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2. Survey Employees on Social Networking Habits and Interests

What social networks are employees using, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In? Are their networks comprised of personal friends or business contacts? Are they blogging? What work-related blogs do they read? Do they use email subscriptions or RSS readers?  Are they familiar with feedburners and social news sites like Digg? Would they be willing to create specific company accounts and serve as social networking ambassadors for the company? What concerns do they have?

3. Cherry Pick a Pilot Group

Based on the survey data, identify a small group of employees across the organization that are the most eager to be evangelists for the company. Offer employees any additional technical training they may need and address their questions and concerns.

Many employees may feel uncomfortable using their personal accounts to advocate on the company’s behalf. They probably aren’t following the right people for business purposes anyway, and a potpourri of user names is not going to help drive Search Engine Optimization. Work with IT to help employees create branded business social networking accounts and blogs that are threaded through the internal system.

4.Relinquish Complete Control, Reward Employees and Reap the Benefits

Employees won’t want to be handed a script, but general guidelines are understandable. It’s important to strike the right balance between being overbearing and free-wheeling.

If employees feel like they are going to get reprimanded for every little comment, they will feel betrayed because the company is asking for their help. In turn, if employees lack guidelines, Inside Out PR could quickly go awry. When setting social networking guidelines involve human resources and legal. If companies relinquish the need to have complete control, they will reap greater rewards.

While you’re talking to HR and legal, discuss rewriting job descriptions so employers and employees take the responsibility of ambassador seriously and project goals are met.  Employers should provide employees incentives and rewards for serving as ambassadors.

5. Work your Wingmen

The key to turning public relations inside out is cultivating a culture of communication from the top down, then the bottom up. Create branded blogs, Twitter addresses and LinkedIn accounts for senior executives and share the content with your pilot group.  Senior executives can serve as examples for employees and ambassadors can support them in return.

Everyone who saw “Top Gun” understands what it means to be a good wingman.  Ambassadors can comment on the blogs of senior executives, retweet their tweets, share their articles on social networking sites and vote for their content on social news sites.  If done consistently, an active flock of dedicated wingmen can collectively propel the company to the top of search engine rankings and to the center of compelling customer conversations. Inside out public relations is an opportunity for companies to generate a sense of teamwork like never before.

6. Hang onto Keywords like Life Rafts

Keywords are like smoke signals that people use to find each other in an ocean of information and interaction.  If you are not tying your keywords to your communications, your Inside Out Public Relations program will be adrift.

What are the keywords that your stakeholders are using? How can employees leverage those keywords consistently across channels in their communications? For example, if you’re a consulting company and your target audience is CIOs, use that keyword to find people to follow and the hashtag #CIO when tweeting so the right people find you.

7. Establish Metrics

Metrics will vary depending on the company’s goals for social networking, but in general, your goal is to engage your customers.

Other questions include: Are you on page one of search engines for your keywords? Are opinion leaders outside of the company reading the blogs and commenting?  Are you being quoted in mainstream media articles as a result of your efforts? Are bloggers quoting your executives? Are you being invited to speak at events surrounding your keywords? Are you extending the reach of social networks into the real world?

This isn’t going to happen overnight. But with management and employee ambassadors working as a team, you will find over time that the answer to these questions will be, “Yes!”