Wendy Boyce
A challenge that many B2B social media marketers face is grabbing the attention of their employees in taking action to help promote a company’s socially relevant content. For me, as a B2B social media marketer, content is king. The very thing that lies at the foundation of a sound social media strategy is the content. It is through content that we can begin to build connections and foster relationships.
Here are some common replies you might hear when asking your employees to engage in social media content sharing and other activities:
“I only use Facebook for personal reasons.”
“I don’t know the first thing about Twitter.”
“I don’t have time to get on LinkedIn.”
“I would have no idea what to write about for a blog article.”
“My social connections are not buying what we are selling.”
The above may all be true, and you may have employees who will never use social media for more than personal reasons and that’s okay. BUT… Even for those who use social for strictly personal reasons, there are small things you can still ask them to do to leverage their social profiles, like providing guidelines for optimized profiles that are keyterm rich for search engine optimization. My guess is that even those using social media for personal reasons, probably have their employer listed on their social sites.
Usually, the bottom line is that folks won’t adopt something new because they just plain don’t know about it, or how to do it. This is often the case with social media.
Having been met with most, if not all, of the above comments – I am rolling out a competition that will hopefully encourage and excite our company personnel to engage in social media (following safe company guidelines, of course).
The competition is based on the popular Hasbro dice game Yahtzee. This competition will span 13 weeks, based on the 13 lines of game play in Yahtzee. The premise is this:
Each week employees who are participating must complete one social media task. The social media tasks include things like:
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile
- Bookmark 3 blog posts on a social bookmarking site
- Submit a blog article for publication on our company blog
Yahtzee!
Every Friday afternoon there will be a time to roll for Yahtzee. Each week the players will take one turn in the game if they have completed a task, and must fill in their score on one of the 13 lines of the Yahtzee score card. Prizes are awarded for completion of the upper section, completion of the lower section, and completion of the whole game. Special prizes are awarded when a participant rolls a Yahtzee, and, of course, we are giving away a Grand Prize to the overall score winner at the end of the competition.
There are several things I hope to accomplish through this process:
- Raise awareness inside our organization about our social media efforts and how they impact the overall goals of our organization.
- Educate employees on various social networking sites and how to properly use them.
- Increase traffic and visibility of our company blog and profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and so on.
- Increase the overall size of our aggregate social network.
- And most importantly, have fun! I want our employees to know that their involvement in social media can benefit our organization with just a little time, and can spark conversations and create new relationships!
I’ll be interested to track analytics on our various social networking sites over the course of this 13-week period. I am confident that our employees are the most valuable assets we have in leveraging our social content. This Yahtzee competition will enable me to show them all that they are each a valuable asset to the success of our social media team here at SIGMA Marketing.
Check out a recent post by Gidgett Ingalls, VP of Human Resources and Strategic Planning at SIGMA. She wrote about DISC profile assessments and people who generate content for social media. Very insightful.
About the Author:
Wendy Boyce is the Social Media & Marketing Manager at SIGMA Marketing Group, an integrated marketing analytics firm. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
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Wendy — what a terrific idea. Using a game to help overcome the fear employees might have about social media will enable them to dip their toes in with the encouragement of their company. If only more organizations would understand that their employees want to support the business goals of the company and help it to succeed. If the company succeeds, they benefit by having more opportunities for growth and advancement. Congratulations!
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