Rise of the Social Employee with Sarah Pedersen

Presenter: Sarah Pedersen, Director of Customer Success for the Americas, Hearsay Social

I was interested in this talk because for years I've been hoping to tap into the ambassador potential of my organization's employees. I honestly think there are a lot of employees who are passionate about our organization, would love to be ambassadors in any way they can, but they don't quite make the connection in the social media space. 

Social listening is great and certainly gives us useful information, but how to do I get my coworkers to understand the power and influence they have and encourage them (and teach them how) to leverage that on our behalf?

Here are a few of my key take-aways from Pedersen's talk:

In your company you have:

• Brand Advocates-they are out there talking about you already
• Social Listeners-how do we let them share their knowledge internally
• Detractors-how you listen/deal with these employees is important
• Opt-Outs- we can't force people to have social media, that's ok, they do other important jobs.

This idea really clicked with me. I can totally see this at play in our organization. I think I had internalized this to a point, but how can we take this frame and make it a more formalized part of both our internal and external communications?

Pedersen also talked about the History of Social Media using the premise that social actually began with the launch of the postage service. Long before the technology, we had a longing to connect with others and this is the root of all social media. 

See all my SxSW recaps on the tag SxSW.