I was honored to be interviewed by Kathleen Norton-Shock @katensch, one of the founders of Diva Tech Talk a specialized podcast that highlights women doing wonderful things in the technology arena. This series was created to inform and inspire women of all ages to succeed in professional and life missions that are technology-driven.
I hope my episode lives up to this aspiration! You can access the blog and podcast interview recording here:
From executives of technology corporations to scrappy entrepreneurs, women are making a huge impact using technology, and in the technology sector today. Yet, the number of women in technology careers is still much too small. To communicate the strong value that women bring to the field, Diva Tech Talkfeatures interviews with female technology leaders, and emerging leaders; and highlights issues and trends in technology. I’m grateful to be considered amongst this esteemed group of leaders!
Follow the @DivaTechTalks series on Twitter for a regular dose of inspiration!
So much goes into building and sustaining a successful employee advocacy program, yet one of the most commonly overlooked steps is determining how to evaluate and measure the varying degrees of engagement amongst program participants. Without a measurement framework, you will not be able to evaluate against transparent criteria and provide the appropriate level of reward and recognition based on the efforts each individual puts forth.
Here are 3 tips on establishing criteria for measuring Employee Advocacy program engagement:
Evaluate the degree to which they perform activities aligned with the Employee Advocacy Program’s goals
Evaluate the degree to which employees are engaging in the content (commenting on it, linking to it from their user generated content i.e. blog posts) and the degree they’re sharing it with their networks
Evaluate the degree to which employees demonstrate ongoing interest in being part of and advancing the program, this could demonstrated by consistently attending to program update calls, active participation in communities, providing peer-to-peer mentoring support to colleagues
For more guidance on measurement approaches and how to build out a mentoring program where employees who advance their commitment and adoption can become mentors of others to coach/train — reference Chapter 5 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth.
Successful employee empowerment begins with a plan, yet all to often critical planning stages are overlooked, and rushing to execution is the norm. The following 3 critical planning steps are an essential foundation for a successful employee advocacy program:
Build a plan that considers: 1. Business alignment 2. Team design 3. Role design
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail
Business Alignment
In order to understand the current state of your employees in social media, ask the following questions:
• Which business topics will your employees discuss online?
• To what extent do your employees discuss topics related to your brand in social media?
• Do they have the expertise to discuss these topics in a knowledgeable manner?
• In which venues do they discuss those topics?
• Where do they participate most actively?
• Which target audiences engage in those conversations with employees?
• Do employees represent your brand, or only themselves, when discussing the topics that matter to your brand?
• To what extent do employees publish versus listen?
• Do they have a degree of authority among the people in their online community?
• To what extent do your competitors’ employees possess authority in the same online communities?
• How would you like the above factors to change?
• How much would it be worth to your brand to change the factors above?
Answering the above questions and creating an inventory of engaged employees helps you to understand what you need to do.
As you work to determine the organizational goals that your program will support, collaborate with the leaders of the business units or functional teams that the program supports. And help them to understand how your program can help them to achieve their goals. Then determine the order in which you will take the steps to implement social media empowerment for people in their organizations.
Specifically, you will not be able to deploy this program to the entire organization at once. Instead, prioritize internal teams for enablement, and manage expectations with their leaders. Ensure that everyone understands when you will be able to support their goals and empower their people in social media.
Team Design
Once you understand the organizational goals that you need to support, you can think about how you will organize your teams to achieve those goals.
For example:
Will you empower one person per subject area, or multiple people per subject area?
Will you empower people in one location, or across global regions?
How much time commitment can you expect from each participant?
This will depend largely on the extent to which their management supports their participation. To what extent will your organization’s marketing, PR, and brand staff participate in the program? Will they provide support, tools, or content to the people you empower?
Role Design
During this step, you will define the roles and domains of expertise that you wish to activate in social media. Your selection criteria should be based on your program requirements and the business outcomes you plan to support.
Employees must be segmented to determine which training, support, and tools they require and receive. Employee segmentation also determines the policies, rights, and privileges that apply to each employee. Some job roles may not be appropriate to activate or may require restrictions on their social media activity. For example, employees with access to the private data of your customers may need different tools than people with no such sensitive access.
See Chapter 6 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth for more information about protecting the safety and security of employees, customers, and your organization.
Determine which roles in your organization are able to support brand outreach based on goals of your program and the extent to which each employee is expected or allowed to participate. Then, prioritize the segments of your employees and define the order in which you will empower each role type. For example, you might choose to empower product managers first, then product development staff, and market researchers last.
Finally, based on the information above, define the roles that socially empowered employees can play within your program. Specify how a role will be different when supporting marketing goals versus supporting recruiting goals. Perhaps they will use different tools, they may need different skills or experience, and they might set different goals for professional development.
The Human Resources department, in most organizations, is getting a dose of reality as they come to terms with employees having their own personal brand — forcing them to rethink job role definitions and skill requirements.
Long gone are the days that social media responsibility is limited to the social media team that administers branded channels or looks after social customer care. While these teams are still essential and have their critical role to play, employees are increasingly driving engagement with customers, partners and communities through social networking, requiring them to have the skills to engage in real-time conversations, online, and often in public view. But most are not professional communicators. So they will need new skills, and you will need to help them develop those skills while taking into account considerations based on various workforce management areas, as described in Figure 2.1. below
Scaling this kind of skills development program will require that you embed social media skills into the employee development and evaluation processes across the organization. Eventually, you will need to add social networking skills to your organizational skills taxonomy; in most organizations, this helps to define role standards throughout the organization.
Some employees’ job responsibilities will change, and the Human Resources organization will need to update job role definitions and skill requirements. These new skills will dictate employee performance evaluation criteria that may be new to the brand. You might find it helpful to define different skill levels at different career levels, and thereafter, skill development plans and assessments should change to support the new job role definitions, requirements, and career advancement.
During training and education, begin by helping your people to understand the business value that can be created when employees and partners build trust and advocacy online. To help them truly understand how the realtime and public aspects of social media engagement work, provide real-life examples that illustrate the types of behaviors you want them to demonstrate.
In particular, tell employees what they should do in social media, instead of what they should not do. Demonstrate this “what to do” approach across various roles in your organization, such as sales, marketing, and product specialists. Describe the benefits that the brand expects to achieve in terms of quantifiable business outcomes. Doing so will make the training more meaningful to employees.
Given the quickly evolving nature of social and digital media, you will need the ability to quickly create and distribute training or education to your people—especially as new channels, best practices, or policies emerge or fade. This approach could easily be used to train employees who are active in social media and also to keep them continually equipped with the latest information about your brand.
Many brands avoid empowering their employees in social media because they do not want to dis-intermediate the marketing team from customers, or they do not want employees creating brand assets that the brand does not own. Some brands fear that employees in social media could damage brand reputation or violate regulations and create liability for the brand. Some brands just do not know how to begin.
Regardless of how a brand feels about its employees in social media, nearly every brand today has employees who are active in social media and employees who talk about their brand in social media. Those employees engage in social media for a wide range of reasons. In many cases, employees get into social media because their partners and customers demand it.
While almost every brand today can find employees using social media to discuss their products, services, working conditions, and so on, the brands that achieve the most value deploy corporate resources to empower their employees in social media.
Simply asking employees to parrot brand-generated messages through their personal social media may help the brand to gain small amounts of reach or engagement, but it is not a sustainable strategy for engaging audiences and developing relationships online. It is easy to do, so a lot of brands do it; however, that approach fails to respect the relationships between employees and their audiences, so it does nothing to help employees create a differentiated and effective presence online. At the program level, design your training and support in 3 stages: Prepare, Manage and Reinforce. From an Individual level, program participants will advance along a continuium at their own rate and pace based on what they commit to. More details can be found in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth
In general, the greatest potential value of socially empowered employees can be achieved only when the brand aligns employee activities in social media with brand goals. And you should do so across the organization.
As stated by Danna Vetter, Vice President of Consumer Marketing Strategy at ARAMARK: “Each of our businessesthat are active on social has different strategies to meet their business needs. So the metrics we use to determine success vary by strategy. We expect employees to set goals and objectives to meet their business’ needs, just like they would in any marketing campaign. Our job is to give them the opportunity to be successful and provide them the tools that allow them to be.”
Brands that build the competitive advantages of socially engaged employees quickly encounter a host of internal and external challenges, including potential conflict between brand goals and the employees’ personal goals for their own professional reputations. Often, those two sets of goals may not align completely, and it takes some effort for the brand to keep it all working together.
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 theIBM 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
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%).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly all brands struggle to remain competitive and are seeking ways to do more with lower budgets.
Lower budgets along with the growing trend that people are more skeptical about messages and content that comes from official brand channels. So, what’s a marketer to do?
Sound familiar?
Enter your Employee Advocacy program
The good news is, people are more receptive to content that comes from a network connection. 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.
Because content from a connection is inherently more trustworthy or “valid”, it’s more likely to be opened, clicked, shared, and ultimately converted into a lead or sale. And since employees use social media around the clock, your Employee Advocacy program becomes an always-on lead generation channel.
Leading brands are increasing investment in digital marketing and Employee Advocacy programs that create business value through equipping and empowering employees.
The most common sources of value from such programs usually include increased revenues from employees who generate more leads and conversions to a call to action as compared to paid media.
Nearly every event I speak at on Employee Advocacy, I’m asked by business leaders, “What incentives do you find work the best to motivate employees to engage?”
So,“What incentives do you find work the best to motivate employees to engage in an employee advocacy program?”
Do you suggest paying them?
Do you provide prizes?
Do you use leaderboards?
What about gamification techniques?
While these may provide a limited lift in engagement for some brands, I would say none of these are what employees are truly seeking. So what is it that motivates employees to engage in a committed way to share their expertise and great news about their companies? Two words:
Visibility and recognition
Top most is visibility amongst coworkers, managers, but most importantly Senior Leadership. Followed by recognition for their commitment and dedication. It’s truly that simple!
So what are you doing to integrate visibility and recognition types of rewards into your Employee Advocacy program?
Here’s a few ideas you may want to consider:
Start a column to recognize the most dedicated employees that are the most committed to regularly engaging to drive the program and company goals forward. Run this column in your company newsletter and create a feature story series on your intranet or company blog.
Create a monthly opportunity for Senior Leaders to recognize employees verbally on a management call. A simple mention of the employee with examples of how their efforts are driving results is a fabulous way to motive employees and spread the good word to management and the C-Suite as well as inspire others to engage.
Take advantage of company events where leaders can recognize the efforts of the top most engaged employees publicly amongst their coworkers. There is nothing more gratifying that public recognition.
You will find more on this topic during the Q&A of this video where I’m asked this question and more. Also, there is a whole section about rewards and recognition in my book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earthsee Chapter 2: Help your people do well
Best selling author and founder of Social Media.Org the one and only Andy Sernovitz pictured with me. What a great event!
There has never been a more a more exciting yet terrifying time in my life. As you may know, I recently made a leap into becoming an Entrepreneur after an incredibly fulfilling career with IBM. Yes, on the road to reinvention, a huge step or perhaps a better word is ‘risk’ for sure, but one that after much soul searching and contemplation, I felt I would regret if I didn’t give it a go.
I’ve joined forces with a long time IBM colleague, Jeanne Murray. The new venture is calledBrands Rising and we’re open for business! We are strategic advisors to companies building employee advocacy programs in social media. We specialize in helping companies develop program strategy, training curricula, and business intelligence and measurement frameworks. We’re skilled at working with brand leaders no matter what stage of the maturity curve they’re in to deploy employee advocacy programs that drive business value at scale.
We know how to help companies impact the bottom line through social media engagement. We have experience, we’ve learned from success (and mistakes), and we are laser-focused on business results.
But nothing speaks louder than when others speak out on your behalf! Jeanne and I were both humbled by this post from Greg Gerik who shares his views on our new business.
We are excited about the opportunity to work with leaders who have a vision – like we do – of satisfied customers, shared expertise, and a network of people who learn from each other.
In addition to sharing my journey as a first time author, we discussed the book content, which is based on my experience building and implementing a successful employee advocacy program at IBM and that of many others who’ve led brand reputation initiatives and employee advocacy programs at global companies. It provides a full roadmap on how to unleash a brand’s most valuable resource, engaged employees, who build credibility through sharing their knowledge in social media and becoming employee advocates.
I hope these insights will inspire you to invest in building earned relationships that last. [button link=”#http://www.bryankramer.com/the-most-powerful-brand-on-earth-with-susan-emerick/” newwindow=”yes”] Listen[/button]
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.
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!
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 ….
