Social Media and the Employee Clone Army: Episode 66

John Mark Troyer – The Geek Whisperers

Is your Employee Ambassador Program just creating a Clone Army?

What expectations do companies have about their employees participating in social media? Has it changed from ‘tacitly allowed’ to ‘mandatory’? This week, it’s just the three Geek Whisperers, and we discuss employee ambassador programs, social media training, and

• “Expectations for Employees in a Social Age”
• Employee Ambassador Programs
  • are they Identity Theft?
  • is this just the desire for a Clone Army?
• How do you scale with software or training “How to be a human?”
• Are they Social Media Foie Gras?
• Ambassador Programs, improperly done, add to the noise rather than add value
• Should you put your employee influencers into your influencer marketing program?
• The employee influencers probably already know the external influencers
• Why, when you hire somebody with social influence do you then treat them differently and interfere with that valuable practice?
• Best case scenario: employee advocacy software platforms are actually really good corporate newspapers. They help employees read about what the company did this week.
• Opt-in vs opt-out media
• How do you force people to pay attention? You don’t!
• Email is still an effective medium – case in point: TechReckoning.
• If you have an employee advocacy link sharing program, should you gamify it?
• Bad actors can really screw with a gamification strategy
• People can add value by
  • becoming an influencer
  • supporting/amplifying the other influencers – this is still valuable
• Amy defends Klout scores as being hard to game
• Employee social media training
• Is it useful to train everybody?
• No horse watering – provide the tools, but don’t force people to do things they aren’t comfortable with
• Give them the tools and get out of the way
• John’s social media training fable: one size fits all training doesn’t actually help two years later when people need it
• You can’t train common sense
• 1:1 coaching often makes a lot more sense than one-size-fits-all training
• Just listen to the Geek Whisperers! Only 66 hours of curriculum
• Making a boring training curriculum
• John liked EMC’s social media video (below). Chuck Hollis also did.
• Nobody will pay attention to training unless it’s relevant to their job role
• Changing the conception of your job role from program manager to public-facing ombudsperson
• 1:few small-group learning and mentoring vs standardized training
• What should employees be doing at events?
• Participating in events has a similar risk profile as participating in social media
• Social media online relationships are solidified in person
• If you are a vendor, don’t just sponsor events – show up!
• Why slap your logo on it and then not meet the people who are part of it?
• Explaining “Horse Watering”
• Don’t force people to go be social at events – it won’t work
• It is after hours – in addition to their normal roles
• But not showing up to an event is missing a lot of the value
• But you can check the box on your project plan
• The event is a catalyst for something larger
• As I’m listening to this and writing up these shows notes, it’s clear that all community events must be part of the official show plan and show personnel scheduling.

John actually likes this training video: