Connecting with your employees is as important as connecting with your customers. Employees can be your energizers. Employees may already be on the same social networks, wikis, and participating in communities.
Internal groundswells can offer the opportunity to listen, to talk to, and energize employees who already believe in your brand. It can offer the chance to support employees and embrace their enthusiasm.
Employees are the first line of defence, they hear customer complaints directly, they work through the day-to-day problems themselves, and they’ve likely already thought up solutions to the problems. The corporate world have embraced wikis, recognizing that employees can offer insight and solutions to one another.
Embracing the internal groundswell means offering new ways for employees to engage with each other. Management must listen to what is being said, as employees have a lot at stake when they put it out there and let their opinions be known. Ease your employees into the internal groundswell. Participation is key, but it needs to be voluntary or it won’t be honest. Like you would seek out your brand enthusiasts outside the company, find the same type of people internally and encourage them.
Encouraging the groundswell internally means developing and nurturing relationships. This is the key to its success.
Like every other business, WIN House can and should energize their own internal groundswell. Employees work in a non-profit because they are passionate about the work. Take this passion one step further, engage the employees to connect with each other through social media. Share their passion with each other with the help of technology. This is one more way for these dedicated employees to generate ideas and expand their horizons.
This is my last post for school. This course has opened my eyes to the power of social media. As a “joiner” I already belonged to and used many of the platforms we explored in class but I hadn’t realized how beneficial they could be to business endeavours. In my personal life, over the course of this semester, I’ve watched a friend struggle through a problem and take to social media (FB and Twitter mostly) to energize friends and supporters – and it worked! They influenced the government to change their stance and offer the support they should have been providing all along. Social media is a powerful tool that can be harnessed in a variety of ways.
This was a great class and I’d recommend it to business owners and fellow business students.
Cheers,
Barb
Reference:
Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press
Image retrieved from https://www.juiceinc.com/blog/show/beyond-engagement-why-energized-employees-get-better-results
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