Employee advocacyA comprehensive guide about all that you need

to know about “Employee Advocacy”

Contents

What is “Employee advocacy” 3

Benefits of Employee advocacy 5

How to measure it 6

Pros and Cons of Employee advocacy 7

Best practices to adopt 8

3

Employee Advocacy

describes the activities

of brands empowering

employees to support

the goals of the brand,

through employee-

owned social media.

Chris Boudreaux

The best of marketers understand that

direct impact of word of mouth

marketing has more power than any

other advertising technique. This is

called as Advocacy, where the

consumers speak and spread the

word about their experience with a

brand and help it grow.

Today most brands are present on

social media networks such as

facebook, twitter, linkedin, and

pinterest, but face the big challenge

of not being able to extend their

organic brand reach,

4

Socially engaged

companies are 57%

more likely to get

increased sales leads

Combining internal advocacy

with social media generates another

powerful concept of Employee

Advocacy, where instead of the

consumers, the internal employees

talk about their company on social

media.

The employees of a company

are the best people who know

about the brand and the company

culture.

Employee advocacy can be

seen as the impact on the brand

that an employee can generate by

sharing useful information with his

or her own acquired audience on

social media.

Encouraging employees to be

brand advocates is being adopted

by various companies because

referrals are one of the best lead

sources, and non-sales employees

are a huge source of untapped

opportunity.

52% of consumers trust

an “average” employee

more than the CEO.

- 2014 Edelman trust barometer

5

Rise of the social employee

It is better for brands to be a part

of million conversations via their

employees than having a one-way

conversation with their customers.

Since the brand is promoted by

those people who actually want it

to be promoted, it creates a sense

of trust and a positive impressions

in the mind of consumers.

Employee advocacy can help your

company generate new untapped

leads, increase event attendance,

holiday promotions, product

launches.

Not just that, it can also help you

attract & recruit new age

employees. Millennials are

increasingly becoming choosy

about where they want to work. A

socially engaged company has a

better chance of attracting them

than other competitors.

In general, empowerment fosters a positive

environment. Employees who see colleagues

demonstrate success will follow and emulate those

behaviors. This drives momentum for program

adoption, resulting in value for the company’s brand

and for the employees own personal brand. Finally,

collaboration and transparency helps flatten the

organization and eliminate the outdated hierarchy

which no longer functions effectively in most modern

organizations.

Benefits of employee advocacy

Susan Emerick,

Founder,

Brands Rising

6

Measuring employee advocacy

Employee advocacy can add value to an organization only if it is measured

in regular intervals against a pre-determined set of metrics.

Metrics could vary from say employee participation to start with. It could be

set to check how many employees voluntarily wish to participate.

Website traffic could also be a metric to understand the increase in number

of clicks after the employee interaction has started.

Depending on the campaign, the

ultimate metric that needs to be

measured is increase in bottom line

(Sales) or number of responses for a

position (Hiring) or increase in

participation of attendees for an event

(Marketing).

Find out the number of employees

participating in the program, number of

times content is shared by employees

and number of clicks per share. Now

you can calculate the total cost of

acquiring all those clicks by paid

channels. This should be 30-40 times

more expensive than implementing

employee advocacy platform.

7

Pros and cons of employee advocacy

- Increase in interactions between the companies employees

and their customers

- Helps social employees increase their social clout and influence

- Businesses save money on paid campaigns. The only money that is

spent is in implementing an employee advocacy platform, which in

most cases is a lot cheaper than implementing paid campaigns that

will help you get the same reach.

- Employees may struggle with sharing the right content on the

right social media channel

- Becomes a time consuming process if employees need to spend

time in finding and uploading content

- Employees who frequently share their company information on

social media websites might frustrate their friends, family

members or colleagues.

- When employees share their companies’ content with their own

voice on social media accounts, they might jeopardize the

company privacy policies

Tip – Opt for an employee advocacy platform that will help you address the issues that come with an advocacy program

8

Best practices to adopt

Keep it optional to

promote the company. It

might be tempting to

make it mandatory, but

do resist. Find out which

departments (Marketing

/ HR / Sales) need it the

most.

Use tools like test groups and surveys to gauge if employees are ready to

share company related content.

Structure your advocacy program to reward

participation. Your employee advocacy

program should help your employees

strengthen their personal brands better on

social media.

Ensure that top management supports the

employee advocacy programs. The senior

executives needs to be the programs’ biggest

proponent.

Ensure that you have the right tools and solutions in your organization for

implementing your employee advocacy program.

9

-James Sinegal

Email Contact@contentivo.com | Blog blog.contentivo.com

“When employees are happy, they are your very best ambassadors.”