One of the key reasons brands and companies have anxiety over employees talking about the company or brand is what's known as 'lack of control'.
In particular in the social media space, when today the table has been turned in favour of the strength of the consumer voice with social media.
Lets agree and be honest with ourselves that at this point, you are not in control now, and never will be of 'Social Media' unless you adopt new skills, processes and strategies to better understand where your prospects and customers are already spending their time, and how you might influence the conversations.
In the old days the brand police worked with the compliance police, who interpreted regulation in order to be able to produce any kind of corporate marketing materials, the process took ages (still does) and it was all, well, very corporate.
The rules were signed off by the board, managed by marketing for the 'colouring in' bit, with the corporate comms team (and external PR agency) being the deliverers of the corporate message(s) ahead of the AGM.
Quite a lot of it was then used to 'interrupt' people with outbound cold calls, e-mail, and adverts.
An awful lot of it was also used by 'sales' teams at exhibitions, or sponsored seminars, and as ammunition to beat your potential prospects with until they either cleared off or went into submission.
All sat well with the Board and Brand Police - then came 'Social Media'!
This traditional 'process and control' approach doesn't take into account the rise of social media where today Billions of people all over the world have multiple social media accounts, including all your employees.
Some for business (company accounts), some personal, and some for personal and company business.
Just like LinkedIn where they are 'hoping' to find the next job, or show that they have just arrived in the new one.
With 60%+ of the worlds population now on social media is now the time to think about how you might upskill your employees to use this medium for something other than a crisis management tool?.
"If you look at what's the typical charter of an enterprise grade CMO: They are responsible increasingly for bigger chunks of customer experience, they have a really increasingly large marketing technology stack that they're responsible for, they're often tasked with owning some proportion of the innovation initiatives for a company," Ross said. "You've got a super complicated consumer landscape. You've got all kinds of business models — disruption happening in virtually every industry. It's a very hard, very substantial job."
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