Don't sack the receptionist - give her more work instead!

Isn't it frustrating when you arrive at an office reception only to find that there's no receptionist! There you stand, waiting for someone to notice you.
And some how the staff manage to beaver away while at the same time giving you glances but, infuriatingly, not making any effort to come to your rescue?
You think to yourself, should I wait, should I talk, should I....

I have worked in many busy offices in my time and the one person who seems to have the most fun and the cushiest job always seems to be the receptionist.
The problem is that when a company has a belt tightening period, then the receptionist is usually the one that bites the dust leaving a void in the reception area and some poor employee out of work and me, the poor visitor, left to her own devises.

I can understand the reasoning for her demise - maybe she spent a lot of time filing her nails or chatting on her mobile - but who's fault is that? She could have been kept busy with a crucial occupation that most small companies tend to ignore usually to their peril.

She could have been the companies "Social Media Whizz Kid"!
Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that you would encourage her to chat on Facebook all day, I am talking about structured marketing using Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn and all the other important social networks.
She would be given targets to meet and results to report on, in fact she would be kept extremely busy.

There's four things you would need to have in place in order to ensure you really do benefit from her activities, in other words to make sure she is actually marketing your business not chatting and making dates with her new found friends.

1) Big Brother is watching!
What a lot of companies don't know is that if an employee is using a company e-mail then you have every right, as their employer, to monitor their e-mails. This is the first thing you should make clear to your new "Online Marketing Manager", (it is amazing how a good title can incentivize).

2) A weekly feedback report.
This would be to ascertain, (sorry for the posh word), things like, how many followers you have gained on Twitter and how many Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Plaxo friends you have on your business pages etc.

3) Somone to write good copy.
Find your cleverest writer, (you could hold a competition!), and get them to write a couple of blog posts a week. The posts should contain all the right key words for the search engines and, ideally, should come out of your website but if you don't have a blog on your website then you can start a blog easily using blogger, or blog spot, there are many others! (A little bit of training for your blogger wouldn't go amiss either!)

4) A good trainer.
It doesn't matter how much she thinks she knows about Facebook etc. she will not know about the right way to leverage this new media to market the business.

The beauty of teaching a member of staff Internet Marketing is that you will be in complete control; your staff member will be gaining some great skills and you will save a lot of money down the line - money that you would have had to pay to a marketing company to do it for you.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach him to fish............

Pat Sutton - Professional Blogger and Marketing Director at Niche Media Marketing
One to one training, workshops and seminars on Social Media Marketing.
Pat Sutton - Forbes Listed as the 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter!