How An Employee Advocacy Program Can Get You Fired (or Promoted)

Did you know that every 48 hours the amount of content created from the beginning of time until 2010 is re-created online?

2010-2015 was all about content, but now we've reached a tipping point where we have an overabundance of content. To put things in economic terms, we have a situation where the supply of content far exceeds the demand. What happened to Starbucks when they had a store on every corner and cannibalized their own earnings? They closed the stores, they gave the locations to their competitors and they focused on execution and delivering a superior experience than the on-comers.

If 2010 – 2015 was about content, 2015 and beyond is about context. The noise online is incredible and as employee advocacy programs grow in popularity, that noise will become unbearable. Do you think it best to continuously spray messaging that will max out the value of your employees, or is it better to help them add context to the message and take the Starbucks route to doing things better than the competition?

Let's look at some key mistakes and how to avoid them when considering and rolling out an employee advocacy program.

Initial KPIs will report reduction in CPM/CPC, but they won't recognize how much your competitors are moving ahead of you with actionable and valuable content. A marketer who stops at reach metrics and doesn't look at resulting actions puts themselves in the same doomsday situation that traditional marketers focussed on billboard eyeballs faces – the inability to show the direct impact on the bottom line.

How to Avoid: Although initial employee advocacy launches focus on CPM, which is a reach oriented metric, they often don't consider engagement or amplification. A good program will measure 'REA' – Reach, engagement and amplification. These metrics show you how well the content is resonating and will allow you to show improvements in the training of employees to add context to messaging, making it more actionable for the unique audiences of each person.

Tip: Make sure you select an advocacy platform vendor that provides best practice training around adding context and that provides the ability  to drive engagement through best practices, like adding images, tagging others in posts, sending direct messages, etc.

Example:

Let's analyze two types of LinkedIn messages. Message #1 is a message you typically see posted from a point solution that allow employees to amplify or re-post company content. Message #2 also allows re-posting of content, but provides functionality to provide context to the message – making it targeted and effective.

Message #1: The above post is an example of a post that's not engaging and doesn't follow any of the engagement best practices that help your messaging stand above the noise. There's no image to compete against other visually appearing social posts on LinkedIn, it doesn't tag any applicable connections to call their attention to the content, and it includes a Twitter handle in the message. This type of message, when shared and amplified, will have little to no impact on success beyond demonstrating a reduction in CPM. As you can see, it has 2 likes and 0 shares. Failure to humanize or add context to the message is a good way to ensure the program isn't set up for success as it matures.

Message #2: Here's an example of an engaging post using several best practices aimed at increasing engagement and secondary amplification of the content. In this post, there's an image that create visual appeal and the post has tagged several contacts who would have an interest or would find value in the content, along with some additional context to the message framing it for the specific audience. The best practices for engagement are clearly used and the message shows how much more effective it is in driving activity on the post and to the link provided. Shares, likes and comments are all in the double digits.

Selecting an employee advocacy solution that'll help an organization maximize it's internal advocates and share it's content is vital. So vital in fact, that it creates tunnel vision and leads to forgetting revenue as a program goal or metric for measurement. This shortsightedness has led to the demise of many programs, and often times the champion of the program as well. That means that even if the initial stages of your advocacy program launch don't focus on revenue, considering how you will eventually measure the bottom line impact as the program matures is vital. A clear plan to show reach metrics, engagement and amplification metrics, followed by revenue attribution, shows a clear path to success and is sure to appease executives analyzing your roadmap.

How to Avoid: When planning how to measure reach, engagement, and amplification, decide on metrics that you can eventually layer on that shows real results. Winning programs know that leads created or conversions from social activities will be needed to improve and justify the program in the future – it's also is the key to getting promoted or fired as the program grows in size. Along with these metrics, you must select a employee advocacy platform that has the capability to connect with key existing systems, like marketing automation or CRM. Failing to ensure your platform provides a way to attribute revenue and track funnel advancements will be the difference in making or breaking the program as it scales and the market matures.

Tip: Make sure that you know ahead of time which revenue and customer relationship tracking systems your sales organization uses and make revenue attribution or CRM integration an important selection criteria for your advocacy platform.

Main image via Shutterstock

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Original source: How An Employee Advocacy Program Can Get You Fired (or Promoted).
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