This week we held a free webinar for HR and Staffing leaders to give them a few ideas on how to create, improve or promote their department's brand inside their organization.
Why is branding important to HR internally?
Because with all the restructuring and downsizing HR departments are facing, it is very important to increase your organizational visibility in order to grow your influence and help you stay in business.
To do that, your HR and Recruiting department should not only be well perceived throughout the entire organization, but also have the respect of senior management and not be seen as merely a cost center. Through internal branding and marketing you can ensure everyone knows of the strategic value you and your team have to offer, which could help you avoid budget and headcount cuts. Especially in a down economy, it's important for executives to know recruiting still has value.
Most HR and Staffing leaders have either taken marketing courses in college, or kept up to date on marketing techniques by reading about them, or have earned their departmental marketing know-how by graduating from the school of hard knocks. We at ACES thought that was not enough to ensure survival and achieve success in today�??s difficult environment so we reached out for help from Marketing and Branding Guru, Bret Starr, the Principal & Co-founder of Starr Tincup, an integrated marketing firm for business-to-business software and services companies in the HR space.
What was covered that you may not already know?
Together Bret and I developed a 90 minute course on how to establish and grow your brand by creating a value proposition and getting the word out using tools such as social media. We translated and assembled some strategic and practical advice from both Bret�??s expertise in B2B marketing and my own viral and guerilla marketing experiences into internal HR/recruiting-related marketing. Here are the top three key Takeaways:
1) Put your departmental value proposition on everything you currently use (like your email signature, your LinkedIn profile if you have one, your intranet page, etc)
2) Create a private group on any one of the locations we reviewed (like yammer, Linkedin, or ning) and invite your team and stakeholders to join it
3) Communicate frequently (weekly or bi-weekly) with the members of this group about your activities, achievements, or other information you can share
After that I transition to discuss some ways you can gain public recognition externally and how that translates to increased internal exposure, brand credibility and trust. Chief among the guerilla techniques I cover is how to beef up your profile so it is not just more easily found but also attracts the right kind of people into your network. I�??ll give you a hint: part of the trick is to be clearly approachable, stay authentic, and be more than mono-dimensional.
I then discuss how to leverage LinkedIn as an internal marketing tool using your first degree connections, Answers, Groups, and Polls. Beyond LinkedIn I cover other ways you can build private online groups such as with Ning and Yammer, and how to utilize Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and Unyk to strengthen your group and bolster your brand equity. Finally I dissect the use of blogs as a departmental marketing tool, particularly tying it with inbound automated RSS content.
Feedback from many of the thought leaders who attended this event was so encouraging that we decided to share the recorded presentation (full audio and video) with the whole world. After a brief registration you can view the recording here at no cost.
Please check it out then drop by here and let us know what you think!
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