Chris Brogan wrote about email and why he cannot contact so many people today for a different reason, but it is just one more good point.

Being a business owner with employees, I can understand both sides of this equation.

Business Owners want to own the relationships that you develop on the clock.  If you leave, they still want to have access to your netword, the things you did for them on the web, etc.

If you are in sales, that is really important.  If you are not, then you can argue it is none of their business.

So here is the thing.  You should talk to clients, team members and vendors via your business email.

You should have a Gmail or Yahoo email account for newsletters, signing up for free services, etc.

And you should have your own domain and email (or a different free email) for connection with people through social media, family, building your personal network, etc.

Consider what happens in the following situations

1. You are fired – They are probably going to go through your company email.
2. You are laid off – You can no longer access your company email, which could have many connections that can help you get a new job.
3. You quit – Did you remember to get all your contacts out of your email?
4. Your company goes out of business – email is simply gone.  You cannot access accounts you set up with that email address as the approval email.
5. Liability – You may be just talking to a personal friend, but you could still be making the company liable for what you say if it is via the company email.

Go read Broagan’s article.  Think about the value of having a relationship (even lightly) with someone that has influence, like him.  And now he cannot reach you.

Getting a Marketing Virtual Assistant – a VA that has been trained in Internet Marketing will increase your odds of success.  Here are 7 tips for better web results with a Virtual Assistant.  You will not like these, because they all involve more work for you.  But get over it and get your marketing plan done in advance of hiring your Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant.

1. Hire 2 or 3 Virtual Marketing Assistants for small projects and test which one does the best job.
2. Either write a detailed, step by step description of how to do the tasks you want done, or provide a video that serves as a  virtual assistant training video.  There is no arguing with clearly documented directions.
3. Set specific deadlines.  For example, do not say you want the Virtual Assistant to write 5 unique blog posts in May.  Instead, state that each Friday the Virtual Assistant needs to mail you the link and keywords targeted for that particular blog post of the week – by noon your time.  Also include a summary of how the last weeks blog post is now ranked for the keywords targeted.
4. Keep talking to your Virtual Assistant.  Do not set them loose and forget about them.  If you want to keep them you need to make them feel like an important part of the team.
5. Do not believe Virtual Assistant resumes – Just like job applicants, people often exaggerate skills and likely outcomes.  If the Virtual Assistant does not live up to how they sold themselves, move on quickly.
6. Expect to get what you pay for.  More than any other position, Virtual Assistants pay rates vary from a couple of dollars and hour to several hundred dollars an hour.  If you go for a cheap virtual assistant, be ready to do more training and management.
7. Treat exceptional Virtual Assistants like gold.  Just like any profession, you have some people that are far and away better than average and if they are motivated, making you money and exceeding your expectations, show them you care.  Send them a gift certificate, a bonus, a card, flowers – and if you are sure you are not going to need them full time, send your exceptional virtual assistant referrals.

Find exceptional Virtual Marketing Assistants.

This article is an inside look at some of the strategies we use in our Employee Ambassador Program.  The reason we are giving away our secrets is that our program is for those businesses that want an outside company with strong social media credentials to work in a collaborative environment with employees to strengthen the personal brand of key employees as well as the corporate brand.  It is not the activities that are important, but the collaborative environment and monthly assessment of progress that will make your Employee Brand Ambassador Program succeed.

Goal of an Employee Brand Ambassador Program

Your goal may vary, but generally speaking the goal of an Employee Brand Ambassador Program is to help employees become better evangelists for where they work. 

The outcome of the Brand Ambassador effort should include:

• Employees connected with more people.
• Positive information in many places on Internet, including search engine slots.
• Increase in sales leads and income, as people feel more connected with your employees.
• Much better search engine saturation for your brands
• Increase in invitations for speaking and PR opportunities
• Jump start online conversations about brand
• Increased website traffic from links and search

The most important thing to keep in mind about your Employee Brand Ambassador Program is that it will compound over time.  The first month rarely results in a big, noticable outcome.  Instead, you have to think of each connection an employee ambassador makes as having value.  Each blog post adds to the content that shows up in search engines.  The Internet has a long life span and the things you do today will keep working for you in the future.

So what are the core things to do with a group of employees to launch your Employee Brand Embassador Program?

Employee Ambassador Profiles

Good employee ambassadors need to develop great online profiles that help people find them and understand what they do.

• Register www.YourName.com
• Add a blog to that domain
• Set up a LinkedIn profile.  Connect with people and answer questions.
• Set up a twitter account
• Your Brand Ambassador consultant can review these and help you get the most from them by customizing them and optimizing them for better search engine results.
• Facebook.com Account
• Set up some free blogs – Even if you have a good WordPress blog on your personal domain, it is also valuable to set up blogs one the free sites, such as wordpress.com and blogger.com.  These will just be lightly maintained with good occasional content and links to important articles, events, etc.

Keep in mind that all of these above items are developing a personal brand.  However, within that personal brand each person should mention where they work and link to the company website or blog.

Employee Ambassador Content Creation

You then need to put together a schedule and rules for using these tools.  I’d suggest that you make it very clear what employees can do during work hours and what needs done during off hours.  Some research I have seen suggests that twitter is a big way people waist time at work.  That is why your content creation strategy for employee brand ambassador’s must spell out the terms of participation. 

In addition to the above personal branding efforts, your organization should set up a corporate blog, corporate twitter account with news updates, post video and possibly do a podcast show about the industry your clients are in.  All of these things can also be developed by your most passionate employee brand ambassadors.

To build a successful brand ambassador program, you will need:

• Set goals and milestones for your brand ambassadors.
• Use a project management and collaborative community to keep the team energized and involved.
• Reward top employee ambassador performers
• Document successes and outcomes each month and share the report with the Employee Brand Embassadors.
• Make sure your Employee Brand Embassador’s know all the great stories, testimonials and ways that your company helps clients.  Give them positive things to talk about.
• Ditch Bad Seeds – Not popular, but someone has to say it.  If someone is not participating, saying negative things or being negative in the group, there is no room for them in your Employee Brand Ambassador Program.

You can do all of this yourself.  If you are looking for someone that can coordinate this effort for you and develop a lot of buzz on the web with your motivated Employee Brand Ambassadors, visit our Employee Brand Ambassador website.

Reprint From Chris Brogan

In writing up my visit to Gannett, I realized that I was missing something that I wanted: I went to link Jim Lenahan’s name, and then realized that he doesn’t have a blog or any kind of external web presence. I wanted to link Michael Maness, their VP of Innovation, and realized he doesn’t have an external web presence. Ditto Ken Paulson, etc.

It dawns on me that this is a missed opportunity in several ways.

1. Links are love. If I link to them, Google values that link and helps search traffic find the site.
2. Links encourage exploration. You click links on my site all the time. I watch you do it.
3. Web presence gives us a public glimpse of you. It gives people backstory.
4. Web presence provides you more opportunities to meet new people.
5. Web presence makes a larger showing of your company’s thinkers.

Not every employee needs a blog, and not every employee should be outward facing from a web perspective (several might not want that, actually). But the folks who have jobs that put them in contact with people like me? I think you need a web presence, please.

Reprint From Chris Brogan

Visit: Employee Ambassador Program

I actually was helping someone roll out a new blog and they wanted to post a lot of promotional things. They could not quickly grasp that the blog posts should be more conversational and less promotional, yet never forgetting that there was a goal.

Then I used the analogy that websites are formal business attire, and blogs are business casual.

She got it right away.

Business Casual in the land of blogs means:

1. Letting people get to know you without disclosing your party behavior.
2. Talking about topics without selling.
3. Creating a give and take, less formal way to communicate.
4. Putting a face on the stogy business identity.
5. Showing real people’s success are behind the business.

Your business blog should be business casual to be effective.

Are you letting your skills limit you?

It is easy to say, “I am a marketer, that is what I am good at.” But are you something because you are good at it?

What were you good at in High School? Are you that now?

• I rocked in fast food, but I let the career opportunity slip away.

What were you good at in College?

• I was an excellent waiter and bartender in college. Ahhh, those were the days.

What was your first job after college?

• I quickly proved my technology skills and moved to the top of a small technology consulting firm. Eventually coding other people’s stuff just made me tired.

What was your first big deal success?

• At Ernst & Young I become a Benchmark Analyst and was billed out at $250 an hour. And I knew so much less back then!

When did you stray from the expected path?

• As a Professor of English in the University of Guadalajara, I had a blast. Too bad being a professor in the US is a bit more work.

What are you best at today?

• Now I find myself being a medley of experiences and skills. Marketing, Technology, Training, Speaking, Consulting….

…..But what is next? What is next for you? Are you taking your skills to a new level or are you thinking about trying something completely new? If you think that your skills define you, you are letting your skills limit you.

 1. What are the common mistakes most businesses make in a recession?

This is something of a loaded question.  Mistakes obviously depend on the industry you are in.

It is well known that cutting back on marketing in a recession will mean a negative impact on your future growth after a recession.  However, if you are in survival mode, there may be no avoiding it.
2. What are 10 methods you would use to survive and prosper in a recession?

#1 – A recession is a great excuse.  This won’t be popular, but a recession is a great excuse to make cuts.  If you have had some marginal performers, use this as an excuse to become leaner and meaner.

#2 – Use down time for new product development.

#3 – Identify what makes you special and then get the whole team behind creating buzz.

#4 – Reinvent yourself.  An industry can collapse any time, not just during a broader recession.  Look at how Kodak reinvented itself after film sales dried up.

#5 – Shore up the value you are creating with your existing clients.  Make sure you keep what you have before worrying about new customers.

#6 – Upsell to your existing clients worries.

#7 – Take advantage of more availability of workers.  Hire Virtual Buzz Assistants to work from home and create more results for you.

#8 – Sell hope – focus on how your product or service helps provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

#9 – Automate more – If you need to save money, find ways to automate processes that used to take a person.

#10 – Don’t give in to recessionary thinking – Your attitude should not dip with recession worries.  If your attitude dips, people sense it and you will hurt your prospects.
3. What are some little known money-making opportunities for businesses?

It really depends on the business.  I would not suggest losing focus on your main money makers. Assuming you have the time to spend, you might try setting up every person in the organization with a blog, giving them a class or workbook on how to use it and creating an affiliate lead genration tool for each person.  Then every employee could be an affiliate marketer for the business (as well as a content creator.)  By making everyone a brand ambassador with the potential to earn some extra money, you make every person a member of the marketing team.

Today I talked to someone that was creating a lot of buzz for a company she used to work for.  She left the company and it ended up going out of business.

The problem that resulted from her was this.  She’d set up pages on myspace, facebook, etc. and built communities around herself and the company.  When the company went under, all those people got upset and she was the only person left as a visible target.

Then, because a company email was used to set up those accounts, she could not cancel them because it no longer existed.

So here is someone that did everything right, and ended up hurting her personal brand.

So how do you protect yourself?

1. Use a free email account that you can access even if the company shuts down your email – Whether you are fired, quit or the company closes.
2. If you are building buzz on your own time, work more on your personal brand as an expert but mention the company frequently so you both get buzz but you are building an asset for yourself.
3. Don’t say something you may regret later.  If you say your current company is better than a competitor, you may find it hard to get a job with the competitor later on.
4. Don’t build a community around a product that is likely to fail.  It is a lot of work to create a good community and you must have the focus be broader than a product that you are not sure will make it.
5. Keep a list of things you need to update in the case of a major change.  If you leave the company, you will need to update a lot of things.  LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Blogs, Twitter, MyBlogLog, etc.
6. Don’t promote something you do not believe in.  In fact, don’t work for a company you do not believe in.  But if you are stuck for the time being, don’t create fake buzz.
7. Take your time in creating buzz.  Make good choices and be careful not to say things that can be misinterpreted or used by a competitor.

The general best way employee evangelists can protect themselves is to respect and manage their own personal brand as well as those elements of company buzz they create – with an eye on growing both independently in the future.

Employee Brand Ambassadors

Read More About Employee Brand Ambassador Programs

I had the pleasure of seeing Jeffrey Hayzlett speak a few months ago.  It was especially impressive to me because Employee Evangelism is something I usually have to dig for, and here was a CMO talking about how Employee Ambassadors are a huge part of their growth.

I got the chance to ask Jeffery some questions about how it works for Kodak and how they implement it.  Be sure to check out the link to their Print Ambassador program.

1) Question:  Kodak has gone through some major changes in the past few years. How has your employee-base changed?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Kodak has gone through an historic transformation from a vertically integrated manufacturer to a diverse supplier of digital and conventional solutions. That transformation was successful due to the enormous talent of the Kodak employees. Now a horizontally lean company, the Kodak employee remains one of the company’s greatest resources…that has not changed.

2) Question: With so many newer employees, has it been easier to encourage Employee Ambassadors?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: I’m proud that two of Kodak’s strongest assets are our people and our brand. Employees have long been ambassadors of the brand. In fact even after retirement, former employees continue to support and tout Kodak solutions. While there have been many change in the past few years, I think one of constants has been both the employees and the public’s desire to see Kodak succeed in its transformation. That support was one of the factors in the success of the transformation to a new Kodak.

3) Question: Can you give me one or two examples of non-sales staff that have been successful ambassadors? What impact did they have on the organization?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: We have recently implemented a program called FAST here at Kodak. FAST is set of operational guidelines designed to drive sustainable, profitable growth.

FAST stands for Focus, Accountability, Simplicity and Trust.

In short, the FAST behaviors require us to treat everyone — internal and external — as a customer.

If we treat everyone as a customer — by delivering as promised and making no excuses — the company prospers.

Another initiative is our new BOOYAH Recognition Certificate. It’s a fresh way to recognize individuals at Kodak for exceptional on-the-job performance, dedication, and commitment. Too often we forget to recognize and thank an individual’s contributions – this certificate provides the opportunity to signal our appreciation in a very visible, upbeat way.

The term “booyah” is a spontaneous expression of passion and joy, usually brought on by victory, success, or some other significant accomplishment. For us, it represents the acknowledgement of a job well done – a great idea, an outstanding attitude, or an obvious effort above and beyond the call of duty.

4) Question: How do your encourage active ambassadorship? Is it required or optional?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: I believe Gandhi said it best. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” People tend to model the behavior of those around them. As the Kodak leadership team models the behavior of an ambassador, it fosters that behavior in the Kodak community. Conversely, the leadership team learns from employee ambassadors as well. It is vitally important to the company as it keeps all levels of the organization in true communication.

5) Question: Overall, how has this program of actively cultivating a culture of employee ambassadors helped Kodak?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: The Kodak brand continues to grow stronger, both internally and externally as our employees hold themselves personally accountable for achieving the corporate goals. My overall observation is we have happier employees. As we continue to develop an environment that fosters a personal sense of ownership and commitment, we build company based on pride. The result is a company with a brand that each employee can call their own, a company of employee ambassadors.

Who is Jeffrey Hayzlett?

Chief Business Development Officer and Vice President,

Eastman Kodak Company

Jeffrey Hayzlett serves as Chief Business Officer and Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company. He has responsibility for Corporate and Product Public Relations, Communications and Public Affairs, Brand Management, Corporate Sponsorships, Market Development and Corporate Relationships and Partnerships. Mr. Hayzlett reports to both the CEO and COO of the company.

Mr. Hayzlett joined Eastman Kodak Company in April 2006 as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President, Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group (GCG), leading all marketing activities for GCG. Mr. Hayzlett has nearly 25 years of international marketing, sales and customer relations management experience.

Mr. Hayzlett is currently a member of the board of directors of the Business Marketing Association (BMA), the Electronic Document Systems Foundation (EDSF) and is on the advisory board of the CMO Council. He is chairman of the Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI) Foundation for Marketing Education, and is a permanent trustee to the SMEI Academy of Achievement Hall of Fame. He is also a two term past chairman of SMEI. Mr. Hayzlett remains a trustee of Pi Sigma Epsilon National Education Foundation.

Mr. Hayzlett has received numerous honors and awards, including the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from Frost & Sullivan, a global business research and consulting firm. He was recently named one of BtoB Magazine’s Best Marketers of 2007. He was awarded the International Business Person of the Year Award by the International Printers’ Network (IPN), received The British Association for Print and Communication (BAPC) Honorary Life Member award in 2004, and the National Association of Quick Printing (NAQP) Industry Award of Distinction in 1997.

Mr. Hayzlett speaks frequently around the world on graphic communications and marketing, including presentations in 2007 at the Canadian Marketing Association’s National Convention and Trade Show, “THE Conference on Marketing,” the Direct Marketing Association Leadership Forum, Print Oasis, and the National Postal Forum.

To find out more about Kodak, visit www.Kodak.com and don’t forget to check out that Print Ambassador program to see some examples of Ambassadorship in action.

1. You will be like a rebel PR agent, creating buzz with the masses.
2. You could win big at a casino and later invest some of that money in the place you work.
3. You have a better chance of landing Paris Hilton as a client for the firm in Vegas.
4. It is a quiet place to relax after the Christmas rush.
5. This is the first step on your road to fame, and your boss will be able to say she used to know you.
6. Phil Gerbyshak is a presenter – How hot is that!
7. Vegas is in need of water – and you are mostly made of water.
8. Company needs to recruit an Elvis impersonator.
9. Outside escalators
10. 2008 can be your best year ever if you put buzz to work for you!

Visit http://www.buzzoodle.com/vegas-2008/

If you make the argument that the Internet does not matter to your organization, then you are just in denial.  The three options above are your only real choices with how you approach your online image.

Careful:  Careful companies control internally who can say things and what they can say.  They plan for worst case situations and they do not enter into the wild world of social media without a lot of preparation and a solid game plan.

Fearful:  Fearful companies are afraid of what customers and employees will say, so they have a basic website and avoid attracting attention.

Full Throttle:  Full Throttle companies fully expect some negative comments and reactions.  They try lots of things and see what works.

You might think that I favor Full Throttle, and I do for my own business.  But my business is the type that people expect to have that attitude.

What businesses should be careful businesses and why do they still need employee evangelism?

Careful businesses are usually businesses that have a long and established brand identified.  They need to first do no damage, and if they get a little buzz, great.  These organizations should have a core team of employees that act as evangelists online.  They should be trained to carefully represent the core message and brand of the company while still putting a personal touch to what they do.  This will help companies create a more personal connection with the public.

Fearful Companies - These companies are probably afraid to get publicity because they know that their product, services or support are not as good as advertised.  Another type of fearful company could be one that would easily attract negative comments and publicity.  Maybe a heavy polluter or a controversial service.

Limited employee evangelism is still critical to these companies.  If there is going to be negative publicity at some point, you can proactively (yet quietly) be publishing the good things associated with your name.  The more good things that are out there, the less damage a bad story can do.

Full Throttle companies are going to be your start up companies or trendy companies.  They can make a mistake or get some bad publicity and will laugh it off, because it is a small part of who they are.  People will forgive a full throttle company faster because they feel like they know them, are connected to them and they are the little guy taking on the big (careful) guns.

- Not that I am saying anything goes – You still have to be smart about it.

These companies can get every employee involved with evangelism.  You should be everywhere you can and stirring the pot.

There is no right answer here.  The question you have to ask yourself is: Do the negative risks to the company and brand outweigh the positive benefits of big time Buzz?

The best choice of people to send to this are enthusiastic employees that would create buzz but do not know where to start or are intimidated by the 1000s of options out there.