Social Value of an Employee

Marketing today goes beyond the marketing department. This is no longer just spreading information about the product. Customers today are a tap away from all the information that they seek about any product. In addition, marketing campaigns are expensive with low conversion ratio.
According to Seth Godin, marketing is primarily about telling stories and spreading ideas. The only thing that technology could not replace completely is human touch and henceforth, every employee can spread personal stories through their personal connections to strengthen the marketing department under the approach laid down by Seth Godin. This, one-to-one conversation builds up trust. JetBlue airlines spent 15:1 on media as compared to its nearest rival and still maintain to remain on top of the mind of the customer. The first thing that their employees are being told is that, “Every one of you is a marketer.” Every employee fortifies the company's ability to spread its message and to captivate target customers.
For one of my personal assignment I rolled out a survey to capture, the number of people in my contact who were planning to buy a car in the next 6 months. The response was phenomenal. In addition, I could also influence a couple of prospects to buy Tata motors vehicle. Just imagine the enormity of idea if all the 30k employees are motivated to do so. Nevertheless, the influencing capacity of blue-collared workers increases in the current scenario with an ever-growing growing demand of commercial taxi service. Hence, attracting more of such population to take up the job. At multiple occasions, I have noticed that the drivers, who are associated with Ola or Uber, also pull in their relatives in the occupation. This certainly qualifies them to be our brand ambassadors. Moreover, this is true with any industry.
In the days to come, organization’s marketing will hinge on employee engagement, far more than ever. If an employee is happy working for the company, and believes in what his company does, then marketers will have far simpler jobs to do. Companies with the most engaged employees hold the power to unleash their goldmines of knowledge to their customers. Imagine what that can do to enable marketing. Live stories, likes, shares, live tweets, Re-Tweets from a set of employee skilled in a specific domain would any day be far better than the company experts would.
To the contrary, if there are employees dissatisfied with their work place, they will negate all the good and now, the organization might end up shelling out huge amount of wealth to neutralize. We should understand that, one-to-one reach to the customer is always phenomenal and is incomparable with anything else. Moreover, every time an employee shows apathy towards one’s job or the company to his friends or family, he may be turning away customers.
This calls for more respect to the employees. It is high time when organizations should start seeing workforce as their Good-will Ambassador rather than denoting them as negotiable/non-negotiable/contract staffs. This will demand huge involvement from the Human Resource department. So far, education, experience, communication or achievements had been the major factors behind estimating the worth of an employee to fix their remuneration. However, it is important that an organization should start considering social value of every employee. Each member of the workforce has a social value based on the number of friends he has on Facebook, number of followers he has on twitter and Instagram or how active he is on Instant Messengers. New processes and incentive policies will anyway help to make this happen. However, this should come from within. I believe, if organizations can create a WOW factor for the employees irrespective of the performance or other factor, will give a push to personalized marketing.

                                                                                 Signing off:-Mr  R.K. Narnoli