Your Online Marketing – Don’t Hide It from Your Employees

Online marketing campaigns may be obvious to marketers at one end and to customers at the other, but don’t forget to inform the employees in the middle as well.

Companies are guiding what their employees are doing on line. How about letting employees know what the companies themselves are doing on line?

Many organizations are establishing social media policies to guide their employees’ use of channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog comments and posts. In most cases, they’re trying avert legal problems, save face and keep things from getting out of hand when employees take to the keyboards in search of Web-fame, whether for themselves or the organization.

It doesn’t always occur to them that this goes in both directions. Herewith a cautionary tale.

“We Didn’t Know about the Online Promotion”

We had to wait 10 minutes for a table at Souplantation (sister company to Green Tomatoes) the other night. In the past, I’ve never had to wait longer than two minutes.

The hostess was in her early 20s, and I asked her how business had been lately.

“It’s been really busy all month long. We’d all rather be busy than idle, but it’s a little bit surprising.”

I mentioned the Facebook page and coupons and offers Souplantation makes to its following of over 40,000 fans.

“Yes, they put a lot of things up there: coupons, special menu items, raves from customers. We all know about the newspaper ads that customers use, but we don’t find out about e-mail and Web promotions until people start bringing the coupons through. We’re like, ‘OMG, they’re doing this promotion or that special?’ We’re glad to be busy, but we don’t always see this coming.”

“You’re an Important Part of Our Online Marketing Strategy”

This struck me as an oversight. If you’re developing advocates in your online world of customers, shouldn’t you also develop them among your employees, even the ones who don’t sit in front of a Web browser all day long?

Of course, if all you want employees to do is execute – heat up the soup, take the coupons, seat the customers, clean the tables, repeat – there’s no reason to educate them in what you’re doing on line. You can measure customer uptake and response six ways from Tuesday, and refine your offering based on the data alone, so why tax your employees with one more thing to juggle?

But if you see ways to give your employees a heads-up – notices at the time clock, quick daily or weekly briefings of shift managers – on your online marketing promotions, you can send the message that they’re an important part of the organization’s online strategy.

Which they are. Social business goes beyond just the Marketing department, as David Meerman Scott points out. Be careful not to become so distracted by Web 2.0, click-through, conversion and data warehousing – where you find customers – that you lose sight of the trenches – where your employees win and retain them.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

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