Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Ted Tuesday: The Rise Of The Social Employee: Mark Burgess at TEDxNavesink

"Employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work."


Good Morning Folks,

Last night a large group of FSO's finest spent three hours circling manhattan on a yacht to celebrate our success, our growth, and future goals. It was a blast and I look forward to soon sharing the photos of all the fun and dancing shoes :-).

Today, however, I am going to focus on a topic of paramount importance in our company and if not your company now, it will be coming sooner rather than later. It's a revolution that begins with every employee… starting with YOU.

A book by today's guest speaker, College of Business Administration professor Mark Burgess explores how employees can serve as brand ambassadors.

In 2010, Southwest airlines removed director Kevin Smith from one of its planes before takeoff, saying he violated the company’s “Customer of Size” policy. Offended, Smith took to Twitter, excoriating the airline in a series of tweets to his many followers. The potential public relations disaster rippled across the Internet, and as control over the incident began to spiral away, the airline had to react in real time.

Enter the social employee. Conceived by College of Business Administration professor Mark Burgess and his wife and business partner, Cheryl, the social employee serves as the brand’s ambassador, its most authentic connection to consumers in the social media sphere, where the bottom line goes beyond buying and selling toward a transparent dialogue of values.

“People tend to believe in the voice of an employee more than the voice of an ad, which can be intrusive and less valuable,” Burgess says. “They want to hear from employees. People respect and engage with those voices.”

Southwest responded to Smith with tweets of its own, followed by a blog post that tried to soothe Smith and put out the fire. Burgess, who helped develop courses in the CBA that shifted emphasis to the growing field of digital marketing, commends the transparency of the response (even if Smith wasn’t gratified) in the 2014 book he and Cheryl wrote together, The Social Employee (McGraw-Hill). Drawing on success stories from Southwest, IBM, Dell and other companies, the book gives real-life examples of how companies empower employees to become brand ambassadors through social media.

“We coined a phrase and feel like we’re leading a movement,” Burgess says. “More and more companies are all using the same term.”

“Marketing is always about trying to sell something, but the difference is how you do it,” Burgess says. “More and more, people are ignoring TV ads. What’s relevant is your own network, and all of this is driven by social conversation.”

Burgess cites a study that concluded brands are central to about 40 percent of conversations on social media. “If you don’t have a strategy, you’re going to miss being a part of those conversations,” he says, adding that employees are an obvious if traditionally underused channel to tell a brand’s story and publicly share a company’s culture. “Trained and inspired around the power of a brand, employees can engage within their own network about it,” he says.

A sound social media policy and well-trained employees can help avert that result, Burgess says. Aside from establishing useful guidelines, brands can foster success by identifying the employees who inherently feel passionate enough about the company’s brand to become its ambassadors. “You want employees to work within their comfort zone,” Burgess says, so if they favor Twitter over Facebook, don’t force them to use Facebook.

The upshot for employees, Burgess says, is that the work also helps them grow their network and burnish their personal brand. “It’s a classic win-win situation,” he says. “If you’re actively engaged, you’re benefiting the brand you work for today, but you’re also building your own brand.”

The activity is far from onerous for the so-called digital natives who take social media as a fact of life.

As more companies adopt the social employee model, the next leap will be to the social executive, says Burgess, who equates the role to that of the player-coach, calling in plays while partaking in the game as well. “At some point it’s almost going to be a requirement that you have to be out there,” he says. “And if you’re an executive who can’t say something about your brand in 140 characters, you’re in the wrong business.”

In this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution that touches every company and relationship around us. Enjoy.


FSO is a force to be reckoned with; our competition is on the run. They know they cannot compete with us and our Personal, Passionate and Productive approach we take in everything we do. 

Our client’s rave about the work we do for them, we hear it from them every day!  

We have a clear path in front of us; it is ours for the taking.  

We have worked hard to get here, we should all be proud of what we have accomplished, but it’s not over!  

To continue the astonishing success I am committed to building a team of Rock Stars, each with the specific purpose to drive new opportunities for FSO! The social employee is on the rise right here.

Let's all go make things happen today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love Life!



Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer  


Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form.TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

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Welcome to the fastest growing onsite outsourcing company in the nation! Led by Mitch Weiner, co-founder and industry pioneer, FSO is "the" award winning enterprise-wide outsourcing and people solutions firm servicing a multitude of clients across North America.

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