The Conversation Manager

Turning your employees into your most important brand ambassadors should be the goal of any company. So many brands are currently looking for brand fans, but forget to look within their own company. Recently I wrote a blog post about my belief in Superstar companies. Well, Belgian's leading brand in terms of helping patients in their private homes, ‘Het Wit-Gele Kruis’, understood this quite well.

In East Flanders alone, they have more than 1500 employees helping patients in their own private homes. These days, it has become pretty difficult to find new nurses. Looking at the growth ambitions of this company, it will be quite challenging to find enough nurses. What is the best way to convince young nurses to join? Of course, the best way is through your existing nurses, especially if you have 1500 of them.

So, they started an online and offline campaign: ‘I have the best colleagues in the world’. Central point in this campaign is their website. The URL of the website (in Dutch) is printed on their 1200 company cars, the best billboards you can imagine.

Next step is placing their nurses in the spotlight on the website. Linking great on-the-job stories to the private social network of their employees gets the message in the open. It goes further than offline. The whole story is about being positive about your co-workers. One of the great things they do, is give ‘you are great’ - post cards to all employees. If you feel that one of your colleagues, a supplier, a patient, a student, an intern … has done a remarkable job, just show your appreciation through this post card.

Goal of the story is creating a positive working environment that (in my feeling) could change the companies’ culture in a very positive way. Companies like ‘Wit-Gele Kruis’ are making the lives of their patients more positive, they are doing an amazing job. The moment you can show to the world how proud you are about your job, culture will become more positive. It is actually facilitating your employees to show how proud they are.

I guess this is the best advertising a company could have. Turn those employees in superstars and make them show how proud they are to belong to their company.

We recently asked 500 European marketers a bunch of questions with regard to their Conversation Readiness. It's clear that we found a lot of interesting stuff (soon more news about that).

I have to say I was really shocked by one figure: 11% states that their company NEVER replies to questions consumers ask through customer service channels. If your company shows this behavior, I can only say:

1. SHAME ON YOU if you don't try to change this
2. Find yourself a new employer if your company does not want to change this.

In these social & transparent times, you won't get away with it much longer. I hope that everyone who reads this will be as shocked as I am. I would say: let's find these companies and let them feel that we don't accept this attitude towards consumers.

Over the previous months I wrote an extra chapter for the book The Conversation Manager, based on feedback of readers. The chapter focuses in particular on the answers to two key questions

1. Who should we appoint as our Conversation Manager?
2. What impact will Conversation Management have on our company structure?

Understanding the vision of the Conversation Manager is easy, but its implementation within the framework of an organization is much more complex. And it is the personality of the Conversation Manager which makes the difference between success and failure. He looks beyond social media and understands that word-of-mouth is the most important driver of growth.

Download the extra chapter now (The personality of the Conversation Manager.pdf (626.34 kb)) and find out if your company is ready for the Conversation Manager.