Should Your Employees Represent Your Company As Spokespeople?

Effective Use of New Media to Represent Your Company Online More and more companies are using employee spokespeople to promote and represent corporate culture online.

The traditional role of a company representative is to mediate with the press, persuade his audience with adverts, articles and speeches, motivate buyers for their products and services, and most important of all to uphold the company brand image.

A Unique Marketing Opportunity In the online environment the need is still the same only the medium changes. The Internet presents a unique opportunity to exchange and share information and opinions, therefore creating an easy environment for networking and promotion.

In an article by Josh Bernoff for Groundswell, new research shows that B2B buyers and decision makers have very high participation with social media.

What does this mean for you? If you’re B2B and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late but not too late yet! Several companies are taking advantage of these technologies but a lot of the blogs, communities, and other social outreach from B2B companies are still gearing up. This is your opportunity to stand out. In fact allocating spokespeople with the same job description to reach out to their counterparts to form natural online communities can be very effective in promoting your brand image.

Employees Make the Best Spokespeople The question is how do you go about promoting your corporation’s products and services using your employees – without jeopardizing your reputation and the integrity of your company brand?

For starters, you would have to work closely with your online marketing agency to create a program that will assign tasks to all participants.

* Choose specialty spokespeople from your company’s departments (i.e. human resources or customer services to manage individual social profiles).

* Brand each profile with the spokesperson. Carefully craft your messages, manage and monitor your brand.

* Monitor online reputation. There are many tools to monitor your online reputation Trackur is very widely used.

In addition, here are a few examples from mashable of corporate spokespeople using social medias for company recognition, services and customer awareness.

Twitter:

* For Jet Blue: @JetBlue

* For Portland Trail Blazers: @pdxtrailblazers

* For Wachovia: @wachovia

Blogging:

* Visit Jonathan’s Blog at Sun Microsystems CEO Blog

* Visit the IBM blogs for many different voices

Facebook:

* Check out the WWE fan page and application for fans that follow wrestling

Community Building:

* Dell is everywhere, Facebook, Twitter to name just but a few.

Look and Leap Forward The trends show that social media is here to stay. Once the domain of “bloggers” it is now going mainstream corporate – and fast. Companies are always looking for that marketing edge. Social media connects people, builds confidence and personalizes contact in an increasingly impersonal info-tech world. Start now and you won’t hear, “I told you so!”-