How is your Employee Advocacy team structured?

Ohh love this!! Paging ​@grace.henley, ​@robbie.schneider, ​@baraica, ​@lisa.rodrigo, and ​@derek.roessler to weigh in!

I’m following, but our org is not ready for a formal employee advocacy program yet.

Hi,

• Only one employee, just me. I’m running everything from strategy to enablement to uploading content. The burn out is real I tell you. 
• I support 10 topics representing every segment we serve
• As of right now I source content internally from our demand gen/content marketing team but we do want to get to a point where employees create their own content in Employee Advocacy 
• Internal stakeholders include sales leaders, content marketing team, our head of social, and our director of customer marketing 

So our org kicked off a pilot program with about 50 sales reps. It was successful and now we are in the process of getting more teams to participate. Those who get it love it. But then we have those who repost our content directly on LinkedIn and don’t go through Employee Advocacy. It’s a little annoying. And then of course we have those employees who are like we’re not active on social media and don’t want to participate. It’s funny how polarizing it is. 

What’s become a bit of roadblock has been the what’s in it for me? We are not allowed to mention personal branding at all. And I don’t have budget to roll out a formal recognition program. Any insights on how to motivate employees to be more engaged would be nice!

Yeah, the burnout is real for me too and I’m still in beta. I’ve been doing so much structural work to build out the program and types of content and make sure all of our integrations are working properly. I followed Sprout’s advocacy implementation guide and found the recommendation for an Executive Sponsor super helpful. I have our head of HR on board and the high-level announcement emails will be coming from her. I think this will go a long way in encouraging more people to value and actually use the platform.

We’re discussing some formal recognition, but it would only be for the first few months of onboarding to encourage active users. I have heard from others that they will do a one-time recognition around shares of a big campaign or announcement. I wonder if that would be easier for you to get budget approval. 

Thankfully, most people in my beta are seeing the personal branding benefits and jump in engagement on their personal networks. They seem happy, I’m curious what adoption will be like after I launch to the bigger group.