This story is about the broader importance of Internal-External Brand Alignment. Alignment is the state of agreement or cooperation among persons and groups, with a common cause or viewpoint.

To say it in another way, Internal-External Brand Alignment is the capability to align the culture of a commercial organization behind the promise made to customers. If your culture does not speak, walk, talk, act, engage, plan, and function in alignment with the ultimate purpose and commitment of the business, your reason for existence and your promise to your customers, then leadership needs to step up and improve alignment dramatically. They are the people who can and should initiate this necessary state of alignment.

I think this goes for the leadership of Fortune 500 companies as well as for leading politicians who are the democratically chosen CEO’s of their countries. They make choices now that will influence the future of tens of millions of their people for decades.

In January 2010, an EU report condemns “severe irregularities” in Greek accounting procedures. Greece’s budget deficit in 2009 is revised upwards to 12.7%, from 3.7%, and more than four times the maximum allowed by EU rules. The European Central Bank dismisses speculation that Greece will have to leave the EU.

Since then the global financial markets are following Europe and its main currency the euro with a hawk eye since it became clear that Greece was facing bankruptcy. Stocks went down dramatically in the next 20 months and several countries faced a debt rating cut by Standard & Poor’s and had to pay much higher interest on their bonds and other loans.

On 9 December 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announces, also on behalf of Angela Merkel,  that Eurozone countries and others will press ahead with an inter-governmental treaty enshrining new budgetary rules to tackle the crisis.

The problems in Greece and other southern European countries are not resolved, and they have even become a bit worse since January 2010. But the financial markets did indeed stabilize by this moment, just on the knowledge that there was alignment among the European leaders on how to approach the crisis and a defined road for moving forward.  

Big multinational corporations are like global stock markets. If the average employee doesn’t see, feel and understand the road the company is taking, or if leadership has no vision or is unable to explain it in an understandable way, people will quickly develop that uneasy feeling a stock trader has in a bear market. Purpose and goal orientation will disappear, leading to a situation where employee engagement will dramatically drop, which in the long run will certainly hurt the ROI of the company.

Dear CEO’s of this world, be like Angela and Nicolas. It is your task to create company-wide alignment with the corporate mission, vision, core values and strategy. We call it Internal–External Brand Alignment. Take the time and make a real effort to clearly state and explain where your company is going and why.  Keep confirming this in many ways on a daily basis. This is how you earn trust and give your people the map to confidently get on a well paved, or even a bumpy road.

The bad news is you have to do this quicker than your political counterparts. The good news is that you can hire world class internal external alignment consultants to support you and your leadership team in this communications challenge. Give us a call, we know a few of them…  

When the final bill arrived following a recent family dinner at a national chain restaurant, our server “Bob” made the plea for us to go on-line and fill out a customer survey.  He had provided decent service although not extremely notable. In his plea regarding the survey, he told us he would soon be going on vacation for a couple of weeks to visit family across the country. If he doesn’t get good survey results, he said his boss may cut his shifts when he’s back from vacation.

The customer survey is becoming very common in the world of retail and service-oriented businesses.  I’m frequently asked when making a purchase to go on-line and rate my experience.  It’s also common for the associate to request the rating they think they should receive.  Sometimes it comes with a plea like Bob’s that the associate may face a cut in shifts or possibly won’t get a raise if they don’t get top-notch results.

For many employees, it seems to be all about the survey results.  Associates probably get frequent reminders from managers that good survey results are imperative.  If that’s the case, then the focus for employees becomes the survey results themselves while the experience they’re creating for customers that supports the company’s brand promise becomes secondary or even forgotten. Are these employees being truly trained on how to deliver excellent service or a good customer experience…or are they simply being trained to ask for a specific rating from a customer?  Isn’t this the wrong message to send employees? 

If employees know how to deliver an excellent customer experience, the rest should take care of itself.  Sure, you can use surveys or mystery shops to confirm and validate. But the rubber truly meets the road if employees understand the experience your brand is aiming to create and how their role in your organization contributes to your customer promise. 

If they’re only being trained to ask for survey results, that may be the last memorable impression made on the customer.  The emotion you create for your customer might be one of pity, sympathy (“I sure hope Bob doesn’t get his shifts cut when he returns from vacation”), irritation (“Why should I give Bob 5 stars when his service only ranked 2 or 3?!”) rather than excitement over a delightful experience.

Do you want your brand to be known as the one that badgers customers to give good survey results or the one that delivers an outstanding experience every time?

What happens when you change your perspective by 180 degrees? 

Have you walked in the shoes of your workforce recently?  You might learn some interesting things about your organization by taking a trip to the front lines.

Most leaders in an organization look at their companies from the top down.  They collaborate with fellow leaders and come up with great ideas and strategies to drive the success of their brand and to fulfill their promise to customers. 

What happens to those great ideas when they’re passed down the ladder? Are they working? Are the expectations realistic? Do your teams understand why they’re being asked to do things a certain way?  Is the mission and vision clear?  Do they know how to successfully & consistently deliver your promise to customers?

When leaders take the time and exercise the patience to put themselves in their associate’s shoes, they can have an eye-opening experience. Put yourself on the front lines and take a look back up the ladder.  What do you see?  How are messages delivered?  Talk to your front-line associates.  Find out what really happens in their day as they interact with customers.  Dig in to see if they’re clear on their role and truly understand their accountabilities.

Armed with this valuable information, you can regroup with your fellow leaders and start to identify all the places in your organization where you might be misaligned.  Then you can re-shape existing programs, fine tune messages, streamline and prioritize communication, and make any other needed shifts so that you’re on the road to aligning your workforce with the promise you’re making to your customers.  

In more than 20 years of experience working with some of the world’s leading brands, our experience has shown that when leaders make that trip to the front line, they always find opportunity to increase alignment throughout their organization.  When they take an authentic look at the world through the eyes of their associates, they discover ways to simplify processes, amplify messages, reduce clutter, and improve results.  It’s all about leveraging energy.  When you’re able to increase the effectiveness of several thousand people (or more), think about the exponential results that are now possible!

What’s going on at your organization’s front lines?

Do you love your own brand?  Are you your brand’s own biggest fan?  If not, then you should be. And your teams should be too!  How can you expect customers to love your brand if you don’t love it first?

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 and integrates new employees in a brand-right, comprehensive, and strategic program.

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.

In any business, there will be problems.  A deadline will be missed, a product won’t function to the glory of its glossy advertising promise, a customer will have to wait in line longer than they should.  Problems will happen – they’re inevitable.  By training your employees how to react and respond when there’s a problem, you can minimize the damage ahead of time and help your brand be prepared to weather any storm.

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.

This was a big week for RadioShack as the 88-year old company announced that it’s reintroducing itself as simply “The Shack.”  According to an article in USA Today, the company is making the change in an effort to maintain its brand heritage while also attracting more tech-savvy shoppers. The article goes on to say that a new ad campaign will focus on the company’s knowledgeable sales staff and the idea that their small stores are easier to navigate than big-box competitors.

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.

Any business leader accountable for management of their company’s employment brand, talent pipeline, or employee engagement should read a new article from Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009 issue) titled How Gen Y & Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda. The subhead states that your oldest and youngest talent cohorts demand many of the same things in a workplace – and have the numbers to get their way. This article offers an interesting perspective on an issue we hear frequently discussed by major HR organizations as they work to create a compelling work experience that allows them to attract and retain the best talent.

In addition to detailing a vision of what the workplace should include to effectively retain Gen Y and Boomer talent the article provides this interesting portrait of each generation.

Portrait of Gen Y

Ambition
84% profess to be very ambitious

Loyalty vs. Quest
45% expect to work for their current employer for their entire career

Multicultural Ease
78% are comfortable working with people from different ethnicities and cultures

Healing the Planet
86% say it’s important that their work make a positive impact on the world

Networking by Nature
48% say having a network of friends at work is very important

Portrait of Baby Boomers

Staying in Harness
42% project they will continue working after age 65

Long Runways
47% see themselves as being in the middle of their careers

From “Me” to “We”
55% are members of external volunteer networks

Yearning for Flexibility
87% say being able to work flexibly is important

Familial Obligations
71% report having elder care responsibilities

What I find so interesting is that I often hear disparaging comments targeted at members of the Gen Y generation that are often leveled by Boomers. Perhaps, with a closer look, the distance between these groups is not that great.

So what do you think? What has your experience been navigating the generational divide in the workplace. Join the discussion. We would love to hear from you.

When was the last time you experienced delight as a customer? I’m not just talking ho-hum customer satisfaction (like the guy at the deli didn’t completely screw up your sandwich, but he also didn’t offer you a pickle on the side either).  I’m talking honest-to-goodness delight! Joy! Extreme fulfillment!

Was it last week at the coffee shop when the barista remembered your name and your favorite beverage and started firing up the espresso machine as soon as she saw your face in the window? Or two months ago when you called your cable company for technical support and they handled your problem with professionalism and rapid response?

For me, it was a few weeks ago at the cosmetics counter of a major department store. The clerk was so efficient in uncovering my needs that I ended up buying several things that I hadn’t intended to, but the items were sold to me in such a way that I couldn’t pass them up. I walked away feeling very satisfied with my experience and the value of the products I had purchased. I ended up spending far more than I had intended, but I felt great about it! Next time I need makeup, I’m going back to that clerk for her efficient and friendly manner.

Out of curiosity, I visited the website for the cosmetics brand this clerk represented. I wanted to see what the brand says about the service experience they promise to customers.  The website talks about expert knowledge, friendly advice, and personalized service that’s defined as a “gold standard” in the industry.

This clerk truly delivered that description to me – she’s representing her brand appropriately and expertly. Her brand is exhibiting internal-external brand alignment by making sure the experience I have as a customer matches what the brand promises. The words on the brand’s website aren’t just lip service. The company is truly walking the walk and delivering upon their promise through helpful, well-trained employees who provide an expert and friendly experience.

Sure, we all expect to be delighted when we check into a Ritz Carlton or shop at a high end retailer like Saks, but delight doesn’t have to be limited to luxury brands. You can build delight into any brand and any customer experience. And when you delight your customers, you’re building excitement and passion for your brand. Your customers will probably buy more of your product or service and be willing to pay a higher price for it. They’ll probably think about your brand every time they use your product, and they may even tell their friends, family, colleagues, and the web about your brand.

Beyond the value you provide for your customers, you also have an opportunity to delight your employees. Setting a high bar for service is a rush for the right employee. It’s rewarding and energizing. Employees can feel excited about coming to work and delivering your brand, knowing they have an opportunity to make someone’s day. It starts with finding and hiring those brand-right people who can easily become natural advocates for your company. If you’re interviewing someone who doesn’t seem like they can truly deliver the promise of your brand – move on! You’ll be glad you did.

Delivering customer delight is a fun game to play.  It’s exciting to be the one delivering it – and it’s even more thrilling to be on the receiving end as a customer. What are some brands that represent true customer delight to you? In what ways do they deliver? Leave us a comment and tell us about your experiences.

We have all experienced it. A slick new marketing campaign peaks our interest in a product or service. It’s usually a bold promise about what we can expect if we purchase a product or sign up for service. We take the chance, engage with the business, and immediately start seeing gaps between what they promised and the actual experience. What happened? Where did the promise go?

Companies that don’t pay attention to the gap between the brand promise and the actual customer experience risk creating a situation where the customer senses a bait and switch. This can quickly erode the integrity of your brand and take years – and millions of dollars – to correct.

The practice of Internal-External Brand Alignment can help ensure that your customer experience reflects the promise of your brand by building a strong culture, providing effective and practical training, and communicating consistently and powerfully to your teams. To get started on the right path, you should first identify the various conditions in your business that have a cumulative impact on your service culture.  Here are a few we commonly see.

Are you clear about your service goal?
This seems like an obvious question, yet it’s surprising how often I ask this question in consulting sessions and get an uncomfortable silence. It’s also surprising how many businesses immediately say they provide outstanding service, but when I dig a little deeper, it’s clear they’re not delivering anything more than the most elementary and basic customer experience. There’s simply no “delight” to be found anywhere. But maybe “delight” isn’t part of the experience you’re committed to providing. If your goal is to provide a solid, basic experience, then call it that. If it’s true delight you’re after, then the elements that make a delightful experience must be clear and tangible to everyone – most importantly your customer.

Are you putting money, and time, where your mouth is?
Here’s a simple question: is your company spending more time or less time on associate training and communication now than you did five years ago? If your answer is “more,” then good for you. Building a strong culture of exceptional service requires time and commitment. If you’re spending less than before, this could be a reason for declining service standards. Over the past few years, many businesses have gradually starved their communication, training, and cultural alignment and are now seeing a widening gap between the brand promise and the service reality.

What does your employee attraction program look like?
Many service businesses have relatively high turnover. Logic would tell you that these businesses should be masters at attracting great workers due to the fact that they are always recruiting. Often the opposite is true. Many service businesses have extremely primitive programs for attracting a workforce that is right for their brand and gifted at providing a great experience for customers. They rely on the most basic elements of recruiting, like posting a help wanted sign in the window or posting an ad on craigslist.  Instead, they could be building a network of qualified candidates who they’ve already determined are brand-right. Leading companies are now focusing on building the employment brand of their organizations to support the larger brand. This employment brand is what will attract the brand-right people into your company and entice them to stay for the long haul and perform to their highest potential.

Does your entire organization know how cool they are?
When working with an organization for the first time, I’m often amazed at how they do what they do, the beauty of their product, the complexity of their execution, and the innovation they foster. Yet, when I point this out to my client they often roll their eyes and shrug off the compliment. What makes their company amazing has become mundane and common in their eyes. Providing excitement and engagement for your customer starts with you being excited and engaged first. Does your organization truly celebrate what you do, what you provide, or how you provide it? Take a fresh look at what you do, how you talk about it, how you celebrate it. You might find that the secret to delighting your customer is first of all re-connecting your organization with a true passion for what you do.

Asking yourself these four questions is a great place to start in identifying where your opportunities may lie. In the second part of this post we will explore the various components of the ecosystem that all contribute to Internal-External Marketing Alignment.

It’s been a busy week as we gear up for some exciting work with a new client – a major specialty retailer who needs to develop internal and external communication programs to support the brand, boost sales, and create a welcoming customer experience.

In the meantime, here’s a roundup of interesting articles & posts we’ve bumped into over the past week.

Employees can be incredible brand ambassadors.  Find out how some Fortune 500 companies are using high profile employees to call attention to their brands. click here

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research regularly provides fascinating insight on the social web. His most recent post describes how top companies are embracing social technologies. click here

Are you afraid of giving away too much of your expertise? This blog post on the Golden Rule of Online Marketing describes how you can share your expertise and still make money. click here

Has your dog been trying to tell you for years that he wants bacon and eggs for breakfast? Del Monte leveraged a social media community for dog owners to create a new pet product. click here

Google uses an algorithm to analyze employee behavior. Wonder what ever happened to a good old conversation? click here

Starbucks has recently launched a new ad campaign that Senior VP of Marketing Terry Davenport calls a “long-term story telling campaign” that will focus on the quality and value of the product and the values of the company. The ads are intended to help build the brand and product value by showing what Starbucks is all about. An article in the Wall Street Journal says the ads are a direct response to competition from McDonald’s, who has also begun a national advertising campaign to promote its new line of low-priced coffee drinks.

No matter what the bottom-line intention of the campaign, Starbucks is demonstrating a powerful example of internal-external brand alignment. The company is leveraging the influence of its employees, or “partners”, as they are called by Starbucks, to support the advertising campaign and integrate it into the customer experience.

In a video posted on YouTube, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks directly to employees about the new campaign. He explains the rationale behind the messages and encourages employees to talk about the ads with customers. He points out that the ads not only represent what the company stands for but are representative of “you” – meaning the employee.

By engaging employees and encouraging the development of a strong internal culture, Starbucks is helping to fulfill its brand promise to customers. As stated on the company’s website, the Starbucks mission is “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” What better way to fulfill that mission than starting with your employees? They’re the ones who can truly create an experience for customers that will bring the mission to life and keep them coming back for more coffee — no matter what the price.

Tell us how your company leverages its culture to build a customer experience. What brands do you think are most successful in this space?

A colleague of mine shared a recent story that I believe illustrates one of the new challenges companies face in managing their brands in the age of the social web.  It also points to the importance of building true internal-external brand alignment in your organization.

Our tale begins at a recent large international tradeshow in Las Vegas where a leading US-based technology company had a major booth.  I am sure the executives who authorized the substantial cost to exhibit at the show viewed it as a fantastic opportunity to connect with customers and promote the many great technologies the company produces.

My colleague, who is a well regarded member of the industry, was touring the show floor and happened across the above company’s booth where she had a rather negative experience. She was treated in a very dismissive way, and she left the booth disappointed and a little irritated.

In the heat of the moment she communicated her disappointment and irritation in a rather sharply worded “tweet” on Twitter through her cell phone, then went on with her day without giving it another thought.

The next day she received several urgent voicemail messages from the Director of Marketing from this particular company, demanding a call back. When they finally connected she was admonished for daring to write a negative tweet about the company, threatened that this company could make her life difficult if she ever said another negative thing about them, and then made to feel guilty for putting the Director of Marketing’s job at risk.  Apparently the senior executives had been monitoring Twitter and were not happy with what they heard in the “tweet” about the experience in their booth.

In so many ways this experience did not surprise me. Many large companies have been able to manage their brand for decades by using their size and industry stature to intimidate and quickly stamp out potential damage to their brand.  These behaviors are often well entrenched in the culture of the organization and employees are encouraged to respond quickly to quiet dissention.  After all, isn’t that one of the benefits of being large?

The leveling quality of the social web has shifted the balance of power forever, yet many companies are still caught in old cultural models that no longer work. Customers and employees now have a variety of channels to communicate both positive and negative messages about the brands they come into contact with. Progressive companies are quickly finding ways to harness the power of the social web to create meaningful connections with customers and employees. They are also educating their teams on how to respond effectively to the comments that inevitably will get made in the social space.

How much more effective it would have been for the tech company in our story to engage my colleague about her comment in a transparent way in the social space. They could have thanked her for her feedback with a quick Twitter reply and worked to turn her negative experience into a positive in front of the social community. No company is perfect.  We all know that. But seeing a company walk the talk and work to truly listen to a customer is reassuring and allows the company to take the high road and further build the brand.

Here is the irony of the story. My colleague is a new member of Twitter with a very small current following, most of whom are family and friends.  Any “damage” done from her tweet was minimal.  But this same colleague has a blog that is read by thousands of industry members each week.  Hmmm, now that this major tech company has decided to use intimidation tactics over a small tweet, I wonder if they have a much bigger problem ahead from a fiery blog post.

The rules have changed and aligning your team behind what your brand stands for is more important than ever.

There’s been a lot of talk in the social media world over the past week about the Dominos incident. Two employees who thought they were being funny posted a video of themselves doing nasty things to some food they were preparing.   Nobody wants their brand raked over the social media coals like this.

How can you prevent this type of incident from happening to your brand? Build a strong company culture where employees have pride in their workplace and in the brand they support. Yes these are just two fastfood workers in minimum wage jobs. With jobless rates higher nationwide than they’ve been in decades, there are plenty of people who would gladly step up and take these positions.

Here are some things you can do to start building a strong culture – even amongst fastfood workers:

Create Hiring Standards
Build standards within your company for how you hire and what qualities you demand. Put checks and balances in place to help all hiring managers know when the prospective employee they’re interviewing is worthy of representing your brand. Support your teams by creating tools for hiring that help identify someone’s character early in the process.

Build an On-Boarding Program
Then after you’ve hired, bring your new team members on-board with consistent messages about your brand, your culture, and your expectations around service. Find ways to test their knowledge and skills – not just about the tactical details of the job but around the cultural and brand details too.

Provide Ongoing Coaching
After they’re brought on-board, keep the learning alive. Build in regular touchpoints for coaching with training material or personal mentorship.

Leverage the Power of Peer Pressure
A strong culture within your company also becomes a self-policing culture. When your employees truly have pride in your brand and workplace, you can leverage the power of peer pressure to keep an eye on things for you. This eases the burden on management and helps employees feel more accountable and empowered to support the brand.

As that old saying goes about an ounce of prevention – building a strong culture within your company can help prevent incidents like the one Domino’s faced recently. That doesn’t mean you won’t continue to have disgruntled employees who act out, but hopefully you will know how to identify and deal with them before disaster strikes.