UPDATED 09:50 EDT / MAY 13 2016

NEWS

6 steps to successful employee advocacy programs

Employee advocacy may be all the rage, but many companies are unprepared to unleash their people as ambassadors for their brands.

Among the reasons: Organizations lack a coherent and inclusive strategy, they don’t have an engaging story to tell and don’t show that they value their employees. Asking disenfranchised people to advocate for an organization they don’t trust is playing with fire, according to several social media pros who have carried off successful advocacy programs.

Employee advocacy campaigns tap into the social networks of the people who work for an organization to spread news and goodwill. When successful, these campaigns can not only amplify messages but enhance credibility because the people sharing them are trusted.

But faith in organizations is low right now. The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 48 percent of rank-and-file employees say they trust the companies they work for, which is just a smidgen below the 51 percent of managers who say the same thing. Employee loyalty is so low 20 percent of the people recently surveyed by SailPoint Technologies, Inc.  said they would sell their work passwords, some for as little as $100.

But for companies that you do have a powerful story, an engaged employee population and a clear objective that benefits both employees and the business, advocacy programs can be a big opportunity.

A group of practitioners and employee advocacy experts batted around tips and techniques for advocacy programs at the AMPlify 2016 conference in Waltham, MA this week. The potential positive impact of employee goodwill was dramatized by Jason Burrows (@jasoncreation), CEO of Creation Agency Ltd. He told of one client that enlisted 50 employees to share a business news item on their social networks. The experiment generated more than 42,000 social media messages and shares, with 94 percent of them driven by employees compared to just six percent driven by the brand. That’s despite the fact that the corporate Twitter account had more followers than the 50 employees combined.

“Our customer’s staff is consistently the largest traffic driver for our campaigns,” Burrows said.

Practitioners from companies of all sizes shared the following recommendations for getting employee advocacy off the ground and scaling it across the enterprise.

Shel Holtz1. Know if advocacy will work for you. Employees won’t advocate unless they want to. If relations between management and line works in your company are strained, then asking them to advocate for you is a recipe for disaster. Recent research has shown that 70 percent of employees in a typical organization aren’t bought into the companies mission, said Shel Hotz (@shelholtz, right), principal at Holtz Communications, a social media and internal communications consultancy. “That means five out of 10 employees will say ‘Uh huh’ and two will say ‘screw you,'” he quipped. Evaluating the level of employee engagement is a crucial first step.

“If we want employees to become ambassadors, we need to start looking at the employee experience the same way we look at the customer experience,” Holtz said. “Engaged employees are the ones who go outside the scope of their job to do something special for the organization.”

2. It’s not just about the company. Even engaged employees are going to be a lot more enthusiastic about your program if they see something in it for them. Sell employee advocacy by stressing its value in building personal brands, increasing personal followers and visibility and creating career advancement opportunities, practitioners said.

“I tell [potential advocates] that they’re probably not going to work for this company for the rest of their lives, and I see the lights go on,” about the value of growing their social profiles, said Douglas Jensen (@douglasjensenma), social media manager at Dynatrace LLC.

3. Have an objective. Truth be told, the real objective of most employee advocacy programs is to promote the brand, but that’s a tough concept to get most rank-and-file employees to embrace. Have a bigger objective in mind, such as advancing the cause of a whole industry or improve health or quality of life. “If people know there’s a goal in mind, they’re more inclined to put in the time,” said Samantha Jorgensen (@samjjorgensen), social media strategist at Charles River Laboratories International, Inc.

Dynatrace wants its people to be perceived as the most knowledgeable subject matter experts in the application performance management market, Jensen said, so the marketing staff makes sure staffers have a variety of content to share about not just the company but the industry and the profession.

Digital marketing agency DragonSearch does the same thing. Only about 20 percent of the content it serves up to its advocates to share is about the company itself. “We make sure the content is tailored to the expertise the [subject matter experts] want to develop,” said Jason White (@sonray), vice president of social media and search engine optimization. The company also routinely cross-promotes its expert content across vertical markets to maximize reach.

4. Start with enthusiasts. The hardest part of building an employee advocacy program is often just getting it started. While you should never expect 100 percent participation, you can grow the population of ambassadors significantly through word-of-mouth awareness, and that means starting with your natural ambassadors.

“We started with five people from marketing and five people from sales,” Jorgensen said. “Getting people engaged early creates proof points for others.”

Added DragonSearch’s White, “Once you get one or two sales people hooked, everyone else jumps in.”

5. Make it easy. Training is essential to get people over their natural fear of missteps. Beyond that, create a mechanism to give advocates a steady diet of content that they can share easily with a few clicks. Conference sponsor GaggleAMP makes one such tool, and a search for “content sharing platforms” turns up many more.

Lack of time is one of the most common reasons cited for experts to opt out of advocacy programs. That’s why it’s important to train them to use productivity tools that make social sharing simple. “When we tell them it’s three minutes a day, it dawns on them,” said Dynatrace’s Jensen.

6. Make it a game. Experts are nearly unanimous that you should never make social media participation part of people’s job descriptions or make advocacy a pay-for-play proposition, but there’s nothing wrong with spicing the pot with some low-cost incentives. The friendly competition created by gamification can be a powerful motivator.

Charles River Labs launched an internal contest in January which encourages employees to upload photos and stories to Facebook or Instagram with a designated hash tag. The best story is selected by a small panel of judges each month, with the winner getting a $200 gift certificate. The purpose of the contest is to make sharing and storytelling reflexive. Dragon Search’s White noted, “It’s amazing what people will do for a $100 Kindle.”

In sum…

Holtz offered three keys to building employee engagement that creates natural ambassadors:

  1. Have a strategic narrative that tells all employees where they fit in the organization. Tell the company story clearly to everyone.
  2. Align the values of the company with the behavior of the executives. You should be able to tell stories and show examples of how leaders exemplify the values of the organization. Promoting people who break the rules sends the wrong message.
  3. Give employees a voice and listen. People who aren’t heard will never be engaged.
Photos by Paul Gillin

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