It is my very firm rooted belief that the difference between a good brand and a great brand lies in the way and to the extent the employee base believes in the brand. The best advocates of your brand must be your employees.  If not, how believable are any publicity or marketing claims?

Social media engagement starts at home

In an era of social media, engagement and activation of your employee base becomes all the more powerful.  Widespread employee participation — manning the keyboards and interacting with customers in forums and/or social media — is the new “guerilla” marketing, and a new form of customer service.  Social media engagement, thus, must start at home.

Most of us should now be quite with engagement index measurements such as the PTA (people talking about) directly from Facebook Insights or other proprietary systems, such as Socialbakers’ “score.”  If I had a magic wand, something I would like to see — if only it didn’t mean excessive spying — would be the level of participation and PTA among the brand’s employee base.  I would call this the real brand’s Facebook Index (FBI): the percentage of an employee base that has liked its own corporate or institutional brand page.  It might be better called the Facebook Internal Index?  Going deeper, the idea would be to gauge what percentage of the employee base is actually engaging on the page.

Being on the same page

Such a Facebook Index would only be valid for brands of a certain size, because if it’s a family affair, you are going to have to hope that the entire family is on the same page, as it were.  Imposing all employees to open up a Facebook account and publicly identify one’s attachment to one’s own employer brand is not desirable nor legally feasible.  Even if a brand were silly enough to do that, the leverage only would come through the continued interactivity and engagement (‘PTA’) and that just cannot be mandated.  At the end of the day, just as great leadership is all about getting your teams to be on the same page, great brands have employees who live the brand — and, I would argue, express it whenever possible on the various social media platforms, not to limit to the brand’s Facebook page.

FBI: Facebook Internal index – the measure of success

I would like to wager that, if such a Facebook Internal Index were to be publicly available*, it would help identify truly social brands, whose employee base is legitimately engaged. And, aside from providing a strong homegrown and free communication platform, this FBI index would also correlate with the strength and conviction of the brand.  Moreover, the greater the percentage of one’s workforce that is active on the Facebook page (same would hold true for other social media platforms), the more socially aware the brand is.  I would claim that the higher the index, the greater likelihood that the brand’s Digital IQ is higher.

The value of a Facebook fan?

If we are still all struggling to place a specific value on a Facebook fan (you can check out my Value of Facebook fan infographic on the topic here), I say that the value of an engaged employee on your Facebook page is worth its weight in gold!

What do you think about this FBI Index?

*Note that Silkroad Point is an HR solution that appears able to provide internal monitoring of one’s employees on social media platforms.