“Get Followed” is one of the core values that we promote to our team members here at Lemonade Stand.
This particular core value is all about the potential reach that our individual team members can have and the impact that that can have on our company as a whole. There is a lot of power in having an online following. This can be extremely beneficial to our company, but it also can have a lot of impact on our team member’s lives. You never know the opportunities that will come or the people that you will be able to meet just from growing your online presence!
We are constantly trying to encourage and support the growth of our people as well as our business, so this is a perfect core value that blends really well with the way that we have built our company.
I couldn’t tell you the number of team members and clients that have found out about our company and our team through someone’s LinkedIn post or by finding a blog article that we’ve written. Something catches their attention (because our people are trying to get followed), and it leads to more, incredible team members joining us or more awesome clients that we get to work with!
I count myself in that lucky group of people who have all found Lemonade Stand because of someone else being brave and putting something out there to the public eye. I grew up in the same neighborhood as our content team director. I had connected with her on LinkedIn a while back just because I knew her and saw her on there one day. Well, it turns out that she LOVES her company and likes to post little updates about some of the amazing people that she gets to work with.
I saw a few of these posts come in and was pretty impressed that someone would be posting so much about how awesome their company is. I had to find out more. From her posting I started to investigate further into this Lemonade Stand business, and I ended up connecting with a bunch of people at the company. I was even more impressed to find out that apparently all of them love the company as much as she does! They all like to post about cool people they are working with or share stories about what they called “Build Then Bless.” The more and more that I learned about Lemonade Stand (from its own team members posts), the more I was drawn in. Eventually I reached out to our COO and asked if I could chat with their team.
Needless to say, I ended up joining this amazing team! I would have never even found them if not for one brave team member who was just trying to live our core value of “Get Followed” by posting a quick little update about our company on LinkedIn.
I have heard the same story from other team members as well as from clients who have joined us. A lot of our growth stems from our people getting followed.
It’s a pretty powerful concept!
So how do we do it?
The Lemonade Stand Blog
We encourage our team members to live this value simply because it’s awesome; however, we have found that it is important enough for our company to include little incentives for being brave and going public.
One thing that we do to help with this is offering a percentage of any sales/deals that are closed from a client that found us because of our team members or any sales that they play a direct part in. To do that, they either have to be active online and “Getting Followed” so that people can find them or talking about our company to other people. Either way, the end results are great for everyone involved!
We also love when our team members are willing to write articles, share stories, or create informational pieces for our company blog. Anything that they add to our blog, on their own time, is rewarded with a little bonus through our favorite employee recognition platform, Motivosity.
We’ve seen our team members do some pretty cool things and really live out this core value!
As another example of this – a while ago, our company founder, Greg Trimble, asked me to start writing articles on our blog. I had never really written anything like this before (he also had me posting on LinkedIn as soon as I started here, which I had also never done before), but I just finished writing and posting my 50th article! It’s been an awesome experience for me and has taught me a ton. I’ve grown a lot and don’t have all of the fear and anxiety about posting publicly that I used to. Now, I’m not at all trying to say that my blog articles are anything to sneeze at, but, if nothing else, my attempt to “Get Followed” as prompted by my team, has pushed me and forced me out of my comfort zone in major, major ways and has made me grow as a person. This value is as much about our team members growing as it is about helping the company to grow.
How Can You Live This Core Value?
This core value can take a lot of courage!
Trust me! Like I said, when I first started here, I was informed that I would need to start posting on LinkedIn. If you’ve ever seen my empty Instagram account, you would know that I’m not really one to post to social media. I have never felt comfortable sharing things in that way and have literally never posted anything on Instagram. I barely even know how to use it if I’m being honest.
To say that I was nervous about posting to LinkedIn would have been a massive understatement.
The key to it all, though?
Post!
Just do it!
Be brave!
Start posting!
Get rid of the “I’m an idiot” and “people will judge my posts” syndromes and just make your first post!
People don’t judge you nearly as much as you think they do. Or at least, if they do, you pretty much never know that they do! It doesn’t affect you as much as you think it will. Once a post is out there, it’s just out there. People read it or they don’t, but you have at least made an attempt.
That’s the first step! That’s the only way that anyone can ever “Get Followed.”
Maybe you’re more interested in doing something like a blog. Maybe you don’t want to be all over social media. That’s fine!
The steps are going to be exactly the same, though.
You’re going to have the same fears and anxieties about people reading through your thoughts and analyzing your writing. It’s always going to be there. The only way to overcome it (or to at least stop letting it dictate your life) is to actually get started on it!
Just start writing!
I would go as far as saying that it doesn’t even matter what you want to write about. If you want to write a business blog that will help other companies, but you aren’t sure where to start, well, write about other topics that interest you first. Write about your snowboarding hobby! Provide value to people in whatever way you know how. This, if nothing else, will at least get you writing. This will at least start getting your name out there or your website. And, who knows? It could lead to a very successful blog, and maybe you end up only writing about snowboarding! Or maybe it just gets you in the habit of writing, and you end up writing not only a blog about business but a bestselling book about it too! You never know where it is going to lead you, but to get there, you have to actually start.
In the world in which we live, it is incredibly important to “Get Followed” if you want to make an impact on a large number of people.
So…
Post about your company. Post about your team. Write articles about things that you love. Tell stories. Share information that will be useful to other people who wouldn’t know how to find it without you!
People don’t know what you do or what you know unless you let them know what you do and what you know! It’s really simple once you break it down like that. You absolutely have something of value to share with the world – you might not think that you do, but who knows? Even just a post about how awesome your team and your company are might just change the course of someone else’s life.
If you do need any help promoting your company online, we are experts in just that! We’d love to help you build up a social media presence or start up a blog on your website to help you gain name recognition, web presence, and share your unique offerings with the world. We love helping people do these types of things, so let us help you get started! We do this for companies like yours all the time, so please reach out to our team! We’d love to help you!!
