Empowering Employees with Social Business Strategy

I had an interesting experience recently. As some of you know, I was at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas last week doing a big presentation there. I saw a lot of friends, and met a lot of new friends, some great content. The NMX guys do a great job.

But the last night I was there, I went to the Penn & Teller comedy show at the Rio, which is where the conference was. It was amazing the way Penn and Teller sort of co-opted the audience and turned them into volunteer marketers. They’ve got a lot of bits in the show where they actually use people’s cell phones and record video and then ask them to upload it to YouTube.

The most amazing thing – Penn and Teller are a pretty big deal, right? They’ve been at the Rio for 12 or 13 years. At the end of every show, they come out to the lobby and sign autographs and take pictures until the last person leaves. Every night. It’s amazing, because that creates so many social ripples. Every photo, every tweet, every Facebook post about, “Oh, here’s me with Teller, and here’s me with Penn.”

I certainly took those pictures and uploaded them, and there’s a lot of people who follow me in social media, of course. So it creates a lot of awareness for them, perhaps even more so than they could create for themselves. I wrote a blog post about that recently. I think it’s a really good lesson for all companies.

One of the things that I’ve been most interested in with regard to IBM’s social business journey is how effective they’ve been at activating their own employee base as well as their hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. I think IBM is really, really smart in that it’s not about them. It’s not about how loud can they shout or how often can they talk at you, it’s about how can we get other people to be our megaphones for us.

It’s a business that’s transparent, open, and honest, shares things, doesn’t restrict you like the other example you just gave us; and it’s a business that is very nimble. In order to have those three characteristics while using social tools and techniques throughout your business processes, you really need to engage your employees to be spokespeople for you. That’s one of the great things that IBM has done.

So if you think about this, really turning your workforce into a smarter workforce where customer service is exceptional because the company reaches out to customers through its social network and pools together the right answer – and does so responsibly – that makes the employee more loyal because he or she is impacting the world. The customer is more loyal because you’ve reached him or her where they are in the channel that they’ve chosen to use and to leverage.

I think social has lots of power on engagement, both employee engagement and customer engagement, that leads to that strong loyalty in the marketplace. I said I haven’t done any studies myself, but I do find that employers or companies who engage their employees with social, their employees tend to stay around longer because they feel like they have a voice, and they have a role to play in the company’s strategy overall.