I went back and forth between Cuba and the United States a lot at the end of the '80s, when very few people were doing so, and I always felt that one good thing I could take to Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what America was like. And one good thing I could bring back from Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what Cuba was like, neither a paradise nor a hellhole but a confounding mixture of them both. - Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro's A Sense of Place (via Vagabonding)
Reading this, I recall that light sense of responsibility when I travel. I'm not sure I am representative of whatever people conjure up when they think "American", yet it is conspicuously obvious since I'll walk into an Italian store or a Costa Rican restaurant and they'll automatically greet me in English and immediately go back to their native tongue as soon as they turn away from me. And so I do what I can to dispel any "this is what all Americans are like" myths by simply being myself.
There are many organizations that promote this sense of one-on-one global ambassadorship including Backpack Nation and Servas, among others.
It's this nebulous spirit of ambassadorship that I envision when I think of employee bloggers (and customer bloggers too). I imagine we are its ambassadors. Which is quite distinct from an Authentic Voice Brand Evangelist.
I recall a now ungoogleable post at Media Guerilla's blog where a commenter refers to Robert Scoble as Microsoft's brand evangelist. Ah, at one time he was a Longhorn evangelist. Technology evangelists are supposed to get behind big ideas - bigger than even the company itself more often than not - not brands. So whatever Robert's title is, it's certainly NOT brand evangelist. But he and the thousand or so Microsoft employee bloggers do form a loose corps of ambassadors.
I'm particularly grateful the USA brand machine is not monitoring my amateur brand evangelist efforts when I befriend a fellow marketer seated by me on the long bus ride to the Mexican border, the university student teaching me Spanish in Oaxaca, the round-the-world sailors in the Dublin pub sharing their exploits and debating the merits of the crowded Canary Islands, the elderly woman sitting on the park bench in Cardiff or the thousands of people that have entered my life overseas.
No two roving U.S. ambassadors will be alike. Nor will any two Microsoft ambassadors. And that's a good thing.
Andy Lark over at brandshift points to a quote by Andy Spade in the recent issue of FastCompany:
BRAND CONSISTENCY IS OVERRATED. The brand doesn't have to look the same, but it has to feel the same.
When Americans visit other countries (and we don't pose as Canadians ;-)) it's another opportunity for foreigners to touch the diversity and richness of its people and vice versa. It's a wonderful opportunity to crack wide open stereotypes, rather than simply be "consistent." By virtue of the fact that we choose to live within the same culture - be that national or corporate - there will be an unnamable, unpinpointable shared experience that gives ambassadors a sense of cohesiveness. But it that can hardly be called consistency.
Heck, I'm not sure I'm even consistent as a person, so I think it's limiting to expect (or want) an entire organization of cookie-cooker clone brand evangelists.
If there is a spirit pervading the company culture, then don't worry you've already have plenty of cohesiveness. Allow people to speak for themselves and they'll do just fine as ambassadors.
Bonus: Never script your brand! You want consistency? Yep, it's a consistent...killer of spirit.
I had no interest in brand awareness. I wanted to know how Nike made people feel...
In a mysterious process that no one ever seemed to grasp exactly - which was not a problem, since grasping things with anal precision was never a core value at Nike - our [internal] mantra had become "Authentic Athletic Performance."
The fact that these three words ultimately inspired a thousand employees was an amazing phenomenon, because not only was the sacred text never written down, it was rarely even explicitly articulated or overtly referred to. And this too reflected a core internal value, because at Nike, the brand was supposed to be felt, not scripted. Everything had to be absorbed at a visceral level, not talked about, conceptualized, or abstracted. And never framed on a wall. - Scott Bedbury, A New Brand World
Comments