Credibility Branding Through Your Employees (the most important marketers)

Today’s special contributing writer Holly Dutra from Worksona is offering insights into creating a culture of trust from within among employees.

“There has to be trust between a company and its employees before there can be trust between a company and its customers.”

This is such an important piece of the credibility puzzle and Worksona has developed an elegant solution using social networking systems to assist with this. I don’t know if this particular solution is the answer, but the idea is a good one and the energy behind it and the intelligence of the Worksona team makes it a good bet.

Holly’s Worksona blog post on April 10th is a nice entree into her article; it reflects her passion based on her personal experiences:

People are the Heart of the Workplace

April 10th, 2007

At the heart of many workplace organizations is the unspoken mantra: value knowledge first - then people.

Before starting Worksona, I worked at a company like this. The result was that I felt very much like a cog in a machine, a number, and was completely miserable. People would get burned out, and were easily replaced when gone. I left before a year was up.

 At the heart of any workplace organization should be a high valuation on people, because people and relationships are the foundation of any organization. Work doesn’t get done without human hands. It is through people that knowledge flows.

 If that were to happen, social networking tools might become just as important as document repositories. Steve Roessler at All Things Workplace put it best when he said:

 I find social networking tools more natural and conversational than emails. Sort of the difference between telling people a real story and showing them bullet points on Powerpoint.

 … that’s what happens when you put people first.

 Worksona Has Your Most Valuable Customers

By Holly Dutra, Worksona

Credibility is the heart of any successful brand. Credibility leads to fulfilled promises of the service or product that the company creates. Oftentimes companies look outside to its customers to build this credibility, but the most valuable brand building can come from right under a company’s nose.

Yes, from its own employees.

A company’s employees are its most valuable customers. These are the people you have already been sold on your service or product. In fact, they are the ones that you as a company are depending on to create and deliver your product or service. They spend more of their waking hours with you than anywhere else. And employees are usually quite proud of what they do.

Thus, it is in the company’s best interest to ensure that their employees are engaged in the company’s brand and promises made to customers. The question becomes: How can companies help employees become loyal, engaged customers of the product and brand?

Trust is a crucial factor in building a credible brand. There has to be trust between a company and its employees before there can be trust between a company and its customers. And as always, the first step to building trust is to get to know “the other”. Who is “the other”? It’s those folks you don’t know at your company--the amorphous “they” who take the fall. It’s much easier to blame a group or department when you do not know them. Anonymity is a breeding ground for mistrust and suspicion.

Worksona was built around the two things that are fundamental to trust in the workplace: people and relationships. We designed Worksona to foster workplace relationships and decrease anonymity within your company.

How does Worksona do this?

1. Once you sign up, you are placed into your workplace community (validated by email address).

2. You can create and control your profile (goodbye nameless face!).

3. Your profile is dynamic, populated by your colleagues on how you have contributed to their work/team (via applauding and tagging).

4. Relationships can now be expressed outside of the orgchart, making it easier to network internally and get to know more people.

We think Worksona is a powerful way to build more trust within your company. And once trust is building between colleagues and managers, credibility branding can really grow among your most valuable customers – your employees.

END

Holly Dutra is a founding member of Worksona and responsible for the user experience of the product. She's worked in large corporations such as AOL, Accenture, and Arthur Andersen... and knows how to fill out more than a TPS report =). Worksona is currently in private beta to select companies. If you are not an employee of the supported company, please submit it with the company name and your email.