We came across a great post today by The Sales Lion (@TheSalesLion) called 10 Reasons Why Employees SHOULD be Required to Participate in Blogging and Content Marketing (article no longer available). We thought we’d flip that: Why don’t employees participate?
Of course by employees this post and the one linked to above mean ‘those outside certain parts of a Marketing department’. But you get the idea.
One way to tackle this – which would be cheating – is to look at some of those reasons listed.
For example #10 It eventually becomes a culture, for our purposes becomes It isn’t in the company culture. So far, so useless.
But what are the other reasons? Here are a few suggestions:
1. Fear. Whether at an employee level or among marketers or the top brass, there is fear that democratising this aspect of marketing might do several things such as distract or confuse staff, let alone show up all those who get described as marketing gurus.
2. Inconsistency. Remember #2 in the list, Diversity of thought and subject matter? Well, that can also mean a bunch of views that don’t dovetail. That’s fine in some cases. In others, it’s catnip for customers or the media to pick up on.
3. Profile. Creating a profile for great employees isn’t a bad thing – losing them because of it would be.
To most of these objections, we’d say one thing. The last five years have seen millions of employees around the world speak about work or their employer’s business on all kinds of social networks. Such social media is already out there. The three points we just made can happen without any inclusive content marketing push.
We say make the effort to include employees, whatever size your business. They will have ideas and insights that no one in Marketing or on the board would have but they need help with channelling this information and every company needs a structure to express it.
So we’d add a fourth reason – Nobody asks them.
This blog post was first published on 5 March 2013.
*photo credit: The Moonstone Archive via photopin cc
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