Does your company employ a multigenerational workforce? If so, your organization might significantly benefit by adopting a reciprocal mentoring program that leverages talents, skills and knowledge to bridge generational gaps surrounding technology — such as social media — corporate culture and team building.

Given the generational divide, older and younger workers often feel disconnected when it comes to adapting to technology, corporate culture and working as a team.

With reciprocal mentoring, workers across all generations individually and collectively play a pivotal role in creating multigenerational buy-in to the workplace changes that accompany the adoption of technological tools such as social media, cloud computing and text usage that will streamline workflow communication, processes and practices.

Reciprocal mentoring takes the traditional mentoring concept of a seasoned employee guiding a worker’s development and transfers it from a one-way relationship to a two-way or team-building relationship in which newer or younger employees also impart their knowledge and guidance.

It can be especially important when it comes to the integration of newer technologies into the pre-existing corporate culture and workflow processes. To create a dynamic program, it’s important to understand the intrinsic generational differences within your workforce.

Consider your longtime employees. When someone has been on the job for an extended length of time, they form ideas and habits that have been repeatedly reinforced by experience and success.

When they are introduced to a new tool, piece of information or technology, some might feel threatened because it changes what they know and how they have become used to doing things, and the immediate challenge will be to figure out how they might adapt this new knowledge into their existing work practices.

As you add younger workers, it’s important to understand that the Y2K generation, or millennials, have a much different set of motivators from many baby boomer, generation X and generation Y employees.

Millennials thrive in situations that allow them to take ownership of their skills, knowledge and work. Challenge and change are key motivators for most millennials.

A successful reciprocal mentoring program will allow your millennial workers the opportunity to impart their technical savvy, to teach seasoned employees how to leverage and navigate the world of social media and the time-saving and efficiency tools available by leveraging mobile, messaging, text and cloud computing technologies.

In my company, we have taken more of a team-building approach to our reciprocal mentoring. We have set up a schedule of twice-monthly lunch-and-learn events. For these lunch-and-learns, we have put together a calendar of topics that my staff and I feel are of interest and importance to our business. We have tapped every employee, from entry-level to executive, with a topic or series of topics that each will present during one of the events. To keep things organized and to provide structure, we have set up the following outline for each presentation:

■  Who is presenting? Give us some of your personal, professional and/or academic background.

■  What is the topic you are covering?

■  Why is it important to our organization?

■  How can it or does it help move our organization forward?

■  How and/or when do we put it into practice?

■  What are some examples, case studies or best practices surrounding the topic?

During the presentation, we ask the presenter to use presentation tools to provide a show and tell of the topic he or she is covering.

By providing employees a forum to share their skill sets and knowledge, we create an environment where individuals feel they are making a valuable contribution to the entire team. By presenting in a team-like atmosphere, we are fostering individual presentation skills and creating an environment of team support, knowledge-sharing and problem-solving.

Adrienne Lenhoff is president and CEO of Buzzphoria Social Media Marketing and Online Reputation Management, Shazaaam Public Relations and Marketing Communications, and Promo Marketing Team, which conducts product sampling, mobile tours and events. Her companies have been seven times named a 101 Metropolitan Detroit Best and Brightest Company to Work for, a two-time Crain’s Detroit Cool Company to Work For and a National Best and Brightest Company to Work For. She can be reached at alenhoff@shazaaam.com. Follow her on Twitter @alenhoff.

The Michigan Business and Professional Association (MBPA) has named Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria LLC as one of Metropolitan Detroit’s “101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For,” marking the fourth year in a row that the agency has been named.

“We are proud to receive this high honor once again,” said Adrienne Lenhoff, Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria founder and president. “We take special care in making our workplace a creative and fun place to work for our employees,” she added, “and the results show in both our work for clients and the dedication that our staff shows every day in accomplishing their goals.”

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria and 100 other businesses in greater Michigan will be honored at an awards luncheon on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at The Dearborn Inn, a Marriott hotel located in Dearborn, Mich.

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, Novi, Mich.-based businesses, have also received numerous recognitions from Crain’s Detroit Business named as a “Cool Place to Work.” The selection of Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, along with other winning companies, affirms to its employees, clients, vendors, and to the business community at large, that it is committed to being one of the Best and Brightest companies to work for.

MBPA qualifies companies using independent research that evaluates company communication, community initiatives, compensation and benefits. The organization also reviews other categories such as diversity and multiculturalism, employee education and development, employee engagement and commitment, and work-life balance.

“Because the companies selected have created impressive organizational value and business results through their policies and best practices in human resource management, we believe it is important to recognize their accomplishments, especially at a time when all businesses are being challenged in ways never before seen,” said Jennifer Kluge, MBPA executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Metro Detroit’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For is sponsored by AT&T Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Corp!, Magazine, Davenport University, DTE Energy, Pepsi Bottling Group, Douglas Marketing, The Designate, Strategic Staffing Solutions, WJBK Fox 2, HRAGD, the Detroit Athletic Club and McGraw Wentworth.
About Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria

Founded in 2001, Shazaaam! (shazaaam.com) is an award-winning, independently owned, group of affiliated communications companies headquartered in Novi, Mich. Shazaaam! Public Relations, Social Media Marketing Agency Buzzphoria (buzzphoria.com) and experiential marketing company Promo Marketing Team (promomarketingteam.com) specialize in traditional public relations, social media marketing, product sampling and street-level marketing promotions and events, respectively, on a national level. Specialties include media and public relations, guerilla marketing, online viral marketing, electronic and new media development, mobile tours, product samplings, social networking and event coordination and management.

In our last post we covered To Blog or Not to Blog. In that post we mentioned that too many brands and corporations take a Field of Dreams approach to creating a blog believing that just because they build it the audience will come.

A report in the Wall Street Journal, noted the effect of adding a blog to a web site: unique site visitors increased from 100 per month to 150,000 per month; total sales increased 18 percent; web-site generated sales increased to 25 percent of referrals, up from a mere one percent.

The Wall Street Journal article also suggested that a blog can be more important than having a web site.

While we agree that blogs can be an important component of a brand’s marketing mix, we feel that it would be reckless for a brand or company to depend solely on the blog as their online marketing initiative. A blog is a great tool if properly planned and executed, however, if there is no voice, no plan and no audience it can also fall into the proverbial tree falling in the forest argument…

Creating a blog can be inexpensive when free blog sites such as Google’s Blogger.com (www.blogger.com). And while no one can promise that using Google’s blog site will get your blog a better listing in a Google search, it just seems like common sense that it would be a plus.

Other free blog sites include Wordpress.org (www.wordpress.org), LiveJournal.com (www.livejournal.com), and . . . we’ll stop here, because any list will be sure to omit the one blog site that someone thinks is the best blog site on the web. But that’s one of the great things about a blog: readers add value by posting comments. So, let the debate begin over the best place to be blogging. Or whether Blogger.com earns better positioning in a Google search.

But back to business . . . your business.
 
Why Blog?

A blog is alive.

A web site is static.

A blog is fresh, it’s now: content with a “born on” date.

A web site is like . . . that jar of peanut butter of an unknown vintage, lost in the back of the pantry.  Contaminated with salmonella? Who knows how long it has been sitting.
 
A blog engages the reader by empowering each reader to post comments.

A web site is mere dictation . . . dictatorially delivered.

A blog collects consumer feedback . . . in a place where your business can respond, especially to show the world you care about satisfying any unhappy customer.
 
A web site may invite an email or phone call, but can fail miserably at enabling you to show the world you care and do deliver excellence in customer service.

Updating a blog is as easy as posting your latest text, pics, or video to the blog.

Updating a web site? Unless you’re technically savvy, you’ll be writing text and a check with every little update.

A blog allows you to show your expertise. With this blog, Buzzphoria aims to illustrate details about our being our own best case study while at the same time showing how your business can use digital marketing strategies to enhance your bottom line.

To help stimulate the discussion, Buzzphoria will continue, intentionally, to do some things wrong, while unfolding all the elements of endgame and “we are our own best case study” illustration . . . and, we invite readers to demonstrate their informed opinions on the better way to achieve marketing success in this space. Uncensored.

Coming soon: What is a social media reality check? and What happens when your brand gets hijacked.

In our last post we talked about Buzzphoria being our own best case study. Our example was blogger journalism and some of the comments received helped to also illustrate other elements of our case study such as freedom of speech and brand hijacking.

As part of our case study we decided to illustrate the mistakes companies often make in thinking they absolutely have to have a blog…

Perhaps that’s why there are estimates that there will be 110 billion blogs by 2010.

See, so often companies feel compelled that they have to have a blog just because they have to have a blog.

They never ask themselves the critical questions:

- why they have to have it,
- how are they going to maintain it,
- what do they want it to achieve - what’s the blog’s purpose,
- how are they going to build a following for it,
- what voice do they want to set with it,
- what do they want to say,
- more importantly, do they have something to say?

Instead many companies rush to set up their blogs. They post a couple times, get side-tracked by other projects, lose interest and ultimately abandon the blog.

They enter into the blogging endeavor like Kevin Costner clones in Field of Dreams thinking all they have to do is say, “Hello World”

And they wait, and they wait and they wait…a long time. Like a tree falling in a forest, did anyone hear it fall?

Waiting…Waiting…For that one person to say hello back.

For most no one ever says hello back.

In our case we waited patiently for 5 months from the time we posted that blog page for the first hello.

In our case it came through five months later through a tweet by Jim “Genuine” Turner who was first to note that we had left the original Word Press message “Hello World” sitting out there.

This led to Mr. Allen. That led to tweets and blog re-postings and link backs chastising us for what these folks perceived to be our foolishness, a novice error.

Thank you gentlemen for proving another of our points to our clients:
You don’t need a blog just for the sake of having a blog. Only do it if there’s a reason why anyone would care…

And then maybe, if they’ve developed the right strategy, done the proper planning and knew what their end game was the pollination effect will begin to take hold. 

In our last post, we talked about having the end game in mind when you enter your brand or company into the social media stratosphere.

We figured the best way to illustrate what brands and corporations often do wrong (without pointing fingers at brands and corporations that are doing it wrong) was to create a case study and example.

Congrats to journalist, blogger and social media guru Scott “Social Media” Allen for revealing typical bungles brands make and special thanks for also illustrating our point about the dangers many companies don’t realize when they embark on the social media journey. Naive mistakes, they make, but that’s what happens to the naive.

Numerous studies estimate by 2010 there will be over 1 billion blogs worldwide. 

According to Reuters, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Reuters goes on the say that many bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.

Reuters pointed out these specifics:

37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism.

 Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.

 More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.

11 percent said they post corrections.

61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material.

55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym.

Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers. 

Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs. 

82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit. 

We especially appreciate Scott Allen’s help in communicating an important message to our clients by  dissecting many  of the things we intentionally did wrong or left incomplete. (See his blog posting published March 27 @ http://scottsocialmediaallen.com/index.php/buzzphoria-social-media-reality-check/)

But Mr. Allen never called the subject of his critical story prior to publishing it.

Had Mr. Allen — who admits in his post about Buzzphoria that he had contact information (it is after all posted on our website), contacted us he would have learned the end game strategy around our public launch.

In fact, we reached out to Mr. Allen via email through his blog and received a response in less than 24 hours.

The good news is that Scott Allen is an exception to the complete point we were looking to illustrate.

After our reaching out to him and letting him in on our end game, he’s turned out to be an amazing good sport.

Mr. Allen makes the #1 point we needed our clients to realize:  many bloggers feel no responsibility to contact the subject of a critical story . . . at all!

Thank you Mr. Allen. You helped us achieve our end game…generating social publicity for us and reinforcing the many points we evangelize to our clients about the dangers of lack of proper planning and the potential irresponsibility of bloggers and journalists who do not properly fact check.  This is EXACTLY why our clients hire us and why we generate such great results for them.

Watch for posts over the coming days and weeks as we reveal more of our end game…