Last week, Brian Solis from Altimeter presented his thoughts about the True Power of Employee Advocacy. If you missed it, you can access the webinar and the slides in our resources library http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/webinars/.
What was shocking to me was a statistic that Brian shared about the number of social media incidents that were reported in the Social Business Survey conducted by Altimeter. In 2012, a majority of companies (51%) indicated that they had at least one violation of their organization’s social media policy. There were some great examples of these types of incidents shared during the webinar. These were the types of stories that make marketers chuckle, yet sigh in relief that their company was not involved.
It was interesting to hear that 37% of companies rate their employees’ knowledge of social media usage and related policies as “poor” or “very poor”. Meanwhile they indicate that only 27% of employees are aware and trained on their company’s social media usage policies Clearly, there are some opportunities for improvement.
However, there is an opportunity to go beyond handing out some corporate policies about social media. Brian had some great points about the need to engage internally before engaging externally. Developing and clearly communicating your brand’s personality and your company’s social business strategy can arm employees with the knowledge of why the company is setting out to engage on social media channels and the value for customers and stakeholders. A great way to go beyond “do no harm” to true employee advocacy. Listen to the webinar to learn more about employee advocacy from Brian Solis.
The Socialization of Earth Day
Posted by Karen Stockert on April 22, 2013Last week, while attending an event to support an organization I volunteer for, I had the privilege of shaking the hand of Denis Hayes, the man responsible for coordinating the first Earth Day in 1970. On April 22 of that year, an impressive 20 million people were said to participate across the country. It boggles the mind to imagine how a skeleton crew of volunteers – passionate as they were – could turn out such crowds, all without the aid of the Internet, much less social media. While I didn’t get to ask him personally, I can only imagine the occasion he was so instrumental in launching must inspire a mix of pride and bewilderment 43 years later.
In 1970, students, parents, labor leaders, politicians, rich people and regular folks galvanized around a common concern for the environment and turned out for thousands of teach-ins and community events. On the most modern medium of the day, “Today” devoted 10 hours of coverage to Earth Day. Back then, remember, there were just 4 channels! The modern environmental movement had been launched.
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