Social Business Archives

Going #Rogue: Losing Control of Your Social Media

Social media plays an important role in global public relations strategies. As quickly as social media can build a global brand, it can tear one down at the hands of malicious insiders or hackers. Recently we have seen an increase in the proliferation of “rogue” social accounts across the social sphere. Attacks like these are not new. In 2013, hackers accessed both the Associated Press’ and FIFA World Cup’s Twitter accounts. A single tweet from the APTwitter handle resulted in a $136.5 billion drop in the S&P 500 index’s value in minutes. A year later Burger King’s Twitter account was made to look like McDonald’s while Jeep’s account was hacked noting that the company was sold to Cadillac.

Now, well known agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Park Service (NPS) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have all fallen victim to “rouge” takeovers. Rand Research suggests that stolen Twitter accounts are now worth more than stolen credit cards. Rogue accounts attract followers by the thousands, which should be a warning signal for brands across the globe. Imagine losing control of your company’s online messaging or branding.

Crisis communication is evolving and becoming incredibly sophisticated. This session focuses on the variables involved in a new era of crisis planning and risk communication. Critical preparedness is important for the public and media when public perception becomes reality as a result of such a breach.

I was honored to present at PRSA 2017 International Conference in Boston, where I was joined by my esteemed academic collegues @GinaLuttrell and @drjamiward

In our session we shared:

How companies can be proactive and vigilant when protecting their brand in an effort to mitigate ramifications from rogue sites. Discuss the ramifications associated with the public’s blind trust in anonymous communication.
The importance of investing in and equipping the workforce with training. How to train organizational leaders to react to a crisis including appropriate responses to the public and within social media. Plus, we examined the role that PR practitioners play in damage control should a “rogue” or “alt” channel become a reality for your organization.
Participants learned about the future of communication stemming from hackers or acts of civil disobedience.
We rounded out the session with outlining the difference between social media guidelines and policies, and how to begin building the framework for social media policies. Plus, writing social media policies and developing education and compliance training on cybersecurity will help to address vulnerabilities.

Are You Prepared?
Have You Prepared Your Employees?
Registered PRSA members can access our presentation here If you’re interested in learning more about equipping your team, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Susan Emerick, Founder, Brands Rising

Regina Luttrell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Syracuse University, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

Jamie Ward, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Eastern Michigan University

The Smart Sceptic’s Guide to Social Media in Organisations

Colleagues, family and friends know I love to mentor, teach and guide, especially aspiring women leaders. Said another way, I love to encourage others to find and spark their “inner expert”. Helping them share their knowledge and thought leadership. I did this professionally for so many at IBM through the employee advocacy program I created called the IBM Select Social Eminence program, affording me the amazing opportunity to work with social business leaders across the globe. Also, I was lucky enough to have been inspired by Gini Rometty, CEO IBM. An amazing leader and the very first female CEO of the 100+ year old company, where I spent 18 of years of my career. Ginni taught me that ….

“In a social enterprise, your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart on others” ~ Ginni Rometty, CEO IBM

You can read more about this in this post about the 10 Benefits of Social Business Collaboration

Meet Yekemi Otaru

Yekemi Otaru, Author of The Smart Sceptic's Guide to Social Media in Organisations — Yekemi Otaru, Author of The Smart Sceptic’s Guide to Social Media in Organisations

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to become a protege to Yekemi Otaru several years back when she graciously reached out to me while researching and writing her masters thesis. Interested in tapping my expertise leading social business initiatives for IBM, a global enterprise with over 430,000 employees. The title of her thesis: Employee participation – the influence of enterprise learning during evolutionary change: a mixed method study into social media implementation (Distinction, 80%).

Right in my wheel house!

I’m proud to say that Yekemi has completed her Master of Business Administration (MBA, Distinction) Henley Business School and earned a distinction in Change management, Marketing in high tech industry.

Well it doesn’t stop there! Yekemi, like me is always reaching higher. This month she did just that by becoming a published Author! The title of her first book is: The Smart Sceptic’s Guide to Social Media in Organisations

If you are considering employee advocacy for your organisation but you are not sure how to sustain the participation of your employees on social media, Yekemi’s book offers a three-step framework developed through research and real life examples.

Yekemi’s book is an interesting compliment to my book called The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. Both works help business leaders navigate with proven methods how to equip a social workforce. Further, customers trust expert social employees more than any other source.

While, Yekemi and I have never met in person (that would be a luxury I hope will happen some day!), we’ve collaborated by phone and across various social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter mainly) and across the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, This is the future of work!

Like me, Yekemi is a working Mother and business leader. She lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland where she and her husband are raising their two beautiful children and striving for balance daily to make it all work in pursuit of her passions. She has worked in engineering and marketing roles at multinational companies such as Schlumberger and General Electric. Now an experienced strategy and marketing professional, Yekemi brings her unique reasoning and writing to tackle the challenge of social media, branding and the digital space in more conservative sectors such as oil and gas, medical, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing.

Connect with Yekemi – she blogs at thetaskmistress.me follow her on Twitter @Mrstaskmistress and buy a copy of her book on Amazon UK

Employee Advocacy: Program engagement doesn’t imply program success – part 2

As a follow up installment to my last post titled: Employee Advocacy: Program engagement doesn’t imply program success, I hope this follow up installment provides you considerations that will help you better understand why starting from the frame of reference of employees is critical.

Considering the vantage point of the employee, why is this so important?

In order to truly encourage employees to engage in an employee advocacy program, you must start with defining and demonstrating how actively engaging in the program will help them increase their visibility amongst customers, influential decision makers, colleagues and industry influencers. Yes, that’s right, I also said demonstrate. That means you’ll need to develop case studies / real examples for employees to reference to help them get the picture.
Start by designing education and support materials around common questions and objections employees have. If not answered from a benefit or position of value, employees will not adopt.
When you design the program with these objections/questions in mind you’ll learn more about what employees are experiencing and you’ll be able to so when they’re raised we have a module/guide to address them in a playbook. This playbook becomes a helpful reference as you extend the number of program managers and participants. You can evolve it over time. Consider deploying a learning hub with a forum component that allows you to gather feedback and field questions. If employees are heard and secure support when they ask for help, they’ll increase their engagement.
Be sure to educate them so they understand how engagement will help them work more effectively, efficiently and last but not least – – how they’ll get recognized for their efforts. It truly is a critical foundation that many brands miss when designing employee advocacy or social selling programs, often thinking that gamification or leader boards are all it takes to drive engagement. While these may help, I’ve learned that the most important and highly regarded form of recognition employees seek is visibility, you can read more about that in this post: What’s the #1 incentive employees seek from an Employee Advocacy program?

So what are the most common questions employees may have? Here’s a few examples, that’ll help you get started:

Why is engagement on social (for business/professional) something worth my time?
Why me? Isn’t this kind of engagement for an intern who knows how to engage on social?
Why should I focus my time on this when I have all these other pressing demands in my job role?

Which then leads into several other questions such as:

How do you define “engagement”?
What is expected of me?
How will I be measured? Compensated?
What are the guidelines?
What training is provided?
Will I be assessed for this?
Is this mandatory?

The key here is to define the value proposition from the vantage point of the employee who will in the end be the lynchpin of the programs adoption and engagement success. The answers must be defined as benefit statements for the adoption and engagement … such as the benefits of:

How sharing and receiving knowledge helps them access to new ways of thinking, access to answers for challenges they’re grappling with and learning from someone who’s already figured it out
The benefits of being positioned as a thought leader, networking and relationship development, and how they’ll tap into the intellect of influential prominent thought leaders that are paving the way

The program foundation must include guidance for employees, a playbook that anyone in your company can tap for engagement guidance, it includes such topics as:

Policies
Procedures
Access to FAQs and directions for access to “go to contacts” for further help
Brand engagement guidelines
Safety and Security
Disclosure
Basic training portfolio

Consider tying adoption and engagement to the basic competencies for staff development and assessment. For example:

Certification of completion is tied to learning/training objectives for all employees and is tied to skills development requirements, qualifications and assessment criteria used by HR and Management in the review, talent advancement and acquisition system.
Focus on adoption and engagement for key segments of your employee population that will help achieve the highest priority business goals first, then expand from there.

It’s essential to have a core team that will actively manage the program and provide support to employees as they advance along the journey. If you need further guidance, reference the second chapter of my book: The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, “Help you people do well” which explains how to establish a program framework which provides the foundation for your people to create and nurture relationships that drive engagement and create business value. Specifically, you’ll better understand how to plan the roles and skills needed, then attract, onboard, support, and measure the people whom you empower in social media.

Employee Advocacy: Program engagement doesn’t imply program success – part 1

I’m asked repeatedly, “What’s the secret to driving employee engagement for employee advocacy programs?”

The reality is, there is no secret recipe. In this post I’ll share a few thoughts which I hope aide you in evaluating the design of your Employee Advocacy program and help you make the necessary adjustments to drive more employee engagement.

To be sure we’re on the same page, let’s start with what I mean by “Engagement”. My starting premise is that the employee has already agreed to:

Participate in the employee advocacy program
Has been through the pre-requisite on-boarding, training and certification steps required to be officially granted program participant status. This means, they’ve been fully trained and equipped to engage across the social web, they understand the companies guidelines, policies, governance model.
They know their role and how their engagement aligns to helping the company achieve specific goals.

If you need further guidance, reference the second chapter of my book: The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, “Help you people do well” which explains how to establish a program framework which provides the foundation for your people to create and nurture relationships that drive engagement and create business value. Specifically, you’ll better understand how to plan the roles and skills needed, then attract, onboard, support, and measure the people whom you empower in social media.

Program engagement doesn’t imply program success.

Employee engagement in the program is a means to an end. Constant, high engagement is a condition for a successful Employee Advocacy program, but it’s not enough.

Unfortunately, program engagement rates are sometimes considered as the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for the program’s success. As a result, program managers are tempted to adopt tactics that will artificially boost engagement in the program. Stop right there! Increasing the amount of activity will not impact achievement of program’s goals such as driving an increase in lead generation or increased prominence and ability to influence to drive consideration, preference and choice of your brand’s offering.

To address this, make sure that you are clear on how your program defines program “success” standards:

Align the Employee Advocacy program’s goals with business objectives
Define the Employee Advocacy program’s success in terms of business impact (sales, conversion rates, cost savings)
Establish meaningful business KPIs for program’s success, which are trackable and quantifiable
Link performance assessment of Employee Advocacy program managers to achievement of program’s goals (aligned with business objectives), not to program engagement KPIs

The basis of the word “engagement” means commitment. Approach engagement and adoption from the value to the employee in service of customers and your business will benefit.

Remembering Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today

I had the good fortune to meet Robin several years ago when I began serving on the Social Media Today (SMT) Advisory Board to help her advance engagement with Social Business Leaders and extend the Social Shake Up event programing to feature such leaders. It’s hard to believe what she was able to accomplish in such a short number of years. Always on the vanguard of what’s new and emerging in the industry that was coming of age. Robin was not only brilliant; she was fun and incredibly interesting. She was sincerely interested in knowing you, as a colleague as well as a friend.

She loved her boys and was so proud of their accomplishments. She joyfully shared updates on their progress as any doting mother would. She was open about the reality of building a business while balancing the demands of being a Wife and Mother. She had a special knack for helping aspiring women. I was a beneficiary of her generosity, for which I’m forever grateful. She was the quintessential Master of Ceremonies, bringing business leaders together from all over the world to advance the Social Media industry through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

No one could host an event and make it fun like Robin. She would light up a room with her energy and elegance. She knew how to prepare the “run of show”, she owned the stage with her glamorous style. So many times she’d break into dancing to her favorite tunes in between event segments. She embraced good times and welcomed all to join in … and we did. She made you feel special for being a part of what she was building. Always giving with her time and intellect, she was a connector from the heart.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 7.01.42 PM — Robin Fray Carey visits IBM Design Lab in New York

She shared the stage with so many. Not just the event stage, the editorial stage. She wrote incredible pieces highlighting bleeding edge work from brand leaders who were in the trenches making it happen. She wrote this post featuring the work of my IBM team, showcasing how we were using Agile practices to transform marketing as well as featuring the foundational work of the IBM Select program that I championed.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 10.34.46 PM — Employee Advocacy Summit 2014 Left to Right: Jeanne Murray, Constantin Basturea, Tammy Wagner, DeShelia Span, Denise Holt, Liz Bullock Brown, Sabrina Stoffregen, Michael Brito, Susan Emerick, Michael Ambassador Bruny, Chris Boudreaux and Robin Fray Carey

I’m especially grateful for all that she did for my co-author Chris Boudreaux and I. From hosting a book-signing event for our book launch in 2013 to allowing us to share the W Hotel venue to launch the Employee Advocacy Summit in 2014 as a half day pre-opener to the Social Shake Up.

The most moving post she wrote was this one about our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. While I was moved by the accolades she included and the hard hitting facts on the integrity of our content … that wasn’t what moved me most. It was the date that it was published and how I came upon reading it that really moved me. You see, Robin had a sixth sense. She knew that my mother was dying and I was her primary care giver. We talked a lot about our Mothers over the years and the kinds of role models they were to us and how we hoped our children would reflect on our legacy some day. So it was … the morning my Mom passed, as I was walking out of her room, a notification appeared on my phone of a new SMT post. When I opened it, this was the post she wrote. It was postmarked the same date my Mom left this world, January 27, 2014. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of Divine Intervention that my Mom was proud of me, while at the same time, so was Robin Fray Carey.

Thank you Robin and the SMT Family. We’ve created a movement, together.

The New CMO: How One of the Most Influential C-Suite Roles is Changing [Webinar on Demand]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of discussing the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) with Sabrina Stoffregen, Corporate Initiatives Marketing Manager and Director of Intel’s Ambassador Program.

Traditionally the CMO has been responsible for building the brand outside the organization in critical areas such as:

Reputation, Community Responsibility, Brand Equity
Driving demand for lead development of offerings (products, services, solutions)
Improving customer engagement
Delivering measureable value at each stage of the Customer Lifecycle

Increasingly, CMOs are leading efforts to build the brand from inside the organization as well. Expanding critical relationships and change management requirements drives the need for collaboration across multiple business units and organizations, in such areas as:

Supporting the CEO and partnering with C-Suite to address transformation across business functions i.e. CRM, customer engagement
Supporting other key C-Suite leaders across the organization, such as CHRO, to communicate company values, building programs that inspire employees to adopt cultural beliefs and act as active and engaged brand champions, delivering on brand promise

CMOs Growing Influence
As a result of the explosion of emerging technologies that support marketing automation, improvements in customer relationship management, increased pressure to respond swiftly to changing market conditions, and customer expectations, the CMO requires capabilities to make better informed decisions based on analytics and insights. As a result, they’ve become a key influential decision maker on:

Technology decisions to support marketing, sales, customer experience
Business Intelligence & Analytics
Business and workforce transformation – especially in critical areas such as Social Business, CRM and Employee + Customer Engagement
Talent management: acquiring and retaining talent, rapid workforce skills development in digital, social, mobile skill sets

Check out the full presentation below:

How IBM Drives ROI Through Employee Advocacy

Today, I had the good fortune of hosting and moderating a webinar How IBM Drives ROI Through Employee Advocacy, featuring my long time IBM colleagues Colleen Burns and Amber Armstrong, who shared several case studies about how the global tech giant is successfully proving ROI through employee advocacy.

For those of you who’ve followed me on twitter @sfemerick or read my blog or book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, you know I believe the most successful brand advocates are those who gain visibility and trust by sharing their expertise, and the most successful brands are those who build systems around these experts to align and scale impact for the brand. IBM has done just that.

Kicking off our discussion by establishing a common understanding of how we define Employee Advocacy – meaning: brands empowering employees to support the goals of the brand, using content and employee-owned social — As explained in the book, this could also be extended to business partners or even customers. (The full webinar on demand is available towards the end of this post.)

But why should brands care?

Well, for starters Employee Advocacy is the fastest growing and most effective means of driving brand engagement and advocacy at scale. Secondly, customers trust your experts and regular employees more than anyone else in your company.

In fact, people trust regular employees as credible spokespeople more than official brand sources like the CEO, as shown by the 20 point gain since 2009, in Edleman’s 2014 Trust Barometer study. In addition, the study reveals that employees rank highest overall 36%, as the most trusted influencer to communicate across 4 out of 5 topic categories including: Engagement, Integrity, Products & Services and Operations.

Prove value to your stakeholders, or your program will be short lived

If you’re contemplating an employee advocacy program, you’ll need to consider how you’re going to measure, demonstrate value and deliver results. If you miss this critical step, the likelihood of your program being short lived is pretty high because you won’t be able to secure the resources or investment you’ll need.

While ROI targets are typically financial, such as Increasing revenue or decreasing costs, they may also be non-financial such as increasing productivity, improving operational efficiency or reducing time to market which have financial implications. No matter which is right for your program, you need begin with establishing measurable ROI targets for the program up front. It’s not enough to set targets, you also have to determine how you’ll measure and report progress against them.

Another critical step is to consider what motivates stakeholders – depending which part of your company is sponsoring your program they will likely have different motivations and attainment measures, the details on addressing stakeholder motivations is explained in Chapter 7 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. We also dedicate a whole chapter to measurement, where you can find a roadmap of how build a measurement framework.

IBM’s a leader in social business, committed to driving transformation, paving the way for open collaboration and employee engagement

Colleen Burns, Manager of IBM’s Influencer Engagement Team, shared IBM’s belief that employees are one of the greatest sources of influence. Not just in IBM products, but in the entirety of the company. IBMers (as employees call themselves), play a critical role helping to set the agenda, as well as build and cultivate relationships.

The IBM Redbooks Thought Leaders Social Media Residency is a great example. The program was designed to create a pipeline of thought leadership blogs and help motivate technical employees to establish their personal social eminence while sharing their technical knowledge and expertise while building engagement opportunities. Since it’s inception in 2011, program participants have authored nearly 2,000 blogs across 11 business topics. In fact 800 posts published on IBM’s Thoughts On Cloud blog have accrued 1.1 Million visits and counting!

IBM’s Select program, designed to identify high-value experts to support social strategies aligned to go-to-market priorities, enabled SMEs to tag links and track inbound referrals from their personal blogs. This program has quantifiably outperformed traditional marketing and paid media tactics, proving digitally engaged experts could achieve a 33% conversion rate to a call to action.

IBM is also helping customers like Performance Bicycle achieve results by creating a community based learning center, which has become the Go-to destination for cycling enthusiasts. Moderated by employees that are cycling experts, they’ve achieved a 300% increase in traffic within first four months while proving a 20% higher conversion from the Learning Center compared to other referral sources.

IBM’s work with Illy, an Italian coffee and accessories retailer, resulted in a 40% increase in traffic to the retailer’s online shopping catalogue.

Amber Armstrong, Program Director of IBM’s Social Business team, launched a unique employee advocacy program powered by Dynamic Signal with 200 initial subject matter experts (SMEs). This elite group drove 146K shares to date, resulting in 188M impressions and 603K clicks through to the call to action. An estimated cost savings on media spend between $300K – $1.2M.

Wow! What an incredible demonstration of ROI

If you’re striving to build a successful employee advocacy program and missed today’s webinar, you can access the replay below, and can also follow and contribute to the dialogue on Twitter using the event’s hashtag #AdvocateArmy

A special thanks to our webinar sponsors BrightTalk and Dynamic Signal

Sprinklr aquires BRANDERATI adding Employee Advocacy at scale to its portfolio

Sprinklr, the leading independent end-to-end social relationship infrastructure, announces the acquisition of BRANDERATI, the industry’s foremost platform for employee advocacy and influencer marketing.

I had the opportunity to discuss the details of the acquisition with my long time friend and colleague Ekaterina Walter @Ekaterina, who’s been a pioneer of influencer engagement and advocacy for many years, most recently as CMO of Branderati. She is now joining Sprinklr as Global Evangelism Lead. Below is a synopsis of our discussion covering how the partnership formed, the robust capabilities it brings to brands, what it means for the industry and more …

Susan Emerick: You’re an inspiration to me personally and professionally. It comes as no surprise that you’ve been a part of spearheading this partnership, which provides brands such a powerful suite of capabilities. What would you describe sets it apart from the growing number of software providers in the growing advocacy space?

EKaterina Walter: Sprinklr bought us because Ragy (Thomas) @ragythomas understood that advocacy has moved from hype to real business driver. Sprinklr’s charter is to provide end-to-end social media infrastructure. To fulfill this mission, the company needed to add advocacy marketing as a core, integrated module that acts as a seamless extension of the social stack.

Branderati technology and expertise brings several things to the equation.

First, our screening technology captures API and self-reported data to align potential advocates with predefined profiles of ideal ambassadors. This technology is critical for any brand looking to create highly vetted advocacy networks at scale. By combining this screening process with the ability to identify candidates across moderation, social listening and CRM, we will deliver the most complete advocacy recruitment solution in the marketplace.

Second, from an engagement standpoint we bring the ability to create entire members-only programs that are highly targeted and personalized to each ambassador. By combing this engagement platform with the larger campaign management and scheduling functions in Sprinklr, the platform becomes a unified command center for activation of both advocates and the broader community.

Third, from a measurement standpoint there are very specific types of tracking data we provide in order to track ambassadors’ true impact. By bringing deep views of this insight into the main reporting suite of Sprinklr we provide a single source for nearly your entire paid owned and earned social impact.

Lastly, Sprinklr acquired focused expertise. We have been managing sustained advocacy programs since 2010. The experience and best practices will be a huge benefit to future Sprinklr product development and to their clients.

Susan Emerick: As you know, I’m passionate about employee advocacy, not just equipping employees with training and content but also helping them engage more effectively with customers and influencers based on social intelligence. What does this acquisition bring to brands that are serious about investing in Employee Advocacy?

EKaterina Walter: It gives brands an integrated approach to activating their internal advocates and offers end-to-end social business solution. Every day, Sprinklr clients are identifying active and potential advocates (both internal and external) through community moderation, social listening and the platform’s powerful audience CRM tools. Their biggest challenge is: how do I activate the right advocates at the right time to align with the Brand’s promotional priorities. Branderati delivers the answer.

Furthermore, the integration of the reporting framework between Branderati and Sprinklr will end “apples & oranges” KPI’s between social campaigns and advocacy programs and provide the full picture of social impact, all in one elegant place.

Susan Emerick: Influencer engagement is complicated. How does this acquisition help brand leaders focus on the most relevant influencers to their business?

EKaterina Walter: The key to identification and recruitment of influencers and advocates is to recruit and identify the right ones.

For that you need to first and foremost know your goal. If you are not clear on what you want to achieve with the program, no number of influencers will be able to help you. Then you align your goals with people. Then you need to understand what communities those people belong to, where they are, what conversation they are driving, etc. Context in this case trumps follower numbers. One person who has 500 followers but leads a passionate community in one particular topic can be way more influential than a generic influencer with 500,000 followers. Influence in this case is defined by the ability to drive actions (conversion, purchase intent, purchase), not just generic conversations.

That is what we help brands establish. A combination of factors that helps define that context is critical to the impact of advocacy or influencer program.

Susan Emerick: The proof continues to mount from industry research that shows trusted relationships in social are most often what people base their purchasing decisions on. What do you anticipate this means for the way Brand leaders need to invest differently?

EKaterina Walter: According to your own IBM data CMOs are considering brand advocacy and loyalty their top priority. But unfortunately up to date not a lot of brands truly invested in the advocacy programs, both internal and external. And if they have, they limited themselves with “borrowing” influencers from platforms that “collect” them. This is a one-night-stand approach and it usually doesn’t drive true business results (though it can drive some awareness). Executives need to invest in evergreen and sustainable advocacy programs that not just spark brand love, but allow for that spark to burn bright long-term, thus building relationships with the right people, in the right place, and in the right way. That community of loyal advocates, will not only carry your brand’s torch, but shine it on the rest of the world. You do it right, you will never have to pay for a new customer again.

For more on the acquisition visit www.sprinklr.com

Employee Advocacy Is a Game Changer: Are You Ready?

Screen Shot 2014-08-18 at 11.44.32 AM — Value Realization*

Building a solid business case for a large transformation program like Employee Advocacy, is a game changer. You’ll either get support or your execs. will move on to the next request in their long que. Are you prepared to demonstrate the cost to value ratio? Do you know what motivates the key stakeholders you’re going to need to sell your business case to? If you don’t, the likelihood of securing the necessary resource and investment to get your program off the ground is slim to none.

Are you ready to change the game?

This week I had the opportunity to be a part of Social Media Today’s webinar sponsored by Social Chorus’ @nalvino called “Engaging Employee Advocates: How Electronic Arts is Activating Employees to Amplify the Brand’s Message” (click to see the replay), along with Electronic Arts program manager @jroumian and our moderator @PaulDunay of PWC.

On the webinar, we all spoke to the real and quantifiable value of Employee Advocacy programs, but none of this is possible unless you start by building a solid business case and securing the necessary investment from key stakeholders. Getting to Yes, requires that you understand what motivates these key stakeholders, in order for them to give you what you need to get the program off the ground.

Here’s a brief summary of what I shared on the webinar on the nuts and bolts of building a business case, you’ll need to consider:

Value Realization
Securing investment – Selling to internal stakeholders
Understanding Motivations

Building the Business Case

The business case for a large transformation program will require both costs and value. If you only estimate the expected value, you do not have a business case; you have a value proposition. It may be very helpful to begin by estimating only the value proposition to determine whether you should spend the effort to develop a complete business case. There is nothing wrong with that. Just be sure to develop the full business case, with costs clearly identified, before investing significant resources and energy into the program. The most common sources of value include increased revenues and decreased costs, or efficiency and productivity gains. For example, revenues can increase when employees generate more leads or conversions. Costs can decrease if employees generate conversions at a lower cost per conversions —or— if employees answer customer questions in ways that cost the brand less per customer.

Another example might be, in your marketing campaigns, you may be able to create business value by empowering employees with the skills to condition the market, to persuade potential customers, or to create consideration and preference through their authentic trust and credibility with decision makers and those who influence them.

In such cases, you may find that costs of leads, conversions, recruitment, and sales improve through your program.

In general, the business case should clearly support the current goals of the business. Such business goals typically include goals for the current fiscal year or longer-term strategic goals. While you may be able to secure a small amount of pilot funding without having to show how your program supports the official goals of the organization, programs like this are only truly successful when they scale to touch the majority of the organization. In most organizations, that level of investment will only be granted if you can show how the program contributes to the most important goals of the organization for the upcoming fiscal periods.

Let’s break this down further, considering Value Realization

You should establish a method for proving the program’s value over time. This is necessary for two reasons: First, you need to establish a feedback loop to help you understand whether the program is on track. Second, you should hold yourself and your team accountable for delivering the results you forecast when you requested funding for your program.

As you develop the business case, think about the ways that you will track and prove progress of the program. For all of the ways you plan to impact costs or revenues, determine how you will track that impact over time. For example, if you believe that employees will be able to generate Web traffic that leads to conversions, determine how you will measure the traffic, the conversions, and the costs of the conversions. Also remember to measure the current state of conversions and their costs before starting the program, so you have a baseline metric against which to compare.

Value realization reporting should be a permanent part of your program management activities, so you will need to plan for resources who will gather, analyze, and report the necessary data.

Next, you’ll need to think about Selling to Internal Stakeholders

Getting executive support is as much about educating the executives as it is about building the business case. In this context, selling is more about consulting, educating, and enabling the executives. It’s critical to know what motivates the people who can get you resources and investment required. The motivations of stakeholders may be vastly different, in addition to understanding those motivations you’ll need to be clear on how your program will help them achieve their goals. Build your business case around supporting the business goals as specifically as you can and align your justification for the business case to the motivations of stakeholder across an organization that you’re looking to partner with.

Understanding Motivations – To help you think through what might motivate leaders across different parts of the organization, this illustration from my book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, describes the motivations and the metrics that stakeholders typically want to see articulated in a business case. You can find more on the nuts and bolts of building a business case for an Employee Advocacy program in Chapter 7: How to Begin.

I hope these tips are helpful to you! To learn more, join us in Atlanta for the Employee Advocacy Summit. We have a great line up of speakers representing various industries, ready to show you the ropes based on their first hand experience!

*Value Realization – Image source: freeimages.com/wmagni

The Role of Online Influence in Employee Advocacy Programs

Recently I had the chance to discuss online influence and what 3M’s has done to power employee advocacy experts to engage in the digital world. Greg Gerik who led 3M’s eTransformation team globally since its inception, shares some ideas on how employee advocates are encouraged to build their online influence, benefiting the company and it’s customers.

To learn more about Employee Advocacy and what’s really involved with creating a successful program, join us in Atlanta on September 15, 2014 for the Employee Advocacy Summit.

Below is the interview and full transcript captured at SXSWInteractive 2014 with Greg Gerik.

Susan: Hi I’m Susan Emerick, I’m here with Greg Gerik of 3M, where he leads the eTransformation team and drives innovation from Social Media to all things Digital. He’s also been a gracious contributor to our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. Welcome Greg!

Greg: Thank you.

Susan: I thought we would talk a little bit about influence. When it comes to social media and empowering employees at a company. You reference in book how important it is that every individual employee understands their own personal influence, I’d like to know how your program helps them grow that over time?

Greg: I think that one of the things 3M brings to the table is a very knowledgeable expert trusted advisor to our customers. It’s interesting to me the humbleness of the Midwest I think for our company lends itself to people just assuming they don’t have a very large sphere of influence. But sometimes employees need help to see how they can translate their offline influence to a digital world, getting them to the point where they understand that they can have a larger impact on our business, on their personal brand, on 3M as a whole and even on businesses that are not directly related to them, so it’s exciting when they see that. To be able to show that to them is the joy that I get out of that I get out of the work I do.

Susan: How do you incentivize and help employees build their online influence? What measurements do you use to incentivize them to keep going?

Greg: We take each on a case by case basis. We’re working with one division right now that has very aggressive sales goals and their rolling out some amazing new products in the architectural market and to help enable their team get to where they want to go we show them how they can leverage the content they’ve created, leverage the information they have about those products, and use that to make a deeper, richer connection with the customer – which they’ve always had, but now they can have in the digital world as well. It’s very rewarding and a good example of how we can do that. Setting measurements, of course you know is a passion of mine. We work with all of the teams to help them understand how they can measure progress against their objectives. They all have lots of objectives, but it’s about helping them measuring back to that object, not just awareness but what kind of awareness, not just impressions but what are they actually going to do for you or for the brand, the business, are you changing the hearts and minds of the customer? Are you there for them? That’s what matters.

Susan: Alignment to business goals is really, really important and unless that the foundation of how you’re enabling employee advocates you’re not going to be able to quantify any outcomes that are aligned to achieving those business goals. How do you address assumptions about digital? As you reference in the book, there’s a need to help people overcome dealing with their own expectations when they come to the table and really want to get involved. Could you tell me a little bit more about these assumptions and how you redirect?

Greg: People that are not expert level in digital as a whole sometimes come to the table with false assumptions about the industry, or false assumptions about who their customer is or where their customer is. In fact here at SXSW, I just had a great conversation with some people in the medical world that previously assumed that nobody was talking about digital and the Doctors and advanced practitioners aren’t the ones active in social it’s more the residents – but that’s not true. The data shows that Doctors at all levels are participating in conversations all over the place. Sometime publicly, sometime behind walled forums. When I think of my role, or the role of the Global eTransformation team as a whole, because I’m a small part of that team – when we work with our business groups, we encourage them not to think about the limitations but to think about the opportunities. There’ve been instances of communities or “walled gardens” of people having conversations that you can tap into because you can ask them for access, you can ask to be a part of the conversation, you can develop relationships within those forums and figure out a way to not offend the community they’re building but leverage it to support them and help them. Sometimes you’d be amazed at what simply asking a question can do. So being able to open up the opportunities to show the possibilities is a huge part of getting rid of the assumptions. People get very excited, business teams see oh wow we can do this – that’s out there, it’s amazing and then they want to do more and more. That’s really a blessing in my role.

Susan: So the future is very promising, things are definitely changing with data driven marketing. A whole new way that marketing and communications professionals have to be change agents. Think about enabling employees and what you can drive in terms of performance-based marketing. Thank you so much Greg for being here and for your contributions to the book.

Greg: Great book! Go out and buy this book!

Susan: Well, thanks, Greg. So nice to see you!

Tips to starting a successful Employee Advocacy program

As author Emily Giffin once said, “Everyone wants to belong, or be a part of something bigger than themselves, but it’s important to follow your heart and be true to yourself in the process.” This quote perfectly sums up what employee advocacy is all about: empowering employees to promote their company’s message on social media and, in the process, allowing them to develop their personal brand, and position themselves as trusted advisors and thought leaders in their own networks. I couldn’t agree more! Today, I had the pleasure of sharing my experience leading successful employee advocacy programs and what it takes to empower employees to engage. Getting started may seem daunting. But remember the saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day” … this applies directly to building an employee advocacy program. It takes time, but you have to start somewhere! So here are a few tips I shared on the webinar. I hope they help you to get underway. If you need help, let me know, I’m just a tweet away @sfemerick Tips for getting started: Building the business case: Understand & Articulate Why You are Starting a Program To establish an employee advocacy program, you will probably need to build a business case to explain the value the program will create. Getting executive support is as much about educating the executives as it is about building the business case. They are not necessarily specialists in marketing strategy, or how to pull together a marketing program, or social networking. They will not have the time to stay abreast of the changes and emerging technologies that are occurring and how they’ve impacted the way people communicate. They may not fully appreciate how marketing, sales, and service must adapt to these changes to improve the customer experience. You have to be the expert who helps them understand the way people connect and communicate is changing the landscape of the way decisions are made and who decision makers trust. I shared some important research that can help you educate your executives, including the Edleman Trust Barometer, the Nielson Consumer Trust in Advertising study are good sources that illustrate employees and “people like me” are the most trusted sources of information online. Set Goals and Objectives: Align to business goals and priorities, for example:

New markets
Market growth
Customer Acquisition
Retention and Loyalty
Financial Growth or Cost savings

Make sure program goals and content align with corporate branding initiative Find a Champion. Better yet, be one! Build a pilot with early adopters. Here are some common characteristics of best suited candidates:

Expertise aligned to business priorities, they can be Technical or Business topical experts
Comfortable collaborating, commenting, publishing in social environments
Comfortable with and finds value in creating relationships digitally
Committed to sustaining activity and evolving participation to achieve personal and business objectives
Willing to leverage internal listening capabilities to identify existing social graph and enhance online professional network

I hope these tips are helpful to you! If you can, join us in Atlanta for the Employee Advocacy Summit. We have a great line up of speakers representing various industries, ready to show you the ropes based on their first hand experience! In case you missed the buzz on Twitter today, here’s the full Storify ….

Meet Yekemi Otaru

As a follow up installment to my last post titled: Employee Advocacy: Program engagement doesn’t imply program success, I hope this follow up installment provides you considerations that will help you better understand why starting from the frame of reference of employees is critical.

I’m asked repeatedly, “What’s the secret to driving employee engagement for employee advocacy programs?”

Traditionally the CMO has been responsible for building the brand outside the organization in critical areas such as:

I had the pleasure of sharing my experience of co-authoring a book about building a successful employee advocacy program, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, on Bryan Kramer’s popular podcast series ~ “From an Author’s Point of View”.