We don’t mean to suggest we want to propose marriage. Rather, we’re inquiring whether you — or, more specifically your brand — are engaged in two important ways with two equally important but very different audiences.
The first audience to consider comprises your employees. Are they engaged with your brand? Do they know what it represents? If you asked any number of them what the brand means, would all of them give you the same answer? Have they personalized it; that is, have they connected with it in ways that enable them to feel like its representative in their day-to-day activities? How do you know?
Allowing your employees to be engaged with your brand begins with clearly communicating your vision. Your vision — the articulation of what you want your organization to become — is the first step toward establishing the direction of your organization, as well as its culture, its personality, and its differentiating value propositions.
The second audience to consider comprises every one of your prospects. They, too, have to be engaged with your brand. They can be reached in a variety of media, social and otherwise. And, cost notwithstanding, no medium should be off the table.
God invented LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Scoop.it, Digg, RSS, and every other platform and website by which to spread your word to be used. Will they all be effective? No. Can they all be employed for next to nothing? Yes. Is it worth the risk of skipping media outlets if they have the potential to convert one prospect into a customer? Positively not.
As the cartoon suggests, if you and your employees aren’t engaged with your brand, you’re probably not ready to engage others — particularly your prospects — with your brand. And you’re surely not ready to engage social media in the positioning and promotion of your brand. But as undertakings go, this one’s not momentous.
If you’ve started with your vision and cascaded it down through your organization, you’re already on the right track. With your employees fully engaged, then, you’ll be ready to engage your prospects through social media channels, secure in the knowledge that their every interaction with every one of your employees will represent your brand consistently.
You can take that as a proposal, if you like.