The Janus Oasis - With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Employee Advocacy - Social Media
[00:00:00] Nola Simon: This episode of the Janus Oasis, it's just me. I'm Nola Simon, change strategist and storyteller and the host of this podcast. I'm going to be talking about employee advocacy and social media. For those of you who don't know me, I worked for global corporation for 17 and a half years and stopped working in November, 2020 due to the restructuring, the most useful step I ever took for my career. It happened after my mom was diagnosed with dementia and then died in 2017.
[00:00:29] Nola Simon: I started writing on social media, specifically, LinkedIn, and Yammer, an internal communication tool. I needed a place to express my opinions and writing was therapeutic. I found a new job that way. I was the finalist student innovation challenge. And I found it an employee resource group because of my writing Executives I'd never met fan-girling over me.
[00:00:48] Nola Simon: And describe me in influential public forums as incredibly creative. Although I didn't realize it at the time I was creating a strong foundation for my personal brand. Social media allows [00:01:00] you to have visibility and reach. That's never been possible before. I live in the middle of nowhere in rural Ontario.
[00:01:07] Nola Simon: And I've been limited in my career by geography. Think about it. The world of work has been long influenced by personal recommendations and networking opportunities. Mostly. Based on who, and where you live. When I first started working, I was warned never to speak to executives because they were in two important with LinkedIn.
[00:01:29] Nola Simon: I can send a private note to almost anybody. It bypasses gatekeepers. We're going to assume that people at bay that LinkedIn user agreement and don't grant access to third parties.
[00:01:40] Nola Simon: I found it to be true. I worked for an American division of my company, specializing in 401k plans, outside of financial services, nobody really cares about 401k plans, especially not outside of the us. When I tried to move to the Canadian division of the same company, it was almost like I had moved to Boston for 16 years.
[00:01:58] Nola Simon: No one in Canada [00:02:00] knew who I was or how the work I did had value. I had to create a network. And demonstrate to that network. What my value was, and I had to do this. By telling stories in authentic and meaningful way. I use LinkedIn to do it. I learned to focus on the skills and the impact. Not the detailed process.
[00:02:22] Nola Simon: And interesting things started to happen. The more I pulled my personal stories, the more I became known as an employee advocate, the communications team reached out to me to thank them for helping. Them do their job better. Customers and strangers across Canada started attacking me. Whenever something interesting was mentioned in the media about the company.
[00:02:39] Nola Simon: Because of connections they built through LinkedIn and Yammer. All we had to do was asked to join the communications team for the women's leadership employee resource group. Next thing. I knew I was the lead communicator responsible for doubling the expected attendees and the host of the session, but women and influence opportunity after opportunity came my way solely because people knew me because of my [00:03:00] writing.
[00:03:00] Nola Simon: I was asked to appear in videos about change management to. Introduce staff to a new hybrid way of working. And a new office layout. I didn't know those people. They knew of me because of my work internally on Yammer. I attended a conference and the keynote speaker approached me in gushed about how influential and inspiring she found me she'd been hired as the motivational speaker and she was thanking me. It was really cool.
[00:03:32] Nola Simon: LinkedIn has even created a, my company page for companies to share trending posts by other employees, retention of existing employees is extremely important for. Companies in today's job market. The great resignation is a real thing. It's an excellent way to stand out and demonstrate leadership to executives know who writes and who appears on that page. Employees trust other employees more than they trust management, but helping management leverage this to improve.
[00:03:59] Nola Simon: Overall [00:04:00] trust and engagement helps everyone. Management and company. And employees. You have to be authentic. You have to be completely credible. Nobody wants a sales pitch. It helps if your company has a great culture and treats people well. I'm a big advocate of using LinkedIn to create a personal brand, but there is a caveat as Peter Parker's beloved uncle advised him.
[00:04:25] Nola Simon: With great power comes. Great responsibility. When you work for a corporation and you choose this level of visibility, you are representing the brand. No, the social media policies meet with compliance. Get your manager on your side and document everything. Not everyone will be happy to see you succeed. Lots of people dismiss social media and discount it's influence your success means fire micromanagement.
[00:04:50] Nola Simon: I experienced this and recently a friend would have her experience on LinkedIn, too. She actually blocked her management team from following cart because they were monitoring the time she posted. [00:05:00] When she wrote about this at post, got over a million views, this type of behavior, this micromanaging of the posting times, that's not isolated to one company where even one country.
[00:05:12] Nola Simon: So that's something to be aware of. If you choose this route. I'm a really big. Leveraging social media, not just LinkedIn, but Twitter and Instagram and creating. A base of a personal brand, because the way the world of work is going, it's actually going to be future Based, and it's going to actually involve probably a larger geographical area than you could possibly travel through. I've got contexts around the world. I've been working on this personal brand since 2016.
[00:05:44] Nola Simon: It takes time to establish. And if companies are going to be working hybrid, they're going to be working remote. You can work from anywhere. It'd be who's everyone to have a brand that is credible. That can be accessed anywhere in the world. And [00:06:00] so that is the story that I'm telling you today.
[00:06:04] Nola Simon: Thank you for your time and your trust.