There has been a lot written about employee engagement and how to achieve it. I particularly love the musings of Liz Ryan who I follow on LinkedIn. It took an innocent discussion with my wife as to how employee engagement can have unintended consequences on a business, in a good way.
The innocent discussion
On our morning commute, my wife asked about SEO. Well, actually she asked about how to get better rankings in Google and I then introduced her to SEO.
While I know this is the tip of the iceberg, I explained that the original (and still hugely important) metric for Google is back links. Simply, the more sites that link to your site, especially from reputable sources such as LinkedIn, twitter, Instagram, the higher your ranking.
Once we got that clear, the next obvious question was: how do you get links. Her immediate assumption, as would be for many, was PR and engagement with the media, key influencers.
The obvious truth
While it is indeed true that PR will create links, the new world we live in requires more than just a couple of carefully placed blog posts. To really move the needle you require hundreds of genuine (not the fiverr kind from Vietnam) links to your site across many channels.
It can cost thousands of dollars and many man hours to engage customers and third parties to engage with your brand and act on that (sharing, liking, etc). Why is the easiest group to encourage so often ignored?
If you have a team that is engaged, passionate, proud of their company, and feels part of the team, they will organically begin sharing things on their Facebook accounts, adding links to their LinkedIn profile, retweeting your company's Instagram posts. This all dramatically impacts where you appear on Google.
Not that simple
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet here. I have seen companies where the CEO in an attempt to gain views on his LinkedIn post, will send an all staff email whenever he posts.
This needs to be organic and will only be a result of an engaged and proud workforce.
The flipside
When your staff see and realise the efforts (and cost) to get bloggers/vloggers/instagrammers to feature your product, they rightly question why the same efforts are not being shared with them.
When they see a blogger talking about the wonderful lunch they had with head honcho and heard all about the exciting vision of the company and got freebies and gifts ... and then they receive a bland email dictating the new vision highlighting the disruptive changes that will ensue with the typical 'bear with us', they will be heading straight to LinkedIn - not to share their company's content, but rather to update their resume and inmail their recruiter contacts.