Everything You Need to Know About Employee Advocacy

Everything You Need to Know About Employee Advocacy Employee advocacy is exactly as it sounds: its all about getting employees to be advocates for their own employers on social media. It runs on the straight from the horses mouth principle, whereby employees share favourable content that paints their organisation in a really positive way. The point? To  market a company by  engaging its people in a social way, so as  to create and project a positive culture. How does it actually work though, and what are the dos and donts?  To get the lowdown I speak to Glenn Gaudet, Founder and President of GaggleAMP to find out all about it. Listen to the interview  below, keep reading for a summary and dont forget to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast. What would you say is the main challenge that employee advocacy addresses? Well, certainly there is the aspect of the online marketing, and really getting the amplification impact of having lots of people who already have an affinity for your organisation, your employees, to be able to easily share content thats being put out by the company. But theres also the engagement aspect of it, which really, the more engaged your employees are, the more it impacts your culture. So you have this two-sided effect. One is certainly from the marketing, which usually leads to sales, and on the other side you have engagement, which really helps drive culture. So its a really powerful combination of bringing people together to be part of an overall strategy that impacts the sales, the marketing, and the culture. Is employee advocacy better suited for large companies? It depends on what your goals are. So obviously for a very large company, its great because you can tap into thousands or tens of thousands of employees. I remember when we, going back a few years, we had a small company come on, they had 17 employees. And this is what they told us, over a three-month period, they tripled their web traffic, they quadrupled their lead flow by getting the employees that were on our platform to just use easily share content. So even in a small situation, it doesnt take a lot of people to have big impact. Youre going to have some employees that are loud on social, theyre out there all the time, they are part of it, they get it. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, youre going to have employees that arent really sure about what to do and what to say on social. When youve got that full range, you need to be able to satisfy the needs of both ends, plus everyone in the middle. Do employees really want to share content about their company with friends and family on Facebook? Again, you have to think about this as a strategy, a broader strategy, a communication strategy, and its not about just getting your product out there all the time. In fact, we have customers, we have some B2C brands that you would know, and when you look at the kinds of content that they are asking their employees to share, whether it be on Facebook or somewhere else, theyre not talking about the products per se, but a lot of times, they are talking about the impact that they may be having in the local community. And then, all of a sudden, you see employees who are really proud about sharing the same, Listen, Im part of an organisation thats having real impact. So, again, it depends on what your communication strategy is. What are you trying to get out there? What are you trying to have impact with? Because, in a broader sense, when you take this out of the realm of just, Im trying to get more leads for my product, what youre doing is youre impacting your brand. And how do you want to impact your brand with the right kinds of messages that are going out, whether it be from the corporate social assets, as well as the employee social assets? And you shouldnt expect that every employee is going to share everything you put out there for them. Thats not what this is all about. Its about giving them the choice so that you share the content that theyre comfortable with sharing. How can you make sure employees dont all share the same content at the same time? There are certain things that we do to help reduce that impact. But, at the end of the day, you also have to look at what the crossover is. So in other words, if you and I have exactly the same people in our contact list on LinkedIn, you might actually start seeing some of that because we might be connected to 100 people in the same company together and then we start seeing that. But the reality is, once you get outside that organisation, the people in the outside, theyre not connected to everyone in the organisation. So theyre not seeing the fact that maybe 100 people shared a message that was similar. People always look at it from the wrong perspective usually, when I hear that, is theyre not looking at it from the outside world, which is really the audience that youre trying to get. How do you measure return on investment of employee advocacy? One of the things that we do is we actually measure the ROI for  our clients. And theres a number of different ways that you can measure. Some of the easy ways is, first of all, the message reach that you achieved. If you think about it, you put something out on your corporate Twitter account, whats the average lifespan of that? Its not very long. And, all of a sudden, now you have the ability to increase the reach, plus the chances of those people seeing the content, by people sharing this over a period of time. And thats the nice thing about this. This is not just, all of a sudden, blasted out to everyone. This is really about organically sharing content over a period of time so that it gets the maximum exposure. So if you think about it from that point of view, whats it going to have impact on? Well, youre going to see ROI, first of all from the reach. Thats one. Thats a no-brainer. Youre going to see click-throughs, assuming youre putting links in the content that comes back to y our website. And then from the links, what happens? Youre driving people to the website. Now theyre downloading forms and youre capturing leads. So theres a direct correlation to the amount of leads that youre getting. And then because what our stuff does is it allows you to actually get that close-loop marketing. So we work with marketing automation tools so that we can do lead-source passing to the marketing automation tool. The marketing automation tool passes that to the CRM. Next thing you know, you know exactly from what message that this particular deal came in on. So if you close the deal for $5,000, for $20,000, you know exactly where that came from now. So its really powerful. Even though youre getting all these people to share, there is that data that comes in with it, which is a really big piece of this. More on this topic at  Employee Advocacy: The Ultimate Handbook.