This Fall my marketing and HR executive roundtables will have a joint session on: Do You Have An Internal Branding Strategy: Potent Opportunity in a Volatile Economy for Marketing and HR Executives I expect about 40 executives to attend and am designing the session to be provocative and interactive and make my business mantras of creating “managed chaos” and “community for leaders” come alive. Did you know that I –more or less – have outlawed powerpoint presentations in my roundtable sessions? The idea is to have real, authentic interactions in a safe and supportive environment where we can respectfully disagree and get our juices going. Here are some of the intriguing topics we plan to address:

· How often do you see Marketing and HR executives get together to creatively explore partnering opportunities and to work jointly on branding strategies? Not very often I would venture. Yet, there are incredible possibilities for synergy, for bringing HR and Marketing together to create an organizational culture that is on brand, on-strategy and to jointly nurture a culture that delivers bottom-line results. HR can play a key role in helping Marketing develop internal communications that help employees “live the brand.” And, at the same time, Marketing can importantly bolster HR’s ability to recruit and retain top talent aligned with the company brand.

· While in the past, internal branding may have been talked about a lot, it has more often than not taken the backseat to an external focus and been considered by many as a “nice to have.” One might argue that we have a unique opportunity in this volatile economy to define and deliver an internal brand that delivers on your marketplace promise. Your employees, if given the right incentives and tools, can become the biggest champions of your brand.

· New opportunities to leverage social media and Web 2.0 in internal branding. Let’s face it, your employees can importantly impact brand experience and also influence public opinion. They are out there on social media whether you like it or not, and if you embrace this fact and integrate social media into your internal branding strategy in a deliberate and strategic way, the likelihood that you will be able to leverage their online sharing in a positive way goes way up! If there are appropriate guidelines, employee use of social media can importantly improve your brand (the opposite would also be true) while at the same time help create an “alive” culture with engaged employees.

What other topics would you want to see on the table –front and center – if you were able to get a real high-powered group of marketing and HR executives from an eclectic group companies together in one room?

Do you have a unique perspective or experience you would like to add to one of our topics?