Standout Jobs

Your brand is controlled by your employees. They’re the ones that are chatting about you through a variety of de-centralized streams: blogs, micro-blogging, instant message, Facebook, social networks, etc. Your job as an employer is to gather all of that data and present it in a useful way to potential candidates…unless your employees aren’t saying anything that’s particularly nice, and then you have a whole other problem to deal with.

Andy Sernovitz, a word-of-mouth marketing guru, takes it a step further in his post: The Employee Evangelists.

It’s not enough to gather up all the de-centralized bits of information spread by your employees about you — you need to be encouraging that evangelism.

Andy writes:

“Your employees should be your most powerful advocates. Are you asking them to be? Are you making it easy?”

Andy has 6 suggestions for how you can engage and encourage employees to evangelize your company, which I’m paraphrasing below (but go read the full post):

1. Involve everyone: Don’t just use marketing & PR people. Titles aren’t important, enthusiasm is the key.
2. Make it easy: Give employees the tools they need to spread the word.
3. Go where they already are: Let employees use the tools they want, whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, etc. and enable them to do so.
4. Make them stars: Public recognition beats internal rewards any day of the week.
5. Employees should be customers: Get your employees using your products, make it easy for them to do so.
6. Beer: Requires no explanation.

I’m particularly fond of #6 myself, but the others have plenty of merit too.