DATE: 12/26/2004 09:05:0P PM
It would help to know the products. But you still can approach this in any number of ways:
- feature employees in company's ads.
- write the annual report from the employees' point of view.
- get some internal contests going among locations.
- create an employee column for them to share their stories.
-start a supply-chain/improvement team by sending a delegation of employees out to meet the customers.
- come up with a creative contest for employees
- sponsor a children's art contest featuring your products-then use them as ads.
- and then there's always the "gimme" hat routine.

DATE: 12/27/2004 19:90:8P PM
We did something similar a few years ago.
- We developed an ambassador logo.
- We held a contest and solicited stories from employees about what being a company ambassador meant to them. The winning essay writers were given awards and recognized at a management meeting and through our employee publications.
- We built an intranet page devoted to the effort.
While I no longer have copies of the program, officers, managers and employees mentioned often that we were all company ambassadors, and to this day, we still hear it mentioned.
We believe employees need to be well-informed to be good ambassadors, so we try to give them company information before it is read in the news media. We, like Mr. Malia, believe employees (and retirees) make good spokespersons. We featured them in our annual shareholders video this year and are building a new advertising campaign around our employees.
A few years ago, we followed the ambassador campaign with a customer satisfaction campaign and solicited stories from people about how their co-workers had gone above and beyond the call of duty to serve customers, internal and external. Most of the people identified by their co-workers said they were just doing their job, but we managed to write and print a compilation of those employee stories.
As you can see, this effort takes some time, but as we like to say in our internal communications department, we aren't communicators, we are agents of change.
Good luck.

DATE: 12/31/2004 38:44:1A PM
Kevin and Peter:

Thank you so much! These are all wonderful ideas . . . enough for her to get started. Peter, the company is Philips Electronics, so the products range from TVs to computers to other stuff. Mostly in the electronics field, but they have other divisions as well, and they're all over the world.

This is good fodder to get my client started . . . and good for me, too, because I'm going to end up doing a story on it for Ragan Report . . . so thank you very much for your thoughts.

Have a wonderful new year!

Steve