1.) Encourage your employees to blog. This creates an instant presence on the Internet, and humanizes your company. It gives prospects a chance to “window shop” your company before they contact you.
2.) Encourage your employees to participate in user groups and professional societies. This will give your company a reputation for thought leadership. It will also put your employees in a position to influence the seminars, conferences, and trade shows for your industry.
3.) Encourage your customers to present at your industry’s trades shows, seminars, and conferences. Who do you think is more persuasive, you explaining your product or service, or your customer explaining how your product or service solved their problem?
4.) Solicit the opportunity to present to local user groups or professional societies. Conferences and seminars are great, but often attendees find the whole experience exhausting, and all the presentations blur together. Presenting to a local chapter lets you have the stage to yourself. Most of these organizations are run by volunteers and are always looking for speakers. Just make sure that your presentation is educational and relevant, nobody wants to sit through your sales pitch.
5.) Nominate your customer for “Best of” awards. Most trade magazines have annual “Best of” features. Resist the temptation to nominate yourself, nominate your customer instead. It will cement your relationship with that customer and create a halo effect for your product and/or service.
See my article Do-It-Yourself Public Relations for Technology Companies for more ideas.
2 comments:
I completely agree with you on the first aspect. It's one of the things that I look at about a company before I consider working with them. The other aspect is the "voice" of the blog. Is it is simply MarComm or near-MarComm or does it actually sound like a real person?
On that note, it brings up another aspect to consider. Employees get
frustrated, burnt out, etc and can offer inside information that no external people would know... that could be good and bad from a recruiting or customer service perspective, but for public companies, it could be troublesome or even illegal.
I think it's vitally important for companies to encourage their people to get out there and participate. These are also great resume builders for everyone involved. Some companies are nervous about having their employees build their resume in this way, but they often miss the point that having "distinguished" members of the community raises their own profile and prestige.
And, when your company is going to present to one of these groups, bring schway and/or food. No, not kidding. If people know that dinner/breakfast is covered, it's more likely to kill one of their excuses for skipping and if they walk away with something, I would suspect (no evidence here) that they're more likely to check out your site and products later.
I am going to have to write a follow post about employees griping, but the shorter version is that employees who do that are more likely to do that pseudonymously.
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