SOCIAL MEDIA
EMPLOYEE ADVOCATES: YOUR ENTIRE ORGANIZATION IS YOUR SOCIAL-MEDIA STAFF
I'm working with a small but influential nonprofit to develop their employees as brand advocates, so Social Media Today's webinar ("Unleash Your Advocates: Nestlé Purina Shares the Secrets to Training Employee Advocates") this afternoon merged perfectly with that work. In this post, I'll share both the steps I'm taking with my client and the advice shared by Laura Lee (Nestlé Purina), Gregory Shove (SocialChorus), and Liz Bullock (SASI) during the webinar.
Step 1: Think about employees and social media in a new way. The heyday of branded social-media is over. A small organization can no longer use only great content to grow a social-media channel to 10,000, 100,000, or a million fans. (At least they can't do it organically, and small organizations often don't have the funds for paid social-media advertising.) Gregory Shove shared the following data, which shows that using 135 employee advocates who have a fairly average reach (338 Facebook friends) will yield more impressions than branded Facebook page with a MILLION fans. Whoa.
The other primary reason to leverage your employees' personal social networks is that authentic reviews and recommendations trump advertising. By a lot. According to a 2015 Nielsen study, 83% of consumers "completely trust" or "somewhat trust" recommendations from friends and family about products. Compare this number to various forms of digital advertising: email subscriptions (56% completely or somewhat trust), ads on social networks (46%), search-engine results (47%), online video ads (48%), and online banner ads (42%). That's 84% trust versus 40-something% trust. Again, whoa.
It's time to think about employees differently. Throw out your existing social-media policy (see Step 3) that makes it almost criminal for employees to talk about their employers on social, and stop thinking of social as the responsibility of one person or one small team. Instead, use your entire organization to leverage social networks and be your social-media staff.
Step 2: Coordinate Legal, HR, and Marketing/PR/Communications/Social-Media departments. Your Legal and HR teams may initially not be thrilled with the idea of mobilizing all your employees to be your social team. But think of this as a chance to empower and enable employees instead of controlling them. Your staff will be more engaged, and your organization stands to gain customers. Likewise, your social-media person or team may show some resistance to this initiative; after all, if every employee is "doing social," why do you need a defined social-media team? Reassure your social team that their work is more valuable than ever. You need social-media specialists to create content, manage your content schedule, and oversee both your branded audience and social-media campaigns. Your social team is what creates the content for your employees to share. You need them.
Step 3: Revise your current social-media employee policy. Chances are, your social-media policy is four or five years old and focuses on employees' not using social media at work and not mentioning your brand or their work on any online network. If that's the case with your organization, rip that baby up. Rip it! Start fresh with a new policy that encourages employees to use social media to share branded content, but reminds them not to share confidential information, not to embarrass the organization, not to snipe about coworkers in a public space, and to identify themselves as employees when they share. Then, if an employee uses social media in a way that's detrimental to your organization, it becomes a performance issue, just as inappropriate behavior would be in the physical world. And be sure Legal and HR do a full review of your new policy, and that you train all supervisors on it.
[Step 4A: If your organization is quite large—several hundred or thousands of employees—start with a small pilot group and expand as you achieve success. Most smaller organizations have dozens of employees, not thousands, so if that describes your organization, you can skip this step.]
Step 4: Train and activate your employee advocates. At Purina, Laura Lee created both in-person and online training. The in-person training (45 minutes) ensured that everyone showed up and allowed for real-time, human feedback. The series of online video training (10 minutes each) allowed employees to learn in short sessions on their own time. For a small organization, in-person may be enough, along with a brief handbook and regular refreshers at all-staff meetings, team meetings, and one-on-one time with supervisors.
What should be in your training? Basics about social-media channels and what sort of content works best in each. Policy issues, like not sharing company secrets and not embarrassing the organization. Social-media best practices, like when to post, how often, and how much to post about your organization (no more than 20 percent of an employee'a total posts). And, finally, branding basics, including messaging and keywords to use and messaging to avoid.
Step 5: Develop a system for informing and engaging. According to Laura Lee, Purina (a big, big brand) uses a tool they purchased to make it easy for employee advocates to share content. Small organizations are unlikely to be able to afford such a tool, but don't let that stop you! Instead, develop a system for getting shareable content into the hands of your employees. If your social-media is active, do this every day. If it's less active, start with one or twice a week. Use email, your company intranet, or instant messaging to offer your employees content for them to share. And reiterate in every team meeting, all-state meeting, and one-on-one employee-supervisor meeting what's shareable and relevant on that day. Be sure to give employees a special short URLs for each link you provide (for example, using Bitly), so that you can track the reach of your employee networks. And even consider creating a special short URL for each employee, so that you can track individual performance. Yes, it's a little bit creepy-Big-Brother, but the more data you have, the more you can improve your performance.
In the webinar, Gregory Shove mentioned that, in order to keep employees from feeling manipulated, it's important to respect their knowledge of their own networks and let them decide which content to share, when to share it, and how often to share branded content. Laura Lee reminded us that employees should make no more than 20 percent of their social-media content work-related, so if someone posts four times a week, they'll be posting for your brand only two or three times a month. Don't expect employees to share everything you give them, and don't expect them to share it the moment you give them the content. Let them decide.
Step 6: Measure, measure, measure. Track URLs, leads generated, the number and quality of job candidates as a result of your employee-advocate initiative. Purina created a special hashtag that all employees must use when posting about the brand on social media. And those special short URLs will make measurement easy. Be sure to know keep track of how the initiative is working so that you can quote stats off the top of your head.
Step 7: Reward and revise. Rewards may not be necessary (or may not be necessary in the neear future, as social weaves itself into deeper into our personal fiber), but to start, especially if your organization is deeply attached to not using personal social networks for branded content, consider creating rewards. Both Laura Lee from Purina and Liz Bullock from SASI highly recommended creating a certificate for participation. Yeah, this may seem like nothing, but employees appreciate it, and it costs you very little. Liz Bullock and Gregory Shove also recommended bringing in social-media speakers that are available only to employees who have gone through the training and are actively advocating on your brand's behalf. I love this idea! Liz Bullock also shared that Dell's huge social pages occasionally retweet or mention an employee's personal handle, thus giving that individual greater visibility. That could be a big incentive to certain employees. In addition to rewards, set up a system for employees to give feedback: whether they're receiving content they can share; the timing of the content they receive; any issues that have come up; etc. Use this feedback to revise and regularly improve your employee-advocate program.
Note: Updated in 2016 to reflect newer data.