summer brand camp 2014 ghost hunting report

Summer Brand Camp 2014 Ghost Hunting Report

Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories

Howdy, Brand Campers! !

You know what’s scarier than a campfire ghost story?

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Finding out you’re the ghost.

🌲🌳🌲🌘🔥🍢👻

👻


1. What makes a 👻 ?

2. The anti-👻.

3. Please stop scaring me: Our 👻 hunting report

4. The Ajax Award: Camp’s Most Corporeal Camper!

5. 👻 busting tips for you and your company.

Are you a 👻?


In a sea of 1 billion social media users (including 650 million professionals), using résumé jargon and focusing on you, you, you, can make you functionally invisible.

Like a 👻.

What makes a 👻.


The anti-👻 leverages her team to make her personal brand stand out.

Instead of saying, “I’m passionate about solving problems,” or worrying about having a “great” photo, the anti-👻 says, “I run marketing for X” and uses a photo that will appeal to the people she serves. She lets her employer’s brand speak for her.

It’s a little trick that can make a big difference.

The anti-👻.


We looked up and assessed the online profiles of the 254 people who signed up for Brand Camp at least two weeks early.

We looked at how this group self-identifies. We ignored Tweets, status updates, and ambiguous bumps in the night to ask to ask, “Is this person more than just another professional?”

👻’s at the conference?


Our 👻 Report


Employee brand advocacy

# of people with over 80% of available advocacy points:

8FYI, that’s 3% of you.

total possible points 23

highest score 22

mean score 6.4

mode score(most common) 0


Few EVPs on our EVP recorder.1 2

Employee value proposition Electronic voice phenomenon

1 2

% profiles with company messaging

in the summary

% profiles free of résumé jargon (or

similar self-serving language)

% profiles with integrated

company /personal branding

23.2% 10.2% 8.3%


Marketing 19.5%HR 27.1%

Both / Ambiguous 0.0%

Operations / Neither 25.2%

Restaurant 19.6%

Non-restaurant 27.9%

VP & Above 30.2%Director, Manager, & Contributor 20.9%

Overall Combined 23.2%

Who had more substance?


This year’s biggest anti-👻?


Jason Lauritsen,Ajax Award Winner.

Congrats, Jason, you’re Camp’s Most Corporeal Camper!

!

🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎊🎉 🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎊🎉 🎉🎊🎈🎉🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎈🎊🎉 🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎈🎈🎊🎉

🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎉🎈🎊🎉


We know you’re curious, but there’s no way we’d post your personal information like that.

So let’s just say this: if you’re worried about your score, look at your profile and ask if you’d want to work with yourself.

If no, then change.

“Hey, what was my score?!”


👻 busting back at work


Your goal is to grow revenues and/or improve margins.

Use social recruiting and marketing to bring employees together into these processes.

This creates leverage and makes processes more sustainable because it aligns with employees’ goals of creating better personal brands, better relationships, more fun and rewarding work.

Know your goals.


Find your resonance metric.

Workforce Marketing

Impact=

Resonance x Reach Cost x Effort

Making the brand meaningful to employees makes it easier for them to share the brand with their networks.

Because employees are up to 6x more trusted than company spokespeople (2013 Edelman Trust Barometer), getting heard becomes easier.

Reach without resonance? That’s spam.

Resonance gets employees to self-identify with the message, making branding programs more sustainable and driving down overall costs.


The scariest thing a field operator can hear isn’t a story, it’s this:

“Hi, I’m from corporate, and I’m here to help.”

Assess executive and corporate leaders early. Make sure they’re walking the walk before they ask others to do so.

Be leaders, leaders.


Have you taken your employer brand and turned it into something conversational that employees can use in real life and on social media?

No? Why not? Who are you, Fight Club?

How can employees engage as advocates if they can’t easily talk about the brand?!

Make branding actionable.


Marketing gets total strangers with no personal stake in the brand to become customers, loyalists, and advocates.

And how many memos does marketing send to customers?

To create employee brand advocates, recalibrate internal communications to more opt-in marketing techniques, less memo.

Bury memos 6 feet under.


Very few of your employees will need social media training.

If they know why they’re there and believe it’ll benefit them, they’ll figure it out. (We know, we’ve been doing this for four years.)

Focus instead on why and how they can leverage the company brand to their own benefit. Then stand back.

Activate the right skills.


Afraid that employees will leave to the competition if you do this?

While this process may put sunlight on a turnover issue, it won’t create one.

Remember, we’re having them take down online résumés and replace them with brand statements.

Play through the fear.


Trust the process: case study.

Why it works:

Our opt-in approach modeled exactly how employees could use company branding to solve a specific, important challenge they had. By solving their problem, the company solved one of its own.

Ajax was approached by a major oil and gas company to help it use social media to recruit more efficiently. (These are not typically employees who bleed company colors.) Ajax assessed employee brand ambassadorship and implemented a 3-step program to engage employees. We achieved the following:

• Voluntary use of brand messaging up 907%

• Voluntary use of LinkedIn summaries/current job descriptions up 268%

• Voluntary use of keywords up 85%

• Voluntary use of résumé jargon down 224%

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Even the experts look to us.The following feedback is from a Fall 2013 program with social-savvy recruiters:

• 97% of participants reported learning something actionable from Ajax’s brand advocacy assessment.

• 94% of participants reported better understanding how to use social media as a business tool.

• 94% of participants reported having taken action or having a strong intent to act on what they learned.

Our methodologies are rooted in decades of organizational science. We have been refining them for social business since 2010.


In short:we ain’t afraid of no 👻’s,

and you don’t need to be, either.


Lisa Cervenka Jason [email protected] [email protected]

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Ajax Workforce Marketing is an branding agency focused on employee brand advocacy.

We get employees and companies working together to tell a consistent story about what life at the company is like.

Your 👻 busters:

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


Thank you!

When people communicate well, amazing things happen. We work with clients to help them unleash the persuasive potential of all their employees.

We identify the essence of what an enterprise stands for, work to make everyone in the company feel ownership of it , show employees how advocacy benefits them as individuals, and create a path for their aggregated efforts to benefit the organization upon whose profits they depend.

In the end, employees are empowered to do more amazing things, and their efforts become the foundat ion for a more sustainable, effective, and strategic employer brand.

Payroll is an investment you’ve already made. Be sure the return is all it can be.

-Jason Seiden