporate players and not everyone is happy. Critics murmur that these posts are more suited to the weekend musings of Facebook or the raucous tone of Twitter". BBC.com

source

Companies today are looking to build a more authentic and engaging social media presence, and a key part of this transformation includes the development an internal 'employee advocacy' content strategy.

An employee advocacy strategy is simply a way of getting your employees (board included) to write about what they have knowledge about and feel comfortable enough writing about it, and this where we provide all the training, mentoring and ongoing support, all done within an internally aligned strategy and framework.

The 2 biggest things you should look to address is the initial concerns around sharing what could be classed as trade or business secrets. After all if your competitor is as active as your going to be on social it's probably not the best idea to let them get too close to things that make your business more competitive than they are. 

The second challenge I often get asked about is how to make storytelling from employees come across as real and authentic without them exposing too much of their personal life.

 As an employer you have a duty of care to make sure the process and involvement doesn't impact on mental health.

I found this piece of research by 'Michael Brenner' (link below) who takes a look at the positive gains from employees creating and publishing content that isn't the usual corporate diatribe that no one ever really believes, or reads.

 

  • Authenticity is essential for building trust with your audience and creating better content.
  • You can be authentic without giving too much away – be relatable but you don’t have to get personal if you don’t want to.
  • Put your audience first and the rest will follow.