Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Kohl’s displays employees’ live tweets on screens in its stores

Digital screens are outsized public platforms hanging in corporate lobbies and lunchrooms, often displaying information such as product photos, stock prices and a cable news feed.

Twitter, on the other hand, is more chaotic and personal, often viewed on tiny devices by jaywalkers on busy streets, people in toilet stalls or drivers cruising blindly through traffic.

At Kohl’s Department Stores, the ordered big screen and unruly small one have merged as communicators encourage employees to tweet their company stories. In what may deserve a profile in corporate courage award, Kohl’s is displaying staffers’ tweets live on its company screens.

“Live tweets?” you might be thinking. “ It’ll be chaos. They’ll tweet that they hate their boss, that so-and-so was napping on the job, that their dog was looking adorable this morning.”

That’s not what’s happening at Kohl’s, Lynn Loignon, vice president of internal communications, says in a Ragan Training video titled “How to connect to and energize a distributed workforce with digital technology.”

Download your free guide: Auditing Your Internal Communications

An army of brand ambassadors

The company was looking for good vibes internally as well as good PR, and the employees delivered. “We wanted to create 140,000 brand ambassadors,” Loignon says.

That’s the size of the Milwaukee-based Kohl’s workforce at its 1,162 stores in 49 states. Loignon’s internal communications team says this blend of internal and external communications engages its employees and inspires a culture of information sharing. It also gets out some nice messages about the company.

“Our goal is to be the most engaging retailer in America,” Loignon says.


Kohl’s has an expanding array of digital screens placed in employee lunchrooms. The purpose is to reach staffers when they’re looking for a diversion while munching corn chips or finishing off the leftover macaroni from last night. Slightly different versions of the screen are shown in each store.

The screen includes a TV feed, and staffers can choose the channel, be it CNN or “Gilligan’s Island” reruns. Across the top is the date, weather and time, so nobody gets caught up in that episode of “The Young and the Restless” and forgets to head back to work.

There is a space for localized company content, such as information on a financial planning tool. “We’re very disciplined about what we show them because we know it’s their break time,” says Loignon, adding, “It’s got to be of benefit to the associate.”

Also—and here’s where it gets interesting—Kohl’s displays rotating tweets and Instagram images on the bottom left part of the screen. To be displayed, employees must include the hashtag #LifeAtKohls.

Kohl’s has software that filters out certain words, and it can block trolls who might show up and create a stink. Otherwise, the merging of big screens and social media has proven to be a success.

“It’s amazing the difference once we added that Twitter feed, how our social sharing went up on Twitter,” says Loignon. “We went up 560 percent because associates were so excited to see themselves on TV.”

To that point, some employees have taken to tweeting, “I just want to be on TV. #LifeAtKohls,” so they can see their names on the screen. Others tweet photos of friends.


Some employees tweet just to express excitement over their jobs.

One Twitter user wanted to note the perks of working at Kohl’s.

Yeah, but what if somebody tweets a pet photo? Well, it turns out those aren’t so bad, really.

How about references out of the blue to a sick co-worker? As it happens, such tweets can make a company seem more human (and more sanitary, too).
The wall screens also enable location managers to post content from templates honoring birthdays, work anniversaries and messages such as, “Welcome to the team, Sarah S.” Kohl’s also recognizes staffers doing volunteer work in the community.

Dealing with bosses and trolls

All that is great, but how on earth did Kohl’s get executive approval to display live tweets? Loignon admits it’s not easy.

“There are lot of challenges at organizations around buying into and allowing employees basically to talk externally about the brand,” she says, “and we definitely had a lot of opposition.”

The communications team knew some “associates” (as employees are called at Kohl’s) would mention negative things, but it felt the positive would outweigh that. Communicators got human resources, legal and others behind the concept.

Kohl’s communications staff found a vendor that would block profanity and other unwanted words. Also, they can individually block any trolls who might run down the brand repeatedly.

After updating the social media policy, Kohl’s put together a campaign to let employees know it was OK to tweet. The campaign enlisted CEO Kevin Mansell to sell the message that they were welcome to mention their jobs with the hashtag #LifeatKohls.

“We included [a video of] our CEO tweeting from his desk to help associates know that, yes, it’s OK,” Loignon says. “If Kevin’s doing it, it’s OK. You can do it.”

The program has worked well enough that Kohl’s is adding “digital walls” in corporate locations, such as the cafeteria. There are made of 12 screens that are seven feet tall and 20 feet wide and display live feeds from Twitter and Instagram.

“Our goal of this,” Loignon says, “is to reinforce that it’s OK to share on social media.”

Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan Communications’ distance-learning portal RaganTraining.com . The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations and interactive courses.

@ByWorking



from Ragan.com http://ift.tt/24o9FBL via web video marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1RlQwsW
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)