Employees can be a brand’s biggest advocates, as they can become brand emissaries for your company. Leaders are increasingly placing employee engagement at the head of the fight for greater authenticity in the workplace, increased employee satisfaction, and ultimately, greater retention and improved customer services. Some of your employees might hold more online reach and influence than your own CEO – perhaps even more than your own brand. Companies now count on an Employee Advocacy strategy which focuses on employees as the trusted channel for passing information to target audiences.
Employee Advocacy is the promotion of an organisation by its staff members; it is the exposure that employees generate for your brand using their own online assets. Reach and influence are two metrics that play a major role in Employee Advocacy. Your employees might already have a presence on other social networks you have not explored yet, or may be influential with what they do outside of social networks; if your employees do not feel that your content is relevant to them or their network, the chance of a share will be very, very small. Do not neglect training and support!
For your employees to share your content and company benefits from Employee Advocacy there is a need of the following criteria that:
• It supports your brand.
• Brand is share-worthy.
• It has value to them.
• Employee is an expert on your product or service, and a credible spokesperson for your company.
• Represents the best interests of the company both internally and externally.
• Boosts Social Media Presence, rising awareness for your brand.
• Recommends a company’s products or services to a friend or family member.
• Drives Sales.
In general, this requires an on-going effort on the part of the organisation; once they are aligned with your brand and have the proper guidance, training, and tools they will willingly share company news and content on social media, increasing your reach and driving awareness.
An Employee Advocacy plan will only work if your company has 1) a transparent culture on trust and freedom. 2) Advocacy cannot be forced, nor can it be bought Trust and Freedom. Trust encourages genuine confidence in your employees and freedom makes you recognise that you cannot force them to do so. 3)
Have clear marketing objectives and brand KPIs. Your Employee Advocacy objectives feed directly into your existing objectives. 4) Have clear guidelines. Make the guidelines easy to understand, easy to follow. You need guidelines that enable Advocacy instead of restricting it: guidelines on what to share, how to share, ideas on where to share content, and an outline of the incentives that employees can benefit from.
A tool dedicated to Employee Advocacy makes it a lot easier for you to view your performance, and for your employees to share your content. Some of these tools can help with content distribution and sharing, enabling you to share content with your employees and enabling them to share it with their own networks.
An ideal Employee Advocacy tool merges content sharing, publishing, monitoring, and analytics all in one platform rewarding employees rather than helping them share content.
While social media is often the main medium for Employee Advocacy, there is a constantly need to measure online assets that include: email, chat, forums, discussion boards and more. You need to make sure you are achieving the right result and have a return on investment in and that the benefits of an organisation’s investment in an Employee Advocacy program is really outweighing the cost of the program.
Start this program by setting goals and KPIs, i.e. what you want to achieve, and how you will measure your achievements. These KPIs will tell you whether you’re achieving your goals, and how well you’re doing so
There appears to be significant focus on publishing and managing content, generally via content management systems. The use of collaborative software in the work space creates a collaborative working environment (CWE) that aims to place the computer straight in the middle of communications among managers, technicians, and anyone else who interacts in groups, revolutionising the way they work.
How to measure Employee Advocacy? It can easily get out of control if you let it run without measuring it. Track how it is performing, as that is the only way you can tell whether it is working or not. Then, share the results with your employees. Here are a few examples of metrics you can track, to get you started:
• Traffic driven – Track the people who lick to your site.
• Sales and ROI.
• Employee conversion rate, meaning someone out there is willing to put their trust in your brand.
• Employee activity (who are the most active, how often are they engaging?).
• Employee influence.
• Impact of advocacy (affect your online channels, follower, fan growth, etc.)
• Reach.
• Demographics change.
• Amount and kind of post engagement your content receives. (Likes, shares, or re-tweets, negative reaction from the audience).
• Track the number of times your brand, product, service, or any other word related to you brand was referred to on conversation (regular intervals as monthly, daily, or weekly).
Digital asset management systems manage things such as documents. Here are some of the features to look out for:
• Make sure there is always content available for your employees to share.
• The tool needs to be able to integrate with your employees’ social profiles.
• Rewards, perks and recognition.
• Performance management.
• Collaboration with other advocates.
• Social monitoring.
• Advocacy monitoring (to easily identify the top advocates).
• Analytics (measuring engagement and performance).