The Rise of Employee Advocacy: HOW CONTENT AMPLIFICATION STRATEGIES ARE EVOLVING TO LEVERAGE EMPLOYEES’ SOCIAL INFLUENCE

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Introduction // The Rise of Employee Advocacy

IntroductionToday’s CEOs typically receive bonuses based on their company’s stock performance or return on capital. Havas Creative Group recently added a unique metric to the fold: employee engagement. CEOs at the company’s international offices must drive a 5 percent increase in engagement over the year to qualify for the employee advocacy bonus.

Many describe “employee engagement” as the modern-day version of “employee morale,” but with the added layers of belief in the company’s mission, drive to work hard, and dedication to the success of other team members. Currently, employee engagement at Havas ranks 59 on their 100-point scale, Digiday reports. Considering a recent Gallup poll discovered only 30 percent of American employees are engaged at work, Havas’ starting benchmark is already high.

Who is in a better position to build and promote your brand online than your employees? These individuals have a thorough knowledge of your products, industry, and corporate culture, and they can quickly react to and analyze new developments, positioning your company and employees as thought leaders in the space.

“Your employees online represent the new front line of public relations, marketing, and customer service,” writes Shel Holtz for Monster. “Just ask Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos who encourages his employees to spend time on Twitter to the extent that he offers classes in the micro-blogging platform.”

This eBook will cover the growth of employee advocacy as a content amplification strategy, focusing on the latest research around the topic, why enterprises are still afraid to give staff freedom to promote, and the ROI you can expect from a well-thought-out program.

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3 Table Of Contents // The Rise of Employee Advocacy

Table Of ContentsIntroduction 1

EmployeesastheNewContentAmplificationPlatform 4

WhyCompaniesAreSecretlyTerrified 5ByEmployeeAdvocacy

WhyEmployeeAdvocacyIsWorththeRisk 7

IfYouLoveSomething,LetItGrow 9

TrustandTransparency:TheKeytoAdvocacy 10Wins/Wins

WhenItComestoContentAmplification, 11EmployeeAdvocacyIsWorthMorethanAnyCheck

Create an Internal Social Digest 11

Invest in an Employee Advocacy Platform 11

Demonstrate the ROI, Always 12

TheROIofEmployeeAdvocacy 13The Findings 13

HowCanSkywordHelp? 15

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

Employees as the New Content Amplification PlatformContent amplification and promotion are huge pieces of the content marketing mix, and ignoring this practice will only decrease your brand’s impact.

Successful content marketers understand this, and they are dedicating more budget to content amplification strategies. In fact, a survey conducted by PR Newswire and the Content Marketing Institute found that 87 percent of content marketers said they were going to either increase or maintain their budgets for paid content promotion this year.

While paid amplification helps brands build audiences, marketers can also achieve similar results without digging too deep into their wallets. The solution lies within employees and colleagues. Turning to internal influencers and employees to amplify branded content can have huge benefits on a brand’s amplification strategy. That said, it may still be a struggle to get everyone on board. First, you need to get high-level buy-in from executives to ensure that employees of all ranks have the freedom to promote your brand across social media and elsewhere. Unfortunately, that’s increasingly a harder program to push through senior-level teams.

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

Why Companies Are Secretly Terrified By Employee AdvocacyWhat could be better than having a company full of thought leaders and brand advocates—teams of passionate employees who use their personal time and social media channels to promote your brand and engage new customers? The social universe is vast, and the more brand ambassadors you have, the more territory you can cover.

Sure, to executive teams and marketing leaders, the idea of letting rank-and-file employees speak on behalf of the company is new and somewhat frightening territory. Brand communication has usually been reserved for the top brass, PR experts, and trained marketers—people who know what to say, what not to say, and how to shine the brand in the best possible light. Until recently, most companies discouraged or even banned unauthorized employees from posting anything about the company on social media.

But now, many customer-centric businesses are embracing employee advocacy as a way to reach wider audiences and inspire greater customer loyalty.

It makes perfect sense. In the digital age of business transformation, when social shares can lead to sales and followers often convert into customers, it would be foolish to ignore the untapped social potential at each team member’s fingertips. Not only can your employees help spread your content and product messaging, they can also become experts and thought leaders in their own right, helping steer customers through the buyer’s journey.

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

Therein lies the second risk leaders take when promoting employee expertise: As their personal brands grow, so do their professional resumes (and the likelihood new work opportunities will open up to them).

Considering how hard companies work to attract and retain top talent, it seems counterproductive to make them more marketable. What are the benefits and risks associated with building up internal team members? Is it really such a bad thing for business? And how can employees build their personal brands without freaking out their employees?

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Why Employee Advocacy Is Worth the RiskCommunication teams and company leaders aren’t the only ones capable of speaking intelligently and passionately about a brand. Your employees know your products inside and out. If they believe in your company’s mission, purpose, and values, they will not only toot your company’s horn but also defend it against naysayers. One in five employees is an employee activist, according to a study by Weber Shandwick, and another 35 percent have high potential to be employee activists.

Employees also have a greater social media reach than your brand. According to LinkedIn, most people have a social following that is 10 times greater than their employers’. And while only two percent of employees currently share their company’s content, they drive 20 percent of the traffic those posts receive.

Not only are your employees’ voices louder than your brand’s, your customers trust them more. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has measured consumer attitudes toward big business for the past 15 years, consumers consider regular employees and in-house technical experts to be more credible information sources than CEOs. In fact, when it comes to how companies treat customers, people trust the opinion of a rank-and-file employee even more than an activist consumer.

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

And why wouldn’t they? Frontline employees have the inside scoop customers don’t have, and they’re not motivated in the same way CEOs are to grow and protect the business. Smart employees, even those who are disengaged or disgruntled, probably won’t openly bash the brands they work for. That would be career suicide. But they’re more likely than executives to follow the policy that if you don’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.

When employees who aren’t executives or marketers start gushing about your brand, it says something special about your company. That’s why top employers like Starbucks, Bluewolf, and LinkedIn now provide the training and resources their employee advocates need to promote the brand (and themselves).

In May 2014, IBM launched a test group of 60 employee advocates who agreed to share company content via their social network accounts. In one week the program drove 35,000 clicks. Today, more than 500 IBM employees have joined in the effort. Amber Armstrong, IBM’s program director of social business market evangelism, says this system has been hugely successful. “If you care about clicks to content,” she says. “It is the most valuable thing we’ve done.”

“ If you care about clicks to content, [employee advocacy] is the most valuable thing we’ve done.” – Amber Armstrong, program director of social business market evangelism, IBM

Deloitte also puts employees front and center on social media, giving them guest-starring roles on the corporate Twitter account and providing content they can use to build their personal brands through their own social media networks. Thanks to the hundreds of employees who participate in Deloitte’s Ambassador Corps, the company more than doubled its number of engaged followers in one year.

Clearly, advocacy programs can grow your customer base. But will they also deplete your staff?

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

If You Love Something, Let It GrowDespite growing interest in this strategy, there’s a fear now stirring up in highly competitive industries. Business leaders want to leverage their employees’ social reach, but they’re afraid these advocates will gain too much influence and eventually leave to start their own consulting practices or pursue other new opportunities.

It’s a reasonable concern, but it’s also the same risk companies take any time they invest time and resources into employee development. However, the alternative is even less appealing: Retain a bunch of mediocre employees, who will probably never outgrow your company or grow your bottom line.

Promoting employee expertise might mean losing some talented players, but it also inspires loyalty that can improve retention and create a powerful group of alumni advocates. As Altimeter founder Charlene Li explains:

“ Every time you can tap into loyalty, give them opportunities for advocacy, and allow employees to express how they feel about the organization, inter-nally and externally, that also deepens the engagement and the relationship. That relationship doesn’t end whenever someone leaves the organization. Engaged alumni can be an extremely important and powerful aspect of your overall employee strategy. They are actively thinking about their prior employment. They may come back as employees in the future, or they may even become clients or customers. So, thinking about that employee rela-tionship much more holistically, across the entire journey that somebody might be taking across their careers or lives, is a different way of thinking about what employee engagement looks like.”

Best-casescenario:Your new thought leaders stay put and make your company look like a treasure trove of industry experts. Worst-case scenario: They leave the company, contin-ue to advocate for your brand, and tell other talented people how great it is to work for a company that puts its people first. In other words, alumni become poster children for your company’s ability to develop careers, which is valuable advertising in itself.

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Trust and Transparency: The Key to Advocacy Wins/WinsPeople who believe in the businesses they work for want to be brand advocates. They know it’s good for the company and for their professional development. Likewise, businesses want to scale their content and reach more customers, which employee advocates can help them do.

Advocacy programs can be a win/win situation for everyone involved, but only if the rules and roles are completely transparent. When companies ban advocacy efforts, employees feel discouraged and undervalued. And when employees try to be sneaky about personal branding, employers question their motives. By creating a structured advocacy program, you prove you trust your team, which makes them far more likely to actually be trustworthy.

Here’s where to start:

•Createguidelines: Include approved talking points as well as classified information you’d rather they not share. It might also be helpful to provide an overview of the marketing strategy, including themes and topics you don’t want associated with the brand.

•Keeprulessimple:While it’s important to ensure employees understand the brand and messaging, complicated rules and processes will dissuade them from participating—either because it requires too much effort or because they’re worried about accidentally getting in trouble.

•Makeparticipationvoluntary:You cannot force or buy employee advocacy. Doing so will alienate employees and make their efforts seem inauthentic to readers.

•Createcontentthey’llwanttoshare:Some employee advocates might want to create their own content and share their own ideas; others are happy to simply share what your marketing team has already created. Curate assets they’ll want to pass along to their social networks that provide value to the reader, not just advertise for the company—and then make this content easily accessible.

Bottomline:You want customers to hear your brand’s story, and who better to tell it than the people who are already part of your mission? If you trust them to spread the world, they’ll return the favor tenfold, and you can begin developing more robust amplification strategies.

The Rise of Employee Advocacy // Trust and Transparency: The Key to Advocacy Win/Wins

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The Rise of Employee Advocacy //

When It Comes to Content Amplification, Employee Advocacy Is Worth More than Any CheckOnce you’ve developed a basic framework and guidelines for employee advocates, and you’ve drummed up activity among your company’s greatest influencers, you can begin to strategically tap into their clout through smarter programs. Here are a couple ways to help get your peers to participate in your employee advocacy program.

CreateanInternalSocialDigestEmployees will often say their lack of free time is the reason they cannot promote branded content on their social channels. After all, their main responsibility is to concentrate on their daily tasks, and it wouldn’t be right to take their focus away from doing their jobs well. One solution is to create an internal social digest email. The social digest is a daily email sent within the company listing the branded content that went live that day and the sample tweets associated with each. When they open this email, they will have a clear list of your blog’s most recent content, as well as grab-and-go tweets. All they have to do is copy and paste one into Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. This saves them time, puts your content in front of their unique networks, and allows you to save some of your content amplification budget by not having to rely on paid strategies.

InvestinanEmployeeAdvocacyPlatformSometimes an investment in an employee advocacy platform might be just what your organization needs. While a social digest is a great tool to help kick off employee advocacy, it will become hard to scale this initiative as your program continues to create more content and you potentially lose bandwidth. Employee advocacy platforms are great resources to help scale your amplification strategy. Tools such as Dynamic Signal, SocialChorus, and EveryoneSocial help facilitate easy content distribution, amplification, and social measurement.

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DemonstratetheROI,AlwaysEmployee advocacy can have a positive effect on the reach of your content, but that positive effect isn’t one-sided. It is also shared with each individual employee. To get everyone’s buy-in, be sure to communicate the benefits they can reap by sharing branded content on their social channels. Employees may be more willing to participate if they understand that by amplifying branded content they will have the chance to develop their personal brands, build authority in the industry, and increase their followings.

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The ROI of Employee AdvocacySocial media holds a strange middle ground for many marketers. On one hand, the medium’s efficacy is almost impossible to dispute, especially for B2C brands that are looking to reach their audiences anywhere, anytime. But on the other hand, many brands struggle to find the “sweet spot” for their social media marketing efforts; as a result, they often neglect social efforts in lieu of channels that historically have worked well for them.

A study from Kitedesk suggests marketers who ignore social channels or don’t try to perfect their social presences may be missing out on a particularly lucrative opportunity. For enterprise businesses that don’t yet have employee advocacy programs, the study might prove the monetary value of developing and implementing a program today.

TheFindingsKiteDesk conducted a survey of 524 professionals. These professionals represented a cross-section of the marketing world, including sales and marketing representatives from various levels of advancement and across a wide range of market types.

Having established a balanced sample of the marketing world, respondents were asked questions that revolved around their success in meeting sales quotas over the past year, and their overall social media proficiency. Only 27.5 percent of respondents reported exceeding their sales quotas in 2015; of those successful respondents, roughly 74 percent described themselves as having been “highly effective” or “better than most” social media users. In fact, across the study, respondents who reported either excellent proficiency with social media or having utilized data from social media in their efforts were six times more likely to have also reported exceeding their sales quotas.

(Source: KiteDesk)

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The efficacy of social media in enhancing sales was further backed by some of the other data displayed in the study. For instance, 42 percent of respondents who “missed their 2014 sales quotas by 10 percent” or more reported never having made a sale through social media or social data. Similarly, 48 percent of quota-failing marketers reported using social media less than 10 percent of the time while working.

As for which platform is the best for social media marketing, interestingly enough, Twitter reigned supreme—followed closely by LinkedIn, then Facebook. While Facebook provides many means for building an audience and collecting data, and LinkedIn provides the best space for establishing professional connections and thought leadership, Twitter’s to-the-moment nature served best for pushing incentives, taking advantage of impulse buying, and promoting products to specific groups.

While social media certainly appears to have a place in the repertoires of successful marketers, it’s important to note that failure to use social media is better than using social media poorly. Marketers, brand representatives, and employee advocates need to remember that social media is effective because of the personal nature of the medium. Tossing inordinate amounts of sales messages at your audience won’t engender any trust (or sales) from your devotees. You’d be surprised at how many brands don’t understand this.

This is why employee advocacy has become such an important facet of content amplification and social selling.

There are many ways to get your organization to contribute to organic content amplification strategies. However, it’s important to note that it’s not the strategy their engagement level depends on—it’s the brand. At the crux of employee advocacy is employees’ connection with your brand, their trust in the program, and their belief in your company’s mission.

Even if your next paycheck isn’t affected by employee advocacy, an engaged workforce acting on your behalf as an extension of your marketing mission and strategy can go a long way toward drumming up positive sentiment and, ultimately, future business.

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How Can Skyword Help?The world is changing and consumers are more empowered than ever. How can you keep with the changing digital trends and compete for dwindling consumer attention? With content, it’s easy.

Skyword moves marketing leaders and those who create content for them forward. By embracing a sustainable, scalable approach to original storytelling, Skyword liberates brands from ineffective marketing practices and inspires them to create deeper connections with their audiences.

The Skyword Platform makes it easy to produce, optimize, and promote content at any scale to create meaningful, lasting relationships. Skyword also provides access to a community of thousands of freelance creatives, an editorial team, and content strategists who help move clients’ content marketing programs to new levels of creative excellence.

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3. “Social Media at Work: Enable your Employees to Be Company Advocates,” Monster http://hiring.monster.com/hr/hr-best-practices/workforce-management/employee-performance-management/social-media-at-

work-us.aspx

4. “Promoting Your Content Marketing: Time to Orchestrate the Concert of Paid Media,” CMI and PR Newswire http://www.prnewswire.com/knowledge-center/Promoting-Your-Content-Marketing-Time-to-Orchestrate-the-Concert-of-Paid-

Media.html

5. “Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activisim,” Weber Shandwick http://www.webershandwick.com/news/article/employee-activists-spark-a-new-social-movement-in-the-digital-age

6. “2015 Edelman Trustbarometer,” Edelman http://www.edelman.com/2015-edelman-trust-barometer/

7. “Why Vocal Employees Are a Company’s Best PR,” Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3044156/hit-the-ground-running/why-vocal-employees-are-a-companys-best-pr

8. “Let Go of Your Fear! Embrace Employee Advocacy!” IBM Social Business https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/socialbusiness/entry/let_go_of_your_fear_embrace_employee_advocacy?lang=en

9. “Beyond Engagement: Should Brands Get Personal with Employee Advocates,” Social Media Today

10. http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/beyond-engagement-should-brands-get-personal-employee-advocates

11. “The Ultimate Sales Guide to Crushing Your Quota,” Kitedesk http://www.kitedesk.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Ultimate-Sales-Guide-to-Crushing-Your-Quota.pdf

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