Evangelizing with Employee A-D-V-O-C-A-T-E-S
By turning employees into trusted brand ambassadors, companies bring their strongest asset and their most vocal internal advocates in direct contact with their customer base.
—Ekaterina Walter, best-selling author
Much like the support given to ambassadors, brands are actively empowering employees to support their goals through social media. They are the most trusted and connected source to target audiences at a time when the growing demand for social media is stretching internal resources to their limits. And by tapping into the personal accounts of these employees, the reach of messaging can be greatly amplified.
In using these employees to scale their social-media efforts, companies are formalizing programs built around a social-media culture and tools for content sharing. They range from new hire onboarding exercises to comprehensive certificated programs. The rapid adoption of these programs is in part due to the growing popularity of software platforms that help identify, monitor, and mobilize these advocates.
Why Employee Advocacy Is So Critical
Companies are now seeing plenty of evidence on bottom line results from having employees champion their brands. A study by Northwestern University, for example, found a direct correlation between sales and the total number of people identified as brand advocates.1 Supporting this finding, an IBM study demonstrated that traffic generated by their employee advocates converted seven times more frequently than that generated by other IBM sources.2
In effect, social media has created an expectation for trustworthy communications. Customers not only expect authentic and transparent communications, but they also know they can get this attention directly from front-line employees that they often see as peers. After all, most of us will trust experiences shared by family, friends, and colleagues over claims from a brand’s logo or statements made by the CEO. And with employees knowing the most about a company, what better way to bridge brands with their customers than through employees. Consider the following nine reasons why employees serve as A-D-V-O-C-A-T-E-S.
Amplification of Personal Accounts
Brands and small businesses recognize how their companies can reap the benefits of each employee’s sphere of social influence. By tapping into an employee’s personal Twitter and Facebook accounts, for example, brands can often amplify their message an order of magnitude beyond what the brand can muster on its own. Consider the following typical case. A brand supported by 100 employees may be able to attract and sustain a fan community of 2,500 followers. But the 100 employees can potentially reach 25,000 followers if you consider the following:
• An estimated 70 percent of online American adults are on Facebook.
• An estimated 20 percent are on Twitter.
• The average Facebook user has over 300 friends.
• The average Twitter user has over 200 followers.
Delivery of Relevant Brand Experiences
Once acclimated to their role as advocate, employees are in a unique position to deliver relevant brand experiences. Starting with content, some programs supply employees with templates, photos, and graphics for brand correspondence. By mixing and matching the content elements for the employee’s personal channels, the customer or prospect now sees something as more intimate and relevant to their channel experience. An Instagram shot of a brand experience from an employee’s own account cannot only be amended with personal commentary, ; audiences will see the content as vetted by one of their own.
While helping NSU launch its social-media strategy for recruiting college-bound juniors and seniors in high school, I watched a clever dialogue take place between another university’s employee and a prospect expressing her dismay over a bad experience. The employee elected to take a humorous route in a personal conversation that poked fun of their pending breakup. Not only did the series of tweets satisfy the prospect, but it also showed the university’s light-hearted side. Consequently, the follow-up tweets suggested the prospect was back on board.
Oftentimes, this brand experience better fits the customer’s frame of mind when it comes from an employee whose department is better suited to addressing customer issues. Imagine a legal representative whose profile on LinkedIn gave the customer a direct line connect—even off hours—in a conversation between two mothers. The legal representative would not have to pitch the brand experience. Their actions and demeanor would undoubtedly have a greater impact on lifetime customer value than the best of posted FAQ responses.
Voices for Real-Time Problem Solving
By launching an employee advocacy program, brands can engage their most vocal assets into direct contact with their customers at a time when target audiences are expecting near real-time responses. Responding to tweets in an hour has now become the norm. And just as front-line employees have become a brand’s voice in the store, online employees have also become the expected point guards when customers reach out to them through their social-media channels.
While directing a team of customer service and sales professionals at BFGoodrich Aerospace, I found our customers to prefer proposals coming from customer service personnel troubleshooting their problems day after day. To them, these folks were the ones bailing them out of airplanes on the ground. The sales personnel, on the other hand, were seen by some as glad handers with little incentive to work through routine issues since most of them covered multiple accounts and rarely had an opportunity to engage outside of selling services.
Oversight of Ambassadors
A number of brands operate their brand ambassador programs described in Chapter 4 9 separate from employee advocacy programs. Mack Collier, however, offers a convincing argument for employees to spearhead brand advisory panels that work closely with customer advisory panels. An employee advocate, or brand liaison in this case, would ensure that feedback on brand performance and other insights are brought to the attention of brand managers.
By using employee advocates to oversee these roles, a brand is capitalizing on the perceived responsiveness of the advocate as well as their deeper insights into relevant issues. Furthermore, the presence of employees on panels ensures that the voice of the brand is heard and understood by brand management.
Content Creation
Depending on the conditions laid out in a company’s social-media guidelines, many brands are permitting employee advocates to create their own content. Not only does this provide content closer to home for the customer, but it also permits a voice from someone they trust. Universities have stepped up to this with blogs hosted by faculty members in effect serving as advocates. Students, in this case, get a look at the real professor rather than hearing from the voice of admissions or enrollment who are further removed from the real classroom experience.
Employee created content is likely to be perceived as more relevant especially when crafted after FAQs addressed to their department. And by knowing that the company permitted content released by employees, the customer is likely to credit the piece as being more authentic and transparent.
Activism
Many employee advocates go out of their way to make their engagement visible and defend their brand when criticized. Known in some circles as proactivists, this special class of advocates enthusiastically let others know they stand behind their employer. A study by Weber Shandwick, in partnership with KRC Research, showed that activists typically represent over 20 percent of a workforce and are gaining in numbers and strength. One key to fueling their passion is to make brand storytelling easy to grasp. This will ensure that “employees are well informed and have something meaningful to say about their employers.”3
Trusted Communication
Where a brand’s vocal assets become especially powerful is when employees evangelize in their own natural habitat. As social-media dependency pressures us all to sound like real people, an expectation has developed not only in conversation tone but in content as well. Consumers now expect brands to be authentic and transparent in all of their communications. This means that their primary line of contact cannot be impersonated by legal vetted correspondence, CEOs with one-way messages, or those paid to pitch. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, in fact, discovered that people are far more likely to trust a company’s employees than its CEO especially on matters of engagement and integrity.4
Engagement
Once employee advocacy programs gain momentum among enthusiastic employees, a key challenge is to sustain their engagement. Successful brands often stimulate engagement by getting their employees involved in small campaigns. Employees, for example, could be rewarded for their involvement in hashtag-oriented campaigns where they share content on something theme specific.
As a smaller outreach, these opportunities allow for early customer feedback from advocates on how well the content is received. The exchange of general program thoughts and campaign questions can then build early confidence before expanding into broader initiatives like contests. In effect, each outreach opportunity provides a reason for leadership and advocates to stay engaged.
Research shows that advocates, like most employees, progress in their emotional journey from a fear of saying the wrong thing to feeling like they make a difference. Once this attitude is reached, solid leadership, content strategies, and governance can help build an outright desire in the employee to contribute to the brand’s success.5
Scaling of Brand Relationships
By having employees act on a brand’s behalf, companies can better scale their social-media marketing efforts. The sheer volume of customer correspondence on social media, coupled with the speed with which customers expect responses, makes the job of social-media marketing a daunting task. But by piloting employee advocacy programs, brands can judge what aspects of the program really payoff.
As content amplified through employee personal accounts starts to reveal tangible results, more advocates could be recruited from the existing staff of employees. This takes the burden off HR to hire social-media specialists while allowing valuable skill building for those seeking advanced career opportunities.
How to Lead an Employee Advocacy Program
Although employee advocacy programs vary in size and complexity, successful programs are normally characterized as activated from top leadership, driven by a social-media culture, and guided by well-documented objectives, policies, and performance metrics. And like most enterprisewide team initiatives, success requires champions and a pilot program aimed at early adopters.
Training and governance has to extend beyond the mechanics of simply using advocacy platforms for content distribution to ways for employees to extend the brand relationship and its overall story. And by measuring which people are the most active and successful sharers of content, brands can reward employee engagement while stimulating internal competition. In general, brands need to create a program conducive to A-D-V-O-C-A-T-E-S as shown.
Audits of Advocate Potential
Companies that adopt formal advocacy programs invariably get HR in the loop. Especially when equipped with Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and GlassDoor ratings, a brand can gauge the likelihood of a successful advocacy program by first taking the pulse of its employee satisfaction and loyalty. Human resources can assist by identifying the traits and availability of those predisposed to advocacy programs. Starting with the hiring of individuals, candidates are now being screened for their Klout scores and social-media acumen as an indication of their fit in advocacy programs.
Employee advocate programs like VoiceStorm and Zuberance can also help brands identify employees who are its best advocates. This identification is often based on social chatter that places employees in groups like detractors, advocates, and passives.
Susan Emerick, an employee advocacy expert, identified the following common characteristics to audit when seeking the best suited candidates as early adopters of a pilot advocacy programs.6
• Those whose technical or business topic expertise is strongly reflected by the brand’s business priorities.
• Those comfortable with publishing, commenting, and collaborating in social-media environments.
• Those finding enjoyment in creating online relationships and enhancing their online professional networks.
• Those experienced in leveraging internal listening capabilities to build social graphs.
• Those with a track record of commitment to and evolving participation in achieving business objectives.
Documented Social-Media Policy
For employees to gain the confidence of a sustaining advocacy programs, brands must champion employee-friendly social-media policies so that employees know what they can and cannot do. These guidelines serve to inform employees about the full extent of their social-media outreach. In cases where employees are permitted to create content for the brand, the guidelines should ensure that any content adequately reflects the brand without unnecessarily restricting the author’s voice or discouraging their participation.
A great example to consider is the guidelines used by a major brand. These guidelines were crowdsourced by their own employees7:
• know the business conduct guidelines;
• you are personally responsible for what you publish;
• identify yourself by name and role;
• disclaim if it’s your personal opinion;
• respect copyrights;
• don’t misuse the logo;
• don’t disclose proprietary information;
• don’t cite clients and partners without permission;
• respect your audience;
• be aware of your association with the company;
• respect others’ opinions; and
• add value.
Value Understanding
A key challenge of many employee advocacy programs is letting participating employees understand the program benefits. Best practice companies like Dell, Zappos, and IBM know that this goes beyond their role in story dissemination. Employees need to know how programs benefit them personally.
Advocacy programs boost the marketability of employees by adding to their personal branding and thought leadership. Those companies that have social-media certificate programs or actively encourage participation through their corporate networking accounts validate the skills of those with aspiring career plans. And since numerous empirical studies show a strong positive relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction,8 those appreciative of the benefits will likely project this attitude in their care of the customer.
Onboarding
Onboarding, or organizational socialization, plays a key role in preparing employees for advocacy programs. Among the key objectives established by many brands in the training of new hires and those new to advocacy is an in-depth orientation to the core values it espouses and the culture they want to nurture.
Zappos does this very well. They not only cultivate these values in their employee advocates, but they also surround them in an atmosphere where employees enjoy the work while feeling recognized and rewarded for their direct engagement with customers. Employees are given full autonomy to converse and exchange content freely on behalf of the brand to all of their prospects and customers. By screening hiring candidates based on perceived shared values, Zappos believes the employees will act responsibly in their use of social media.
Coaches
Especially in the early stages of advocate maturation, employees must know their backs are covered. This starts with having coaches nearby who guide them through thorny issues and baby steps. This not only helps the advocate overcome initial fear, the paired relationship provides helpful feedback to the coaching staff on recurring issues. A study by IBM, for example, found that success when going it alone was a paltry 9 percent. This compares to a 75 percent success rate when the employee advocate is paired with a coach.9
Like any successful initiative, employee advocacy programs need metrics defined upfront to gauge performance over time. This include amplification metrics like impressions, traffic, or followers; conversion metrics like leads generated, registration completions, and sign-ups; or marketing metrics like share of voice or sales. Important to employees is to know they are on track. And brands need to know what to tweak.
Tools and Platforms
Interviews with employees on what is critical to an advocacy program often points to the following success factors: content is located in one place where sharing can be done across multiple channels. This requires a platform that administers content for them while permitting bidirectional content sharing.
To facilitate the ongoing mobilization of employee advocate programs, software platforms are arriving in droves. Most like GaggleAMP, Triberr, and EveryoneSocial, Addvocate, DynamicSignal, SocialChorus, Expion, and PeopleLinx are designing their platforms to automate and simplify the process of content duration. In some cases, SEO value is often improved as employees contribute their own links through platform-advised anchor texting.
These platforms have dashboards for content research, progress reports, and report cards. For example, brands now have visibility into what content is shared, and by whom, as well as the clicks, engagement, and conversion information associated with each member of the advocacy program. And by sharing their leader boards, advocates are given an opportunity to compete and earn rewards.
Exciting and Encouraging Atmosphere
Early momentum in advocacy pilot projects can inject excitement in the atmosphere that is crucial to triggering the engagement process. As advocates read and share more content over time, for example, they become more engaged with the brand. In turn, this often increases the overall social activity of employees. The more social the employee, the higher the company ranks as a great place to work. Gallup, for example, demonstrated that companies with high employee engagement levels have nearly four times the earnings per share of their industry peers.10 Similarly, a study by Fortune, the Dachis Group, and Convince & Convert found, that 40 of the top companies to work for were also among the top companies ranked by a social-media business index.11
Much of this could be attributed to an atmosphere of excitement where employees feel rewarded for their engagement. In the case of Zappos, they are banking on employees discussing online how much they enjoy their work.12 In turn, they believe this will foster a tighter bond with their prospects and customers.
Social-Media Culture
As best stated by social-media expert Jay Baer, advocacy is born from culture and not from technology or marketing. Brands that create a culture encouraging social-media usage often find themselves in the enviable position of breeding true advocates. Add to this mindset the success of some more than others to jump-start high-performance teams, and you have an excellent remedy for success.
Some ways to reinforce this culture is through the reward systems and tools used to collaborate. Platforms that bring the internal communities together in their content delivery and conversation exchange represent an endorsement by senior leadership for employees to actively engage in social media (Figure 5.1). And when rewards are given in line with their engagement, employees will feel even more encouraged to embrace the culture.
Figure 5.1 Summary Model of Evangelizing Employee Advocates
Notes
1. Chris Boudreaux and Susan F. Emerick. Most Powerful Brand on Earth: How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2013.
2. “Getting Started with an Employee Advocacy Program (Slide 10)” Social Media Today by Susan Emerick (http://slidesha.re/1pMO7Xe).
3. Kate Bullinger, Co-Lead, Global Employee Engagement & Change Management Weber Shandwick (http://bit.ly/1p4SwVx).
4. 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer Executive Summary (http://bit.ly/1uuSaNj).
5. Employee-Brand Relationship Model (http://bit.ly/1sdAfuF).
6. “Getting Started with an Employee Advocacy Program (Slide 14)” Social Media Today by Susan Emerick (http://slidesha.re/1pMO7Xe).
7. “7 Ingredients for Employee Social Advocacy” (Slide 10) by Jay Baer (http://slidesha.re/1tJ8NqT).
8. “Employee Satisfaction & Customer Satisfaction: Is There a Relationship?” by Caterina Bulgarella (http://bit.ly/1sbG5gf).
9. “7 Ingredients for Employee Social Advocacy” (Slide 26) by Jay Baer (http://slidesha.re/1tJ8NqT).
10. “Want to Find Brand Ambassadors? Start With Your Employees” by Forbes’ contribution from Ekaterina Walter (http://onforb.es/Yv0Ys3).
11. “Comparison of 100 Top Companies on Social Business and Corporate Culture” by Convince & Convert’s Jay Baer (http://bit.ly/1qCDgVk).
12. “Want to Find Brand Ambassadors? Start with Your Employees” by Forbes’ contribution from Ekaterina Walter (http://onforb.es/Yv0Ys3).