Social media experts like Shiv Singh recommend that you designate one or more people to serve as your organization’s social media voice. To qualify as a “SIM voice” the individual should be a real person, an online conversationalist who has left digital footprints across the social Web and whose profile is easy to find across the relevant social platforms. This person has intrinsic authority and credibility among people within your industry or consumer base.
The challenge with this recommendation is that such people are in short supply and high demand. If you’re lucky enough to employ people with authentic SIM voices, you’re vulnerable to poaching if you can’t motivate them to stay with your organization. One of my clients has already lost 3 SIM voices this year to other opportunities.
If you think about it, the conflict is obvious: the more authentic and influential people with SIM voices are, the more visible they are across the social Web — or at least within the industry niche that matters to your firm. As their authority builds, as their audience grows, so too do their allure and their personal brand power.
This makes them easy to find and increasingly attractive to potential employers who want a fast track to a credible social media presence. Agencies advise clients to put people with social media cred into SIM voice roles. When enterprises lack influential bloggers or SIM voices within their staff, they’ll go hunting. Your firm could be vulnerable, especially if your HR policies don’t take into account today’s talent shortage within the social media realm. (I suspect this is what happened to my client.)
Root Causes
Conflict looms because quarterly earnings pressure drives many enterprises to pursue short-term cost-cutting at the expense of employee loyalty or motivation. Lay-offs abound. Employees feel over-burdened and under-appreciated. In private conversations many of my friends who work for large enterprises with household brands tell me they are miserable at work, and would jump at the chance at another job if the right opportunity presented itself.
Employers treat employees as if they were fungible or captive labor: easy to replace at a moment’s notice with someone else in the talent pool. As a consequence only 20% of the American workforce is passionate about their work, according to a 2009 study by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. Deloitte reports that talented workers want not just monetary benefits but also non-monetary rewards such as learning opportunities and fruitful relationships:
Talent, particularly the creative and passionate talent, is attracted to firms that are rich in relationships, generate knowledge flows, and that provide tools and platforms to help talent to grow and achieve their fullest potential.
And meanwhile no one agrees on how to measure social media ROI. This can aggravate the manager’s challenge when trying to protect people in SIM voice roles from the latest round of cost-cutting by the beancounters.
As we see below, people with SIM voices are not fungible.
Attributes of a “SIM Voice”
According to Shiv Singh, author of Social Media Marketing for Dummies, people who can serve as your company’s SIM voice have the following characteristics:
- A real person within your company who pro-actively reaches out to customers or partners – someone with a customer service mentality
- An authentic, real person who is traceable and findable via Google or Bing
- Maintains an active presence on the social media platforms and across the social networks that matter to your industry or consumers
- Someone who is engaging and conversational – interesting to people who read this person’s blogs or follow her tweets
- Unique and recognizable
- Savvy about the norms and rules of engagement across the various social media platforms, particularly those that are most frequented by or compelling to your customers
But here’s the hidden threat to organizations that’s inherent within the power of personal branding (source: Social Media Marketing for Dummies):
In contrast to a brand voice, this SIM person’s voice must be unique to him and not unique to the company. This is incredibly important for the trust to develop. Otherwise, the whole effort will be a waste of time. Furthermore, this voice should be irreplaceable. When the person goes on vacation, the voice cannot continue to participate and be responsive to customer inquiries. Someone else has to take over and introduce herself first.
Implications for Your Firm
The moral of this story is, if you plan to invest in a stable of SIM voices, make sure your policies and practices motivate talented people to keep working for your organization. If your retention practices fail, your inability to retain such people will become visible and will lead to uncomfortable questions if you lose too many of these assets over time.
Revised on December 17, 2009
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