Advocacy - How are you driving adoption and engagement?

Hi Laura,

I love the articles you posted about employee advocacy lately. Here are my answers to your questions above:

• How do you drive internal Advocacy adoption?

Top-down! If our leaders care about it, so will their team. Leadership buy-in is crucial and we learned that the hard way. We also had to educate our employees about the personal and business benefits of engaging on social media, this helped further the adoption. We also created proof points for the skeptics out there which were in the form of case studies that highlighted employees who have made meaningful connections, grown their audience and increased average engagements because of their advocacy participation.

• What are your favorite metrics to measure success?

Active users! Also, earned media value is always a fun one to share with leaders. 

• How do you recognize top performers?

I like to look at their potential reach, but honestly, I tend to dive deeper manually to see the kinds of engagements our employees are receiving. There is a good chance your top performers were already sharing content and connecting with their audience before your advocacy program. So getting them looped in ASAP is crucial, so my advice is to RESEARCH!

I hope this is useful to someone :)

Our executives love to see the top line metrics, our user love the leaderboard. Success is a combination of both as part of a bigger story of why organic social media is imperative to our marketing strategy. 

We launched our Social Media Brand Ambassador program in the middle of 2021 and have grown it since by hosting “Start Up Sessions” where we invite employees to come learn about the program and how to participate. We also promote the program in our internal communications and with direct outreach to employees that we notice are engaging on our channels. Employees who are active participants with the program get points through our internal recognition platform, called MVP points. 

As for measuring, we report out on total number of ambassadors, shares and potential reach every month. 

WOW! I’m loving these answers already. Do any of you reward top performers with prizes or company swag?

So we have a “Bambu Buzz Builder” award that goes to our top sharers. When they get this award they receive a t-shirt. I am curious though, what do others do for incentives? :)

I ran a month-long contest a few months back and awarded $100 company store gift cards to three randomly-drawn people who got one drawing entry for doing any of the following:

• Share 10 stories in the month
• Suggest 3 stories
• Recommend a new user

Would love to have leaderboards that show more than the total number of shares to encourage quality contributions and different types of participation in Bambu.

I think about these questions too… can’t wait to follow this thread.

Agree with the top down approach… when execs are on there, then rest of employee base gets a little FOMO and it encourages them to make it a habit to check on the tool. That being said, it’s been hard to get execs involved. I did get our CMO to record a welcome video for our training and we try to get a spot on the agenda at companywide all-hands calls at least once a year. My tool lets me send out a weekly newsletter, so I try to update that weekly, sending out personal branding tips, highlighting new ways to use the tool, and I’ll often call out the top five users. Hoping to interview them and host Q&A style content and make quote graphics around why they’re on the tool and make that a regular part of the newsletter as well. 

As for metrics, I look at input at output. I need to make sure I’m uploading a regular stream of content and I really care about the percentage of branded to unbranded content. Monthly active user rate is what keeps me up at night. How do we get our employee base to become regular tool users. I send out emails to those who haven’t logged in within a month to provide a nudge. I also look at Google Analytics because when our employee base shares blogs, webinars and the like, those get 3x more click throughs than when the brand shares similar. And once they’re on our site, they spend 4x more time and visit 4x more pages and are 2x more likely to convert. So to show the power of these clicks in context really wows the c-suite. Internally, I look at what content gets those high metrics so I can look at doing more of that. 

Trying to get a swag program launched. While I can do t-shirts and water bottles, also looking at including a lunch with an executive, a LinkedIn review by your manager’s manager, and other non-swaggy rewards. In our remote/virtual world, looking at Etsy artists on unique interpretations of our logo as art pieces that could be hung on the wall behind desks. I also make sure to like their posts within Twitter and LinkedIn, so they see in their notifications that their efforts are being noticed. That’s probably baseline, but thought it worth mentioning. 

How do you drive internal Advocacy adoption?

• Campaigns running regular webinars - advertised on intranet, Yammer, company newsletters.
• Employee advocacy Yammer group
• A permanent employee advocacy intranet page
• Onboard contributors from different areas of the business and advocates will follow as they want to share the content from their curators.
• Groups attending events is a good opportunity to onboard.
• All the recruitment teams - They love sharing content and have big networks.

What are your favorite metrics to measure success?

Senior management love to see the reach, clicks generated to our website and media value.

How do you recognize top performers?

Target on clicks. This will ensure they are only sharing relevant content to them and their audience and will prevent ‘spamming’ and posting everything and anything. The more clicks they generate through to the website, the higher they go up the leaderboard.