A little brand narcissism is a good thing, and it starts at the top. When the leadership team actively loves the brand and freely expresses that love, it’s infectious to teams below. It’s not about indoctrination or mind-control.  You can’t tell your teams how and what they should feel, but when your employees hear the leaders actively and enthusiastically loving the brand, they’re more likely to jump on the bandwagon and love your brand too. 

A little brand self-love can go a long way toward internal-external marketing alignment. Building a culture within your organization that expresses that self-love can be an excellent first step toward aligning your internal messages with your external ones.

While it may feel like you’re asking your teams to drink the Kool-Aid, the other valuable point about brand self-love is that it can quickly weed out the people who aren’t on board with you.  Employees who are skeptical, cynical, or resistant are not the people you want on your team who might leak their feelings onto a customer. Figure out who your biggest cheerleaders are and then let them express their passion to their colleagues and to your customers.

Who are your brand’s biggest internal cheerleaders? How do they express their love of your brand?  Leave us your comments and share your story.

Effective onboarding goes beyond tactical training 

Every new employee reflects time and money - not only in the recruiting and interviewing process but in the time it takes to bring them up to speed and make them productive.  Creating an engaging and comprehensive onboarding program will maximize your investment, reduce your overall training time, and generate motivated and enthusiastic new employees who are ready to help your company thrive.

How can Onboarding align your brand and marketing messages?

Many companies view onboarding as simply “orientation” - those first few days on the job where new hires learn how to use the phones, find the bathrooms, and fill out paperwork.  This completely misses the bigger picture.

Onboarding is an opportunity to immerse your new team member in every element of your company - from the basic and tactical to the strategic and cultural.  An effective program will help new employees become ambassadors of your brand and company, which is especially crucial if they have contact with customers, vendors, partners, or anyone outside the company. They will reflect and deliver your brand to the outside world so it’s imperative they do so in a brand-right way.

By integrating brand, culture, and marketing messages into your onboarding program, you will generate alignment and consistency throughout your organization and support the delivery of your brand.

Ten On-boarding Best Practices

1. Reflect the brand. The strength of your brand plays a huge role in recruiting and retaining top talent. The on-boarding process should reflect your brand seamlessly and consistently.
2. Reduce time to productivity. How fast can your new hire be up-to-speed? The sooner they’re productive, the sooner the company will benefit from their contributions.
3. Unify all on-boarding efforts.  There are multiple components and agendas that make up on-boarding - everything from payroll and benefits to security, IT, branding, customer service, and more. A unified and integrated program that covers all on-boarding elements will ensure each topic is trained consistently and according to company standards.
4. Introduce company culture. New employees can impact an organization’s culture. Now’s the time to introduce the company culture, and help new hires understand how they will be expected to meld into it.
5. Roll-out for maximum retention. Don’t overwhelm new hires by cramming all on-boarding into the first few days or weeks on the job. Spread it out to improve retention and provide on-the-job experience that can build better context.
6. Provide coaching & mentorship. It’s easy for new-hires to get frustrated, overwhelmed, and simply throw in the towel. If you lose them, you’ve also lost time and money. Give new employees an appropriate and safe outlet to vent, ask questions, and get coached.
7. Include evaluation and go/no-go checkpoints. Sometimes that person who shined in the hiring process turns out to be not the best fit after all. Build in checkpoints and measures for evaluation to help identify and de-select a poor fit early in the process, before you’ve invested a lot of time and money.
8. Involve managers. Don’t pass off on-boarding to the training or HR departments. Involve managers to establish rapport quicker and help them identify strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, motivation factors, growth opportunities, and more. 
9. Keep employees in the work environment. It’s tempting to ship your new employees off to a classroom for onboarding, but they’ll learn faster and retain more if you provide as much training as possible in the actual work environment.
10. Map to a larger plan. Onboarding should connect to and reflect your overall business objectives to support long-term company success. Also, development plans for each employee that are initiated in the onboarding process will improve motivation while building upon larger business goals.

Consumers are more cautious about spending and want a larger return for their hard-earned dollars.  They’re more skeptical about what’s going on behind the curtain at large companies.  They want reasons to believe in brands before they offer over their loyalty. 

With trust on the line, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your brand is aligned and that you’re walking the walk of your marketing messages and brand promises. Stray too far, and you may go down in flames.

Recently, my husband & I experienced a problem when we took a roadtrip to our old college town to attend a football game. After a hot day of traipsing around to visit our youthful haunts, we arrived at our hotel, ready to check in and freshen up before the big game.  It was nearly 90 minutes after check-in, and our room wasn’t ready. 

While the desk staff fumbled around trying to find a room that we could check into, several employees stood in front of us and had a conversation amongst themselves about why housekeeping was being so slow and that rooms were not being turned fast enough.

A problem was occurring for this hotel, which was threatening its brand - and the employees were making it even worse by engaging in idle banter and gossip about housekeeping in front of customers. 

When there are problems, your employees can be your best and your worst asset.  They’re the front-line to your customers and how they handle and manage problems can make or break your brand.

By empowering your employees with three simple steps, they can manage problems in the moment, helping to minimize any long term damage to your brand. 

1. Acknowledge your customer’s concern. When a customer is upset, it can really take the charge off of a situation when you “get” them - you let them know you understand why they’re upset. In my situation at the hotel, the manager could have said something like “I understand you must be tired and ready to check into your room, and that you were supposed to be able to check into your room over an hour ago.” 
2. Communicate your commitment to your customer, and let them know what you’re doing to fix the problem. At the hotel, the manager could have said “We are committed to getting you checked into a clean and comfortable room as quickly as possible so that you can make it to the game on time.”
3. Compensate by finding some way to make it up to your customer, no matter how small it may seem. Standing at the hotel desk while they tried to find us a room, it must have been pretty obvious that we were hot and tired. The manager could have found us a couple of cold bottles of water to drink while they found us a room. It would have been a small gesture, but one that would have gone a long way toward making me believe in their commitment to me - the customer.

Most importantly, when you’re having a problem, employees should know it’s not okay to engage in idle gossip in front of customers or complain about the problem to the customer or anyone else.  Your message to your customers should be one of accountability and confidence.  You’re taking accountability for the issue, and you’re displaying confidence in how you are responding to and correcting the issue.

How do you handle problems for your customers?  What problems have you run into as a customer yourself?  And how have they been handled?  Leave us your comments, and tell us about your experiences.

Bloggers and Twitterers buzzed about the change all week long - many were quite critical saying the name change doesn’t pull the company out of relative obscurity compared to sleeker rivals like Best Buy.  One blogger wrote that his impression of RadioShack is that it’s a brand that “never made the jump to the 21st Century” and that this re-name doesn’t do enough to give the brand a larger overhaul to make it relevant.

Any time you make a change to your brand, it’s perfectly natural to experience resistance, both from your customers and your employees. What will make this a win for RadioShack will be well-trained, engaged employees who are truly enrolled in and representing the fundamentals of the brand to customers.  This is the foundation of internal-external marketing alignment, and it can make or break a shift in your brand.

This is is critical in the face of competitor Best Buy who recently launched a new program on Twitter called Twelpforce: “A collective force of Best Buy technology pros offering tech advice in Tweet form.”

What do you think of RadioShack’s name change?  Does it impact whether or not you will shop at the store?  Leave us your comments and tell us what’s on your mind.

Taking on the world of social media can feel an awful lot like going to the gym when you’re really out of shape. You groan and moan, and it’s rather painful for the first few weeks.  Even the simplest tasks (like writing a single blog post) feel like they take forever, and you’re just not seeing the results you want. But - if you stick with it, it becomes easier, your muscles get toned, you feel better, and it becomes part of your routine.

Here’s a few ideas and resources to help you hit the social media gym, and start building your muscle today:

Want to know how social media guru Chris Brogan starts his day?  Here’s his five daily social media tasks.

If your company is starting a blog, and you’re wondering how to find a hook that will keep readers coming back, here’s some corporate blogs that are succeeding.

Need copywriting tips and ideas? Copyblogger is a favorite blog I follow for practical writing tips, tricks, and inspiration. A recent post called “how to kick ass as a freelance writer” has lots of great ideas on how to keep your readers coming back. Even though it’s written as tips for a freelance writer, there’s lots you can apply to writing your blog.

Still trying to get comfortable with Twitter?  Here’s some tips for new Twitter users from Mashable, and don’t miss the Mashable guide to Twitter.

No matter what you do — stick with it. Success in social media will happen as you build your muscle, make new connections, explore and experiment, and increase your confidence. Most of all - have fun with it!