Who wants to be a champion?

Within the workplace, we are surrounded by Champions.

These are people with skills and knowledge outside of their normal duties. People who are waiting for their moment to shine…

A good example is our own in-house photographer, Reiner Maigbas. One of his hobbies is making online guitar tutorials to teach people popular songs and chords. He has a YouTube channel with over 120,000 subscribers, some of his videos have reached over a million views. He has an understanding of YouTube far beyond the average non-marketeer, and without the right communication, that knowledge and talent would be unknown to his colleagues (and most importantly, Management).

You are surrounded by unknown talent.

A good tip to make your social media strategy achievable is to unlock that hidden talent. A business can not rely on a single Marketing Manager or Executive to generate, edit and post content in real-time. By identifying “Social Champions” within your workforce,  you can nurture and develop these people to help create images, videos and stories to post on your channels.

This works particularly well in hotels, where you have multiple interaction points with guests. For example, it would be useful to have a “Social Champion” on the front desk, and also in your restaurants & bars. These people can interact with guests to tell stories and generate content.

Here is a real example of discovering a Social Champion: As part of a training project with a hotel group, we recently spent the day with one of their properties. Whilst we were touring the hotel and meeting the staff, we were introduced to their Head Chef. The Chef was extremely proud with the presentation of his dishes, his work was Instagram content gold. We asked Chef if he would mind taking some pictures of his day to day creative dishes, and send it over to be edited and posted. We were inundated with amazing images of everything from parsnips to pavlovas. This was some of the most liked and shared content to be posted on the hotels social channel to date.

And thus, a Social Champion was born...

Here are 4 tips to identify a Social Champion:

• Pick someone with charisma:

• A Social Champion can work a table and charm guests and customers into appearing on social media without being pushy. This person should be able to identify the type of customer who would be a willing participant, and not make them feel obligated..

• Someone who understands what makes good social content

• This area can be developed over time. But essentially you need someone who understands your brand and has a rough idea on what makes good content. If they work in a restaurant, then images of food, cocktails and the ambiance of the surroundings are great (although a balance must be kept).

• Identifying Storytelling opportunities

• Following on from the above point, storytelling is what Social Media is all about. A Social Champion should be able to identify these opportunities and capture them. Perhaps the fine tuning should still be done by the Marketing team, but these contributions are still important.

• Find someone who uses social media as a hobby

• If you ask a group of people: “Who uses social media a lot?” - 75% of people will raise their hand. If you ask them “Do any of you blog or have a strong following on Twitter or Instagram as a hobby?” - This will whittle down the numbers and help you identify people like our own photographer, Reiner.