Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com

It’s not that Fortune 500 employees aren’t paying attention. It’s the company’s fault for not communicating. I’d be willing to bet that most Fortune 500s spend more on advertising than on communicating with employees.

Business Insider looked at the average expenditure of Fortune 500 companies and found that they spent around two percent of revenue on advertising. You are probably thinking, “now, Harry, you act like that is a bad thing that my company spends more to communicate with customers than it does with me.”

Yes, it’s bad, indeed. Why? Well, we’ve talked about the importance of employee communication before here.

Companies spend millions of dollars each year developing mission and vision statements, identifying their brand, and then communicating their brand promise through various media. Employees are the primary “media” in the majority of brand contacts. In most companies, employees don’t understand the brand promise well enough to communicate it, let alone live it and articulate it clearly.

A company that spends a lot of money spreading the word about its brand promise does so at its peril if employees aren’t in the loop and on board with the promise. Who typically delivers on the brand promise? Employees.

Nucor is one of our great customers. They understand the importance of the employee better than any company I have ever worked with.  You could learn a lot about employee communication and branding by following Nucor’s example,

The recipe for success: run the business on the basic principles of lean management, innovation, environmental stewardship, and last – but not least – a commitment to employees. Employees, after all, bring your brand to life.

So, Fortune 500 HR people, you have some work to do. I ran across this article the other day that talked about the opportunity for Fortune 500 HR people in the realm of branding,

Herein lies the opportunity for Human Resources to get through the fence and into the game, by helping ensure that all of the large and small actions that people take every day, throughout the organization, fall in line with the brand strategy. This requires becoming knowledgeable about brands and branding as well as becoming familiar with the company’s brand strategy and marketing communications, especially advertising…A second requirement is to make the brand strategy the lynchpin of the HR strategy…A third requirement for becoming involved in implementing the brand strategy is to brand the HR function itself.

This is solid advice. Finally, I would advise you to take as much care with your employee communications vehicles as your company does with its advertising. You are competing with the best for your employees’ attention. Substandard PowerPoint and corporate videos won’t make the grade.

Other Posts You Might Like

• Top 10 2011 Posts
• All Branding, All The Time
• Brands Still Matter
• Fortune 500 Friday – 7/8/2011
• Brands Out Of Control

Since My Creative Team works with Fortune 500 firms, we often like to share the marketing techniques of these big boys with you. Many of these techniques can be replicated by marketers in any size business. So, let’s see what the big boys have been doing.

Eight Fortune 500 Marketing Techniques - Although red tape often slows down the big boys, they do a few things very well. Here are a few of these that any small business could put in place in their marketing effort.

Wal-Mart Accelerating Growth At Market Concept –  Wal-Mart has determined that their smaller footprint stores are delivering returns on par with their supercenters. The lesson here: consider changing the size of your product to reach a different audience.

New Marketing Approaches For Ford - You can no longer follow the traditional model of ‘announce, launch, abandon’ and then prop it up again when sales tail off. You have to keep listening, and keep responding.

Verizon: A Case Study In Marketing Done Wrong – Poor customer service, inept pricing and deceptive communications: that’s Verizon’s prescription for bad marketing. A small business who had done this would be belly up.

Coca-Cola Employs Music & QR Codes in Marketing - Coca-Cola has finally come up with a game plan to catch up and tap into Pepsi’s target audience and hopefully gain the patronage of a better chunk of soda consumers. And this game plan also involves the use of music to connect to people, albeit in a different manner.

Other Posts You Might Like

• Top 10 2011 Posts
• Another QR Code Update
• Employees: Your Most Ill-Informed Audience
• QR Code Naysayers
• All Branding, All The Time

What are the business-to-business blogging trends for 2011? You can find out in this new paper released just this morning by my digital colleagues Tony Karrer, Ph.d and Tom Pick. They asked some of the top bloggers to prognosticate about what will happen in B2B blogging. I was honored to be among those who are included in the final paper.

What do I think we’ll be seeing this year? Here are a few thoughts I shared in the paper:

In 2011, we’ll see an increase in the number of B2B blogs, particularly among Inc. 500 and Fortune 500 companies. A pair of studies by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has taken a look at these groups and their blogging habits. Since 2007, there has been steady growth in the percentage of these companies blogging. At the end of 2009, 45% of Inc. 500 companies were blogging. In 2010, 23% of Fortune 500 corporations report having blogs.”

I hope you’ll download the paper and check it out.

Other Posts You Might Like

• Driving Blog Traffic With Pinterest
• 7 Strategies For Employee Communication Through Social Media – Part 2
• Top 5 Posts Of 2012
• Are You Content With Your Content?
• Calling All Guest Bloggers

UPDATE: With Christmas behind us, this Lowe’s tool is offline.

We’re proud to be launching today the Lowe’s Gift List Builder that we just completed.  It’s an online holiday tool catalog that allows you to build a gift list, save it online and then share it with friends via email and your Facebook account.

We had some fun with the email sharing feature, allowing you to select avatars that represent your personality. Or, if you have no personality, that’s OK, too.

So, I hope you will visit Lowe’s and build your Gift List today.  Please tell your friends about it, too.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Creativity 2012 – Week #8
• Your Personal Brand
• Creativity 2010 – #1
• Leaders Must Understand And Practice PR
• Weekend Reading: 7 Web Marketing & PR Resources

Some Fortune 500 company marketing highlights:

Fortune 500 2010 List - Here’s the current list of Fortune’s top companies.

Verizon To Sell iPad October 28 – Smart move by both Apple and Verizon to team up on the sale of the iPad, setting the stage for the rumored 2011 iPhone partnership between the two companies.

Wal-Mart’s Mixed Message – Analysts say Wal-Mart’s mixed marketing message and its push into urban markets are reasons its stock price is floundering.

TIAA-CREF Urges: Become Your Future You – The company financial services provider to the academic, government and non-profit fields is seeking to “fight the inertia” surrounding retirement savings by asking viewers to imagine their futures.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Great Guerrilla Advertising
• 2009 – Back To Basics
• Embrace the Unexpected
• 4-25-2007 Links
• Know Your Media – Newspapers

Today’s Fortune 500 Friday is about Nucor, #206 on this year’s Fortune 500 list, & one of my clients. I have been in marketing since 1983, and in my experience, Nucor does a better job of branding than any other company I’ve ever been around. It doesn’t waste time or money on promoting itself outside its niche. The people who need to know about them, know who they are.

Your organization could take branding lessons from Nucor. The recipe for success: run the business on the basic principles of lean management, innovation, environmental stewardship, and last – but not least – a commitment to employees. Employees, after all, bring your brand to life.

Nucor hires the right people and immerses them in its corporate culture. The poster above that we produced outlines the Nucor way. Walk into a Nucor facility and you’ll see posters like this. This is not just empty talk. I’ve seen the culture in action.

Recently, I was producing recruiting videos for Nucor. Everyone I interviewed clearly understood and brought the corporate culture to life. It was truly amazing that they all told me stories that supported Nucor’s four employee relations principles:

Management is obligated to manage Nucor in such a way that employees will have the opportunity to earn according to their productivity.
Employees should feel confident that if they do their jobs properly, they will have a job tomorrow.
Employees have the right to be treated fairly and must believe that they will be.
Employees must have an avenue of appeal when they believe they are being treated unfairly.

When the video is completed, I’ll share some of the Nucor employees’ stories.

Are your employees part of your branding effort? Tell us about it.

Other Posts Of Interest

• The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same
• I Own You!
• All A Twitter
• Is RSS the Best of Web 2.0? – eMarketer
• Web Trumping Old Media For Campaign Info

My Creative Team works for a number of Fortune 500 companies, so we wanted to provide a service to our client contacts that helps them stay current on what their peers are doing in advertising, PR, marketing and social media. That’s how the idea for Fortune 500 Friday came into being. If you have written about Fortune 500 companies or know of good articles on them, please let us know. Here is our first edition.

Apple Makes A Run At The Enterprise - Consumers love Apple and have for years. Big business has resisted Apple’s advances – until now. What did Apple do to break into this virgin territory?

Pink Hardhats? – The macho construction industry is the last place you’d expect to find pink hardhats, but EMCOR employees are doing just that to promote breast cancer awareness.

Corning Goes Social – Corning uses new media to deliver instant information on such topics as its financial performance, its products, its history and its charitable activities.

Your Google Adwords Budget Was What!!? – Some of the Big Boys are spending a lot of money on Google Adwords to shill products and to control spin around bad news.

3M Gets Back Its Mojo – Some say 3M lost some of its creative juice under James McNerney, the acclaimed GE alum who led the company from 2001 to 2005 because he preached focus and control over creativity.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Creativity 2012 – Week #19
• Contacting The Media
• New Business Primer – Network It
• Media Fusion
• More Dusty Archives