Employee ambassadors are an important part of a social media strategy. The right kind of employee evangelist is like a Unicorn: very hard to find. Unicorns can also be disruptive to an org chart when their social media footprint starts to overlap with their day job. This week on the Geek Whisperers we discuss Unicorn Husbandry.
- What are Unicorns? What is a Unicorn Moment?
- Why do Unicorns strain an org chart? Can prophets ever be famous in their home towns?
- Why are companies like Ford factories? Can you have more than one role in an organization?
- Are Unicorns born or raised? Can you train them or must you sniff them out like truffles?
- If you think you are a Unicorn, what steps should you take to embrace your Unicorn-ness?
A few of the links we talked about:
- What’s It Like To Be A Technical Evangelist? GW #15 with Greg Knieremen
- How Much Is A Geek Worth These Days? GW #21 with Ethan Banks
- Seth Godin’s Linchpin
- Engineers Unplugged
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It’s always interesting to hear you all talk about advocacy programs. I’ve written and re-written this post because I’m not sure what I want to address. I work for a very small partner (around 20 people total) who has had 3 people go to work vendors in the last 5 years or so. Is that the ultimate goal of advocacy programs? I don’t think so…I don’t think you guys think that. For me advocacy programs enable the members (and of course help marketing and sales for the vendor). What I really wanted to comment about is being a unicorn that can interweave the day job and evening/weekend job of blogging/podcasting/evangelizing. I’m not so arrogant that I’ll call myself a unicorn, but I will say they can definitely co-exist. As a former post-sales person and a recent pre-sales person I always write about what I’m doing currently. Then with new clients, or clients who are using new things, I’m able to point them to blogs and podcasts I’ve created or participated in. To me it’s about time management and getting the best bang for my buck. Maybe I’m lazy (well…I’m totally lazy) but that makes sense to me. And from a customer perspective they see that I’m passionate about what I do and hopefully have some credibility. The advocacy programs help me with that as well.
Great points Lauren. Influencer programs are not recruiting efforts (or shouldn’t be), and I think the skills can coexist and the hours in the day can be found. But that takes effort. I suppose an argument that unicorns can be both made and found?
Excellent description of how this plays out in real life.
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