Twitter Town

Wouldn’t life be so much better if we left all of our bureaucracy to social media…..

Well one town has decided to completely embrace Twitter. For the previous four years, a town in Spain has been relying on the American online social networking site for managing the town and life of the residents. The town, ‘Jun’ has been using Twitter as its main platform for resident-governance communication. Leading the charge on social media is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, a passionate believer in the power of technology to solve problems and move the community forward. His reasoning was, ‘“Twitter has created the society of the minute – very quick questions and very quick answers. We now do our paperwork on Twitter,” he says. “But this is an important point, because who values the work of the people at city hall? The street sweeper? The cleaner? We decided that everyone would have a Twitter account so that they could see that people value their work.”

This approach obviously shows an extreme case of ‘employee connectivity’, which asks the question, could your business learn from this? A move to completely communicating through social media channels might not work, but a lot can be done through social, including:

Make culture part of the conversation: any business can say they have a ‘great’ culture, but make your own employees advocates of this. Make your company culture more visible on social media, through photos, videos and direct feedback from those who work there. You’ll not only attract customers who appreciate how well you treat employees, but you’ll also draws in potential candidates who might want to work for you.
Build a personal brand (especially in sales): when you’re in sales there’s a fairly stereotyped view that most employees are ‘faceless’ drones on the end of the phone. By getting your staff active on social media, as well as highlighting office personalities, people want to trust other people more than they want to trust brands, and as a result, personal recommendations and personal consulting tend to take a greater priority over corporate communications. By allowing your workers to freely exchange on social media while identifying with your corporate brand, you’ll be launching a fleet of small personal brands to do some of the branding work for you. You’re missing a trick by not giving your team freedom on social media, let them live and breathe your brand online and the whole business will benefit.
Connect: LinkedIn is perhaps the most renowned for this but it doesn’t mean other social media networks cannot do it as well. Encourage your employees to connect with peers, colleagues, clients, customers and contacts online. This will allow them to build their own networks and find new ways to converse and collaborate.