Have you ever been at a presentation or workshop where the speaker has been so magnetic that you are able to retain and recite what you learned to others?

The chances are that the facilitator or speaker used stories. Story telling in building your corporate brand, your employer brand, your internal brand or your personal brand is a great way to facilitate engagement with your brand.

I am delighted that Kevin Kelly, author and speaker on the subjects of leadership and motivation will be joining me on Monday 11 February 2008 at 1pm ET/ 6pm Ireland and the UK to discuss with me the art of story telling.

Amongst other things we will be covering how to get clear about your personal story that supports you in building your personal brand and reputation so that you can attract more clients and the career opportunities you are looking for.

You can join me by registering at Biz Growth Live - it is free to attend and I will be podcasting an extract of the conversation in a few weeks time (the full recording is only available to members of our membership programme the Biz Growth Gym launching this Spring).

If you have a question about how to develop your brand story, you can leave your questions here, email me or post your questions to our Biz Growth Live question desk.

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In my seminars on the subject of building your employer brand and expressing your internal brand to engage with potential candidates, one subject I always cover is the area of developing a blog to support your communications strategy.

This could be a blog where the author is the CEO or a group or employee blog.

Here are 5 actions to take if you are planning to establish a corporate blog:

1. create your business case so you scan demonstrate how your corporate blog fits into your overall employer brand and internal brand communications and engagement plan
2. ensure you seek legal advice on what you can and can not write about and create your corporate blogger policy - this is one of the areas many people get concerned about and one of the reasons that many company’s never start a corporate blog
3. engage employees in your corporate blogging project that are already interested in social media or have a passion to learn
4. make sure that you train your corporate blogging team before they go live - one company I know underestimated the need for training and then wondered why their blog was faltering
5. determine your corporate blogging measures to ensure you track your blog ROI and adjust your strategy based on the results you achieve.

Savvy candidates preparing for job interviews with you will be searching not only on your website but in forums, in blogs and in Google for what ever information they can glean about you. What they find will influcence them about whether you are a company they want to work for.

And of course they will be speaking to people in their own network of friends and family to access information about what they know and think about you as a prospective employer.

Corporate blogs are not for all businesses - but before you dismiss the idea, consider for a moment the impact a corporate blog could have in connecting with the talent of tomorrow who we know are in short supply.

If you want to know more about corporate blogging, be sure to register for my forthcoming teleseminar with author and corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil who will be joining me live on the 24 March 2008.

And if you want to know more about how corporate blogging can support your employer brand and internal brand strategy, join me at the forthcoming HR Ireland “Successful Recruitment” Masterclass taking place on the 27 May 2008 at the Clarion Hotel, Liffey Valley, Dublin.

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As I’ve written about before, many organisations are concerned about allowing their employees to have access to social networks such as Facebook. In a previous article about Facebook, I provided tips on actions you can take and why social networks in corporates can provide competitive advantage.

So I was delighted to read an article in The Times outlining how some organisations are finding that letting their employees access social networks to support collaboration and sharing of ideas.

The article showcased Cisco Systems who encourage its 65,000 employees to use social-networking sites such as Facebook, and it operates its own social network - the Idea Zone or I-Zone for short - that enables their people to invite other employees respond to ideas. I guess you could see this as the 21st century answer to an interactive “suggestion box” that many organisation put in place in the 1980’s.

Cisco has also just been listed as the 6th best place to work in U.S. in the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies To Work For 2008 list and ranks number four among large companies. It is also featured on the All-Star list as a result of being included on the the Best Companies list every year since it was first published in 1998.

The article goes on to comment about a report by the British internet-security firm Clearswift who claim that two-thirds of British companies have banned employees from using social-networking sites. The reasons for banning access to social networks were attributed to issues of security and protecting information from being leaked onto the web and the issue of productivity. Apparently half of the HR professionals surveyed by Clearswift said they had disciplined employees for time wasting on the internet.

Oh come on guys! If your people are really going to want to sabotage your company and share commecially sensitive information they can take documents and upload them to a host of sites, blog about the information, or even just talk about what you are up to to their friends and to your competitors. Don’t UK companies have trust in their employees? Remember trust is one of the keys to building a collaborative an high performing workplace.

As for HR managers disciplining staff for wasting time on the internet:

1. you should not be disciplining - your line managers should have the accountability for management of their people
2. why aren’t you measuring outcomes versus inputs? In the workplace of today we should have moved beyond the hours people spend on the job as a measure of their performance and effectiveness
3. no wonder the HR function has not developed it’s reputation and constantly gets accused of not adding value
4. have you taken the time to invest in learning what social networks are and how you could harness them to support your communication and engagement policies across the business? (The Clearswift research found that one in five HR decision-makers were unfamiliar with the new networking technologies and two-thirds of HR professionals do not use them).

Apparently, (according to the Times article) the CIPD itself (the professional association for the HR community) restricts its employees’ access to social-networking sites to lunchtime only. I guess the employees in the CIPD should be thank ful they have access at all!

The article goes on to cite the case of the City law firm Allen & Overy who banned its staff from using Facebook only to be forced into an embarrassing u-turn after an avalanche of employee complaints. The article reports that the company had to e-mail their people acknowledging the strong reaction and conceding that Facebook was used by many employees for business as well as social networking. The Allen & Overy network on Facebook had 700 members.

Procter & Gamble on the other hand, the article reports, has been encouraging social networking using the InnoCentive network that links 100,000 scientists across the world to come up with new products. They used this network when it was trying to find a cost-effective way of printing trivia questions on crisps to boost sales - they found a professor in Italy who had devised an ink-jet method for printing edible dye onto biscuits and the method was adapted to crisps.

If we are looking to build a company based on innovation, expressing a strong internal brand to connect with clients and customers and developing a strong employer brand to attract and retain talent, I urge you, don’t dismiss social networking and social media marketing out of hand. At least explore, learn and research the different platforms available to you before you make a corporate wide decision. You can access alot of resources right here at no cost. And if you are looking for an even broader range of training you can join me at the social media training programme taking place between the 20-29 February 2008 - early bird pricing ends on the 31 January 2008.

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