Sharing Company Secrets: Can you trust your Engineers on Social Media Networks ?
Image Courtesy of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Is it a good idea to have our engineering department be active on social media? That’s what Thomas asked me lately.
Thomas is a hardware circuit design engineer. I’m just calling him Thomas. It could be any engineer.
He had just followed one of the training sessions I organized around the increasing need for change towards a digital, social and content oriented company.
I’m into the bad stuff
“Very interesting stuff, Tom”, he said. Maybe the first hour a bit too much marketing stuff for him as an engineer, but still.
But that’s not why he came to me. He said : “Usually social media is all about the good stuff. But we engineers (support engineers, hardware developers or software developers), we’re also into the bad stuff: we actually fix problems! For some of us that’s even a full time job.”
Should he be active on Social Media if all he does is fix problems? And can you trust the guys on social media networks who sit on our intellectual property and secret roadmap information? Read more 
How to build Epic Content as an Organization? 5 Key Tactics Explained
Image: courtesy of Intelsat.
Successful organizations take on a content strategy as a centrepiece of their activities. It’s not an add-on. It’s strategic. Getting buy-in from the organization can be difficult, but doable. More difficult is getting people motivated to build that strategic content.
How do you get an organization to take on content as a strategic part of the business? Here are 5 key tactics that help building a culture of content.
How do you create a culture of content creation and education, internally and externally?
1. Find out what your colleagues care about?
When people do their job well, they get praised. Or get a raise. Or get promoted.
That’s what drives people.
A great way to make content creation a company wide activity is to embed it into what they care about.
- Service engineers care about solving a customers’ problem
- Project managers care about delivering a project on time, within budget, above customer expectations
- Training managers care about good feedback from trainees
- Customer support care about how they excelled in helping customers
- …
Find out what makes these people ‘tick’, and let them write it down. Let them know that you expect this from them. Help them in “airing” their personal success stories, insights and helpful stories. And if they do, praise them in public. Read more
