endlesswormhole

It's time for organizations to have a major realization breakthrough when it comes to their employees and social media and understanding the idea behind the "viral expansion".

We get many organizations coming to Room 214 seeking 'viral' communications programs. What we see in the WOM market, are organizations stepping in and offering methodologies to help spread a company's message through researching the top blog influencers and seeding them in hopes they will be the ones to spread the messages, or creating some viral applet that people will post on their social media pages.

From my recent post "Real-World Friends and Family More Influential Than A-List Bloggers?", on CaptureTheConversation.com. I brought up the fact that "real" friends are still far more influential than A-List bloggers and suggested a Litmus Test For Companies.

Companies are Missing the Point
But the disconnect comes into how organizations can leverage its most valuable assets, Employees, to help build viral expansion loops for its messages.

I was inspired get my thoughts into a blog post in part from watching Shel Israel's FastCompany.TV interview with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. At the minute 9:45 in the interview Biz talks about visiting Nike to help their people understand the tools people are using on online. He asked why and Nike told him, "because we don't let people use them." Okay, that's not good.

Also, prior to that at minute 4:30 into the interview a lead developer said this about Twitter: "The majority of the usage is people to connect with people they already know....Twitter is interesting when the people that you know are using it."

Why Personal Relationships Matter
Okay, so now the picture should start to become clearer. Social media becomes exponentially more interesting when you are connected to people that you actually know and care about. The critical element to making something go viral are the personal relationships individuals have with others, be it online or off.

Ignoring the A-Listers Theory of Viral Marketing
Let's skip the idea of a campaign that targets A-Listers all together and imagine a company of 20 people that are all fired up on their company, its products and all have active Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and StumbleUpon pages where they interact with real friends and like minded individuals.

This company has a policy that encourages and helps trains its employees on using social media, and even lets them do a little social media interaction at work, to stay connected to their peers.

So these employees all have been active in posting on blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, submitted stories to Digg, gave thumbs up to website on StumbleUpon. Not about their company, but about what they are passionate about. One would think part of that passion is the work they do, so there would be some crossover into their field of work.

To be clear, I'm not talking about having each employee be an online expert, I'm saying just get them in involved in connecting with friends and family online, because that is where the real influence happens.

Now, comes the time when the company has a significant cool piece of news, or a product launch, sweepstakes or contest. The company can encourage its employees to let friends and family know about it.

So let's take one employee that has 100 friends on Facebook, 50 on YouTube, Digg and Flickr, 20 on StumbleUpon and 100 followers on Twitter. Let's assume of the aggregate of those connections, there is a 50% overlap. So that's 130 unique people that single individual reaches.

Of those 130 people, let us say 10% actually pass it on to their 130 connections, that would be: 130 x 13 = 1,690.

That's 1,690 people a single employee can reach, and that's just one level of connectedness. Multiply that by 20 and instantly 33,800 people have the potential to interact with your content.

Chris Brogan recently posted "What Comes Next With Social Media" where he states:

"Once everyone understands the tools, accepts that they should be part of the conversation (or moves on from the notion), has accounts and presence where all their customers are spending time, what comes next? What should businesses and individuals DO once they're set up?

If you were advising Ford, who by the way, is looking for someone to sign on to help with their global social media strategy, what would you suggest they do once they gave you the green light?"

My advice to Ford would be to leverage its incredible employee base. Take the time and offer social media classes and get them involved in social media.

It's not enough for Ford to have it's official YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. It must rethink how it can leverage its greatest asset - it's people to move the needle forward.

Reason: If my brother worked for Ford and every once-in-a-while he posted something about Ford asking for feedback on a project, or a video that gave insight to engineering the next car, or a charity function they are doing in my local area, I would participate because I'm following my brother, not Ford.

So what do you think Ford or Nike could do with an socially connected employee base?

Tags: wom fastcompanytv chris brogan viral expansion loops capturetheconversation ford social media strategy