Do you know who your primo marketers should be? Your employees.

Not just the CEO, the marketing department, or the sales staff– but everyone. The most genuine, positive stories about your company and your products come from any and all employees who tell others, who tell others, who tell others…….. Word of mouth that sells good products has worked for centuries and will continue to work. And now with the Internet conservatively speeding up communications by a factor of seven, there’s no more powerful marketing force today than your hyperlinked employees. If treated like humans, given a voice, allowed to talk freely about the products that they develop, left unshackled from inane policies and procedures, employees will be your best marketers. And it costs you nothing.

But unfortunately, the bad blood between employees and corporations often starts early on, with an obnoxious legal flimflam called the "non-compete agreement." I know first-hand. Over the years, I’ve signed several pieces of garbage with that title. Corporate employers have threatened me, and happily, I fought back and won. I will never sign one again.

Non-compete agreements are, of course, only symptoms of the bigger problem of corporations acting as bureaucratic spin factories, filters, and censors of employees’ communications. Big Brother often does a pretty good job of turning off its best marketers: its top assets–its people.

Here’s how the scam works. In that gooey honeymoon period with you’re employer-to-be, and sometimes after you’ve started, you’re told that you need to sign another piece of paper. Everybody has to do it. It’s no big deal. It’s only because the lawyers say you have to. Then, when you hear, "Heck, these things don’t hold up in court, anyway." You know it’s your non-compete.

In carefully crafted legalese, you are told that if you leave the company in any way shape or form (including being axed for no reason), that in essence, you are supposed to forget everything you learned or did at the corporation (even though, of course, corporations know nothing–people do). You are told that if you even think about communicating with a competitor (often defined as virtually any company in the world)-- much less consider working again for one, that

you will be sued and/or you will lose your paltry severance package. And if you do leave, you better not aid and abet any of your colleagues doing the same. There is usually a paragraph on being drawn and quartered if, perchance, you try to start a company that "competes." Wow, what a deal for you, the new employee! Thank you, sir, could I have another! And that’s just on the way IN to the corporation.

Non-compete agreements have nothing to do with pirating trade secrets that may be a legitimate concern (except for the fact that few companies have any real trade secrets or truly proprietary stuff that would make a difference if anyone else had them). Companies that have legitimate trade secrets may feel that they need a confidentiality agreement that reinforces the idea that employees cannot steal from their employers (already covered by statute in every state, by the way).

Every time I have a discussion about non-competes with a top executive or a corporate attorney, they pooh-pooh these agreements and admit that they aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Which is true–they almost never hold up in court. But these folks continue requiring them--and miss the point entirely. They’ve just institutionalized bad blood between the corporation and every new employee. Besides being legal fraud perpetrated by corporations to disadvantage employees, non-competes are asinine in that they often initiate the downhill slide of employees despising their corporations. Or, if not despising--certainly not exuding a lot of goodwill.

So here’s my NOSPIN advice. If you’ve got non-competes in place today, throw a company party and let everyone shred his or her own agreement. The sky will not fall. Apologize for being so blatantly "corporate." Encourage open communications internally and externally. Get rid of other Big Brother policies and procedures that get in the way of people talking to people inside and outside of your four walls. If you’re a new company, save attorneys fees and dispense with the non-compete from the outset. Start a culture of open communications wherein employees decide themselves to become ambassadors of goodwill of the products they create, install, service and sell.

Unleash your employees. Let them communicate freely inside and outside the company (obviously being cognizant of reasonable security issues, etc), without non-competes or other dopey controls and rules. It may not be the easiest, but it’s the cheapest and smartest marketing thing that you can do.

Bad blood or primo marketing–it’s your choice.

 NoSpin Debunkers are free weekly online newsletters written by Tom Ranseen. If at anytime you would like to be removed from the NoSpin Debunker reader list, please Unsubscribe. Otherwise, enjoy, join the conversation, and please forward this debunker to as many friends/acquaintances as you think may be interested–or send me their email addresses. Thanks.

Tom Ranseen NoSpinMarketing 615.383.7157