What Is an Internal Brand Ambassador?

What is an Internal Brand Ambassador? Well, you may not have heard that term before because frankly, I made it up. Actually, I combined other words to put it together, so let’s break it down.

This whole concept of brand ambassador comes from YouTube influencers and social media influencers where there are external people that are willing to promote your business and your brand. Now, the internal part is really about you not letting other people outside the company do it, or you are actually engaging the people that are already on your payroll. Those internal employees. So when you put that together, and you get Internal Brand Ambassador.

I share this with you because I’ve been studying hyper-growth companies, I’ve been looking at what does it take to create leadership that inspires ownership, which is about going beyond responsibility, about really creating an “own it” culture. Those things really lead up to how do you get people to not just do the work, but want to do the work. This concept of the Internal Brand Ambassador is really powerful if you think about how you could be engaging others in your organization that wants to share the message for your company. They would want to get on stage, they want to become the media in some way, whether it be through a podcast, or written, or video, but you allow them to do this, and you coach them to really represent you the best way possible. They’re growing, you’re growing, and the company’s growing, and the people that are receiving the messages, well they’re benefiting too.

Now, we have a special episode today because I have gone into uncovering what is this role as a brand ambassador. Now you may have heard something about being an evangelist. Not everyone can do that, but a brand ambassador is someone that has responsibility for the overall message for that piece, whatever they’re going over, and they share that with the marketplace.

The interview that I’ve done is with Microsoft, Christi Olson specifically, is helping me understand what her role as a brand ambassador inside the company is. She represents the search functions and artificial intelligence inside Microsoft, and she’s correlating between not only internal teams the message, but also externally and sharing that on stages, to the media, and she actually has a voice in the marketplace that makes her the media.

Now hopefully that sounds enticing to you that you would love to have someone take the reins when you can’t go to those speaking engagements and represent you and your company so that it sparks interest in the marketplace. But that’s an Internal Brand Ambassador. We uncover exactly what that is in the LeadersintheTrenches.com/300 episode. That’s my podcast, Leaders In The Trenches, where it’s all about business growth and leadership development. This is a series of brand ambassadors, specifically Internal Brand Ambassadors, to help you understand the role. And if you’re ready to step into this, ready to become a brand ambassador, then you’re going to want to take good notes because Christi’s got insight up to here.

I’m excited to share this with you; I’m also excited to celebrate 300 episodes of Leaders In The Trenches and share this message with you. So check out LeadersintheTrenches.com/300 and my interview with Christi Olson at Microsoft about Internal Brand Ambassadors.