Countless articles and blog posts have been written listing ways to encourage employees to become brand ambassadors. A lot of companies already engage in many of these practices, but that doesn’t stop most employees from ranking among the company’s detractors. As I reported earlier this week, a Forrester study found the Net Promoter Score among information workers is a disheartening -23%.

The problem is that the brand ambassador efforts most companies have in place are designed for those employees who are already inclined to recommend their employers’ products or services to friends or family. Detractors aren’t likely to take advantage of any of those programs.

Companies should focus on converting employees from detractors into promoters. One critical way to do that is to improve brand literacy.

Most employees in most organizations are intimately familiar with the aspects of the company with which they are directly involved. Accountants know the numbers. Engineers know what it takes to build the products. Even brand managers tend to be familiar only with the products for which they’re responsible. Brand literacy aims to ensure every employee has a comprehensive understanding of the company brand. (It’s one of three literacies companies should work to build. The other two: business literacy and product literacy.)

Brand literacy means that employees understand…

• The brand promise (what the company tells customers it can do for them)
• The brand experience (the result of all customers’ contacts with the brand)
• Brand awareness (how aware customers are of the brand)
• Brand communication (what the company is doing to promote the brand)
• Brand identity (the logos and trademarks associated with the brand)

Here are eight ways communicators in your company can help improve brand literacy:

1. Indoctrinate them early

New-hire orientations are tedious affairs in most organizations, focused on reviewing benefits, getting paperwork filled out, and covering policies. The best new-hire orientations are more longitudinal—that is, they are not one-day or half-day affairs, but rather continue over a period of months with education about culture and brand built into the fabric of the process.

Even if you can’t improve the new-hire orientation at your organization, work to include some brand basics in the existing program.

2. Tell brand stories

Too much of the employee communication efforts around brand are perfunctory, fact-laden, and barely-readable articles on intranets and in company publications. Far more compelling to employees are real brand stories. I’ve always adhered to the Indian proverb that goes:

“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

Stories convey real experiences from real people. They may take more time to find than simply another essay on the brand, but employees will pay much greater attention to them.

3. Curate brand content

Employees interested in the brand frequently have to spend time in search engines, both internal and external, to find the information they need. The volume of content available to employees has created an urgent need for content curation within the organization. Ideally, this would result in a one-stop shop where employees can find all the material on the intranet and the Web associated with the brand.

Think about the way Yahoo, in its early days, attempted to categorize all the content on the Web. These were hierarchical drill-downs into a topic, providing links based on the specific category of information you were seeking. While the Web grew too large for human indexing efforts, information about your brand is still easily managable. Contained in your brand curation site should be links to…

• Official position statements
• All official brand materials, including marketing and advertising plans, strategies, and collateral
• Pertinent articles that have appeared on the intranet or internal publications
• External articles, blog posts, and other material that covers the brand
• A multimedia archive of both internal and external video; this can be divided into company-produced material and content created by third parties (such as fans, critics, and news media)

4. Host internal trade shows and product launches

Companies make a big deal about product launches to customers and consumers. Internally, the launches are usually covered with an article on the intranet. That’s a big mistake. The more employees know about the products, the more they can promote them, answer questions, and generally support them. Consider ways to duplicate the hoopla around a product launch internally.

5. Use multiple media and employee-generated content

Don’t limit brand communication to text and pictures. Videos don’t need to be high-end these days. If the company is hosting an event or participating in a trade show, shoot video and make it available to employees. (You do have an internal YouTube-like video sharing site, don’t you?)

Further, employees have their own brand stories to share and should be able to, on internal blogs, by shooting video, or recording audio to convey their experiences. Employees are inherently interested in what other employees have to say—that’s why a 401(k) promotion at Best Buy that had in-store personnel sharing by video the reasons they invest in the retirement plan produced substantially better results than traditional benefits marketing campaigns. Microsoft’s Academy Mobile is another example of employee-generated content promoting knowledge sharing beyond the limitations of traditional employee communications channels.

6. Provide training opportunities

Among the training programs the company offers, a “brand immersion” coruse should be offered. Provide both classroom and online training opportunities for those employees who are interested. Provide incentives for employees to go through the training.

7. Share customer feedback

I wrote about this earlier this month. If you accept the idea that the “brand” is the cumulative experience customers have with the organization—the reaction to seeing the trademark or hearing the company name that is based on all those contacts with the company, not to mention stories they’ve heard from others about their experiences—then you know that brand literacy just include customer reactions. Don’t confine customer feedback to the customer service department. Find ways to share what customers are saying throughout the organization.

8. Host polls and quizzes

Sprinkle polls and quizzes related to the brand throughout your online communications. If they’re fast and fun, they can reinforce key messages delivered through the other channels listed above.

Brand-literate employees will be far more inclined to become brand ambassadors, at which point you can start to take the advice from the scores of posts and articles that list effective techniques. Some of my favorite posts are…

• Edelman Digital’s David Armano on How to be an effective corporate ambassador
• Jenny Schade on How to Help Employees Promote the Brand
• Employee as Brand Ambassador, from the Brand Ambassador Blog
• Shouldn’t Every Employee be a Brand Ambassador? from David Polinchock
• Mashable offers a How To: Help Employees Talk About Your Brand Online