Brand Ambassadors. Thought Leaders. Storytellers. These are three phrases you will see often describing how Fierce serves our clients. We become your brand integrity ambassadors, trusted advisers around your board room table, and storytellers as we begin to communicate creatively on behalf of your brand. And we teach you how you can empower your own people within your organization to take on these same roles internally, allowing them to become a powerful and positive force on behalf of your brand. We also show you how your customers can become loyal brand ambassadors as well.
What is a brand ambassador? I love the definition that Brains on Fire gives in a blog post dating back to 2006: Not only do we believe that a brand ambassador is a passionate individual for a particular service or product, but we believe that individual is a loyal and loud advocate that spreads the goodwill in the name of that company, product or service. It is a dedicated mission that is personal and fulfilling for that person who is not there for PR or to push product, but to spread the love.
A brand ambassador’s role is powerful. Internally, they are born in an inclusive work environment and culture, led by the top executives in the company. Harvard Business Review says this: In the standard corporate communication model, top executives and professional communicators monopolize the creation of content and keep a tight rein on what people write or say on official company channels. But when a spirit of inclusion takes hold, engaged employees can adopt important new roles, creating content themselves and acting as brand ambassadors, thought leaders, and storytellers.
Let’s look at each one individually:
Brand Ambassadors
When employees feel passionate about their company’s products and services, they become living representatives of the brand. This can and does happen organically—lots of people love what they do for a living and will talk it up on their own time. But some companies actively promote that kind of behavior. Coca-Cola, for instance, has created a formal ambassadorship program, aimed at encouraging employees to promote the Coke image and product line in speech and in practice.
Thought Leaders
To achieve market leadership in a knowledge-based field, companies may rely on consultants or in-house professionals to draft speeches, articles, white papers, and the like. But often the most innovative thinking occurs deep within an organization, where people develop and test new products and services. Empowering those people to create and promote thought-leadership material can be a smart, quick way to bolster a company’s reputation among key industry players.
Storytellers
People are accustomed to hearing corporate communication professionals tell stories about a company, but there’s nothing like hearing a story direct from the front lines. When employees speak from their own experience, unedited, the message comes to life.
HBR goes on to say that physical proximity between leaders and employees isn’t always feasible. But mental or emotional proximity is essential. Having managed a company with a geographic footprint of three diverse states across the US, I have known this to be very, very true. So how do you manage it, and develop the trust and intimacy needed to create brand ambassadors, thought leaders, and storytellers?
HBR goes on to say this: In developing our model, we have identified four elements of organizational conversation that reflect the essential attributes of interpersonal conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. Leaders who power their organizations through conversation-based practices need not (so to speak) dot all four of these i’s. However, as we’ve discovered in our research, these elements tend to reinforce one another. In the end, they coalesce to form a single integrated process. Here’s a few ways to help develop interpersonal conversation.
Intimacy: Getting Close
Personal conversation flourishes to the degree that the participants stay close to each other, figuratively as well as literally. Organizational conversation, similarly, requires leaders to minimize the distances—institutional, attitudinal, and sometimes spatial—that typically separate them from their employees. Conversational intimacy can become manifest in various ways—among them gaining trust, listening well, and getting personal.
Gaining Trust
Where there is no trust, there can be no intimacy. But trust is hard to achieve. In organizations it has become especially difficult for employees to put trust in their leaders, who will earn it only if they are authentic and straightforward. That may mean addressing topics that feel off-limits, such as sensitive financial data.
Listening Well
Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously know when to stop talking and start listening. Few behaviors enhance conversational intimacy as much as attending to what people say. True attentiveness signals respect for people of all ranks and roles, a sense of curiosity, and even a degree of humility.
Here is a powerful example of listening well in action:
Duke Energy’s president and CEO, James E. Rogers, instituted a series of what he called “listening sessions” when he was the CEO and chairman of Cinergy (which later merged with Duke). Meeting with groups of 90 to 100 managers in three-hour sessions, he invited participants to raise any pressing issues. Through these discussions he gleaned information that might otherwise have escaped his attention. At one session, for example, he heard from a group of supervisors about a problem related to uneven compensation. “You know how long it would have taken for that to bubble up in the organization?” he asks. Having heard directly from those affected by the problem, he could instruct his HR department to find a solution right away.
In conclusion, conversation goes on in every company, whether you recognize it or not. That has always been the case, but today the conversation has the potential to spread well beyond your walls, and it’s largely out of your control. Smart leaders find ways to use conversation—to manage the flow of information in an honest, open fashion. One-way broadcast messaging is a relic, and slick marketing materials have as little effect on employees as they do on customers. But people will listen to communication that is intimate, interactive, inclusive, and intentional.
