Empowering your employees and customers.

Reading Brian Solis's blog, (R)evolution Episode One: Empowering Your Employees and Customers with Josh Bernoff about the book Empowered.

I totally agree that businesses must now compete in domains where consumers define their experiences through the connections they decide to make. In order to compete for the future, businesses must now establish a presence and earn attention, build new connections, and cultivate meaningful relationships to foster trust, loyalty, and advocacy.

Although many companies are interested in engaging in social media, the upper management is usually preventing real progress from happening as the new technology, widely available and cheap, could transform the way branding and marketing is done. Customer service, marketing and public relations can all be benefited greatly.

In order to harness the power of Web 2.0, companies need to re-organize and think of new ways and strategies. Staff needs to be trained so that they understand what is and what is not appropriate.



Many staff can influence their own groups of people, and evangelize for the company. Instead of shutting them down and quenching their passion about the company, strategies that help in the management of the networks these staff and sometimes customers have will in turn promote branding and marketing in a unparalleled manner.

-- Robin Low