Employee Engagement in changing times of Social Media Communication

Many employers think of converting a recruit to an employee the same manner as conversion of a girlfriend/boyfriend to wife/husband — once they sign on the dotted line, the romance between company and employee goes away, and they’re left on their own to deal with everyday work issues. Marriages can only last if both sides honestly communicate between them. So transparency in communication is what matters for better engagement. It is also essential for organization to practice integration of forward and backward communication channels as it help to analyze whether expected messaging has reached all the stakeholders in uniformed manner. This has been proved by various studies and every one of us will agree. Rather organization has to strategize engagement levels for different set of employees as each person is different so have to engage on different level.

It is clear that employees want consumer-like experiences. They don't want a job; they want a career with growth objectives. Money matters less, than fun, purpose and work-life balance. Regular engagement surveys are conducted to monitor employees' engagement levels at work. The future of employees depends not on their qualifications and skills, but their capacity to self-brand in the age of social marketing.

Marketing and human resource departments can play vital role in engaging and developing employees through a combination of initiatives digital and non – digital as well. In future the businesses admired by consumers / customers will be the best places to work, and being employed by those organizations will strengthen employees' personal brand image, which in turn will support the growth of organization. Finally as, LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner said, “The world's best recruiters are increasingly thinking like the world's best marketers." Marketing is about storytelling, influencing and creating a differentiation in the story about brand.

In last decade the growth in technology has fueled increased in communication, bridging gap between the two worlds i.e. marketing and HR, despite apparent differences between these two functions, the digital world has brought them closer by eliminating differences between employees and consumers. So much so, those organizations have started seriously considering hiring their best customers.

Social media has revolutionized internal communications, allowing companies to communicate directly and instantly with their stakeholders i.e. employees, marking a shift from the traditional monologue, to dialogue between company and employees. Digital disruption by social media has increased channels of communication combining multimedia opportunities for better engagement with employees. Organizations have been increasingly thinking of launching internal social networks for engaging with stakeholders.   

Internet Marketing – The Next Big Thing in Board Room Meetings

Don’t be surprised if ‘Internet Marketing’ is the next agenda during your board meetings, with Narendra Modi and NDA winning the Elections 2014 this has become the NEXT BIG THING for discussion. Be it your board meeting, customer care dept. meeting or human resource meeting, everyone is discussing about it, so be equipped for it. 

Internet Marketing as defined by Wikipedia – Online advertising, also called Internet advertising, uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including banner advertising) and mobile advertising.  

Major reasons behind Internet Marketing being the HOTTEST topic of discussion is almost 90% hardly understand its implications whether positive or negative. Having account on Facebook and twitter deciphers into knowledge on Internet marketing, which by far most Indian’s believe?

 

So finally what is internet marketing, to make it simple here you go

Search Engine Optimization - This is a process to organically rank your website in top ten results in search engine. This process involves more than 200 techniques and each is used based on the search engine algorithms. To put it in simple words, using this technique, your website can rank in the top pages of search engine, which results to more clicks, more leads, more conversions and more BUSINESS.

Social Media Optimization – This is a process where in social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger, Flickr, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc are used. SMO is more of a branding technique for the company. This technique is used to engage with the stakeholders, customers and leads. Though this is a long term process, but it definitely helps in the SEO process to generate instant leads.

 

Pay Per Click – This is a process where you pay to the search engine / social media portal to rank your website / updates on top of the results. Referred as PPC, since you have to pay per click, there are different combinations which can be used to garner the desired result. But since this is PAY PER CLICK, so incurs huge budgets.

For any company to succeed online a combination of these three techniques are used, but never forget to define the objective of the strategy, because without objective the whole budget and time will be wasted. So next time in the board meeting be well prepared to discuss how this will be a boon for different departments. Remember ‘Digital Marketing in Future will be like SEX, only losers will have to pay for it’

 

For better understanding check out my presentation on Slide Share - Click Here