How to Build an Employee Advocacy Program

What’s the key to a successful employee advocacy program? We’ve had a chat with Mikael Lauharanta, the co-founder of Smarp, to find out.

Listen to the podcast interview on Soundcloud, iTunes or keep reading for a transcript of our conversation.

Why do companies need employee advocacy?

I touched on it a little bit already in the intro. Still, there are internal and external goals for the company regarding employee advocacy, which they probably have already done without knowing. So the term is new, but for example, many companies we talked to are already sending emails to their employees asking them to share, for example, open positions or if there’s some industry news. But in the end, it all boils down to the company side: how can they reach more people in a more relatable fashion?

If you ask companies what their digital goals are nowadays, it’s usually all about increasing reach. But I think more importantly, there are soft values and internal values for the company about showing they trust their employees, they’re okay with them going on social media, and they’re actually trying to help them gain their own personal benefits and achieve their own personal business goals on social media. So, I think those kinds of internal engagement and empowerment gains are more important in employee advocacy.

6 benefits of employee advocacy:

1. Increase your reach by up to 10x more than a company’s corporate social channels.
2. Build trust: an employee advocate is trusted twice as much as a CEO.
3. Save costs, employee shares generate on average four clicks on Facebook.
4. Engage your employees: 50%+ % of employees rank communication and honesty as key factors to drive engagement.
5. To succeed in recruiting, one-third of companies see decreased time to hire, about half find an increase in the quality of candidates, and 43% in the quantity of candidates.
6. Generate sales, a 12% increase in brand advocacy generates a 2x increase in revenue growth. Leads from employee advocacy are 7x more likely to convert.

What’s the employee advocacy reach calculator?

It’s a simple formula. We can look at a company’s followers for its official social media channels. Let’s take EY, one of our clients. If we look at their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers, it’s a total of 1,200,000+ reach through their official company profiles, but then at the same time, they have right around 190,000 employees. From our SmarpShare data, we can tell that an average user has 420 Facebook friends, 370 Twitter followers, and 348 LinkedIn connections. So, if we multiply that network size by the number of employees, it’s ridiculous. So, the same thing as in the story, the intro, is that the communication potential in the employee networks is huge compared to the company following.

The official social media channels for EY would reach about 1.2 million, but with employee amplification, it would be about 216 million. Obviously, not all employees will share each story on each network, but even with smaller participation, the increase in the reach is significant.

What are the key elements of an employee advocacy strategy?

I think, first of all, the most important thing is to get the positioning right and the internal communication. So, they should position it as a tool for employees and show how they can become better at what they do to reach some of their KPIs or personal business objectives. Only through that correct positioning, which is a tool really for the employees, can the company also reach some of the goals that they have put forth regarding their employee advocacy program. So, just think about the positioning before sending out any invitations.

Another step is identifying the user group they want to roll out with. So sometimes, we’ve had clients that want to roll out right away for everybody. Sometimes, they have identified that they might have a brand ambassador program going on, and then it’s natural that those people are the first ones who are going to get a crack at it, so to speak. But, yeah, have the positioning right, then identify the target group and carefully do the internal communication. Hopefully, also include the leadership in that and show some examples.

They should also have a program manager, somebody responsible for looking after the program. We are not necessarily doing everything ourselves but ensuring that everything works well and that there’s good communication between us and the company. Eventually, the program will start growing organically, but obviously, it doesn’t stop with sending out invitations. It needs fresh content updating and taking care that it gets off to a good start and then after that hopefully grows organically.

Should you incentivize employees to share?

It’s gamified a little bit, so you get points for your activity when you share, especially if you get a lot of traction for your post. So, if you are able to come up with a clever way to tell why you are sharing that particular article, you get more points for more clicks for that content.

There are several ways to recognize those employees, and we’ve noticed that the best thing is usually to have your management recognize those most active people online. If they’re already active on LinkedIn or Twitter, then have your CEO or someone from the management team actually give them a heads-up and tap on the back, “Hey, thanks for being active here.”

Some companies find it interesting that you can see how you stack up against your colleagues or other departments, so there are leaderboards there. And then actually, with the points, you can also donate money to charity, so the company can have a poll of, for example, which charities the company should be donating money to. The most active and influential employees can then have a say to which charities they donate money to or then they can also claim small rewards from the platform, and that’s entirely up to the company to decide whether it’s a Starbucks gift card or if it’s a gym membership, or some other memorabilia.

Who will likely be the most engaged users of an employee advocacy tool?

I think the most interesting part is that you cannot always tell, so sometimes our clients are really surprised at how active their people are, especially after they give the green light and actually encourage them to be more active on social media. But obviously if you have employees that are already being active on LinkedIn, it just fuels the fire, so to speak. So, those people who already have those networks and understand the value of professional networking online are usually, in the beginning, the usual suspects.

How can you evaluate what content is good for the brand?

Mikael: Yeah, that’s something that we’re always being asked about, and we decided we’re going to write a little blog about it. And I think the key word is value and value to actually three different kinds of stakeholders. So, as long as the content is valuable to, first and foremost, the employee, the employee’s networks, and the company itself, If they can find a lot of content that checks all those three different areas, they’re off to a good start.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. Does this content create value for the brand?
2. Does this content create value for the employee?
3. Does this content create value for the people in employee networks?

How can you measure the return on investment on a program like this?

You can try to arrive at a monetary value and a return on investment in several different ways. Obviously, it depends on the KPIs the company has set for themselves. But the most obvious thing is when we can see, okay, how many clicks the company is getting from which networks in a specific time period. We can then look at how much they would be paying if they compared that to what they would be paying if they bought advertising from Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. We also know how much they paid us in that time period, so we can just compare them. Okay, what is the return on investment multiplier in this case? We call it the estimated earned media value, the price of those clicks on social media.

But obviously, it goes further than that, so we track the website traffic with UTM tags as well, so if they have conversions on their website, for example, to purchase products or to apply for a certain position. Then we can tell, okay, these people came through SmarpShare and did this on your website. They can look at the bounce rate and the pages inside the website they are looking at. So, really, there’s a lot of measurement and analytics that you can get out of using employee advocacy platforms.

What are typical employee advocacy mistakes companies should avoid?

There are a couple of key things. So we already talked about the positioning, but I’ll repeat it, it’s essential. Positioning it correctly to your employees, so sometimes the internal communications or the inviting or telling about it is more about the eventual benefits for the company in terms of larger reach and all of that. But it all starts with, “What it’s in for the individual employee?” Only through that, if the employees find it helpful and good for them, can the company reach some of the goals that they have set for themselves.

The second thing that’s always a little bit irritating for me is when clients underestimate their own employees. So they might think, “Oh yeah, no, we can’t have this. Our employees are going to go crazy on social media,” or “No, they won’t understand the value,” or something like that. So trust your employees. I think whenever you trust your employees and show trust, good things will happen. So, don’t underestimate their power.

What are some of the clear benefits for employees?

There are many things, so start with your professional brand on social media. So, if you have good content to share with your professional network, then you will increase your thought leadership status, and it will help you reach some of your own personal business objectives. It can help you get more leads and create more business if you’re in sales. If you’re in recruiting, you might reach more people, more relevant people, and get better applications or more applications. If you’re in marketing, you will look at the cost per click, what you’re doing, and your digital footprint. So, regardless of your job function, it can help you.

And in the end I was also talking about those people that are already on social media and doing professional networking and being active on LinkedIn, the benefit for them is the ease of use and the time saved, so they don’t have to go around and look for good articles anymore. It’s tailor-made for them, and they can pick and choose the ones they like and share them instantly from the same platform to different sources. So they don’t have to go to Twitter and do that, and go to LinkedIn, do that, and find articles from Forbes, Guardian, whatever. So, it’s easy content discovery.

And yes, sometimes it’s about recognition, so they know that somebody knows their actions are not going to go unnoticed, and they can get a pat on the back for their good work on social media. Because there’s a lot of unmanaged employee participation going on already, it’s just a way to take it a step further.

6 WIIFMs for employees:

1. Professional image: by sharing, you’ll build your personal brand online.
2. Growing networks, with relevant updates, you’ll engage and expand your network.
3. Easy content discovery, save time by picking suggested updates.
4. Recognition: you will get noticed internally and externally.
5. Professional success and sharing can help you recruit, sell, and market.
6. Influence company performance and branding, this is your chance to make your voice heard.

What are the important considerations when choosing your technology?

I think for me, the most important thing when you’re looking at different options or providers is how easy it is to use because, in the end, if the employees don’t find it easy to use, they’re not going to use it consistently, they’re not going to return to it. Also, think about whether it has always been built around employee advocacy. And is that the number one thing that the kind of software was created for? Was it tweaked or changed from something that the company has or did before?” Think about, for example, those two things.

Tell us about what EY did in the Nordics.

EY is a great case for us. They started originally in the Nordics, but they have since expanded to other regions as well. They were also looking at it from two different directions, so some of the external things that they wanted to do were just to be more visible, create brand awareness digitally, and become the most socially active company in their industry. But then they also wanted to reach a couple of key internal goals to show everybody who’s working at EY the projects and the wins that they’re achieving and getting. In the end, they got some of the returns, which they didn’t even think about. It was more like they increased the team spirit of the EY employees, and there was a lot of internal pull for the software. So those employees that didn’t use it were asking, “Okay. Hey, what’s this? I’m seeing this post for this software, and it looks kind of funny and cool.” So yeah, it was all about making sure that there were goals both internally and externally.

They achieved some really good results. One nice quote from their program manager, Leena Suominen, was that when they launched in the Nordics, the employee advocacy initiative outperformed any paid advertising campaigns they’ve ever done on social media. So the number of clicks and the cost per click for that were crazy compared to some of the more traditional methods that they had been trying. So they were really, really happy and are still happily using SmarpShare.

What companies are finding success with employer advocacy?

I think the best part is that we’re not tied down to any industry or region, so we have a lot of clients from different industries. We have a lot of IT companies, such as EMC and Rocketfuel. There are also Professional Services, EY, and, of course, Wilmington. Then, from the recruiting industry, it seems to be a really good vertical. We have Morgan Philips in France, for example, then B2C companies as well. For example, Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds. We have some pharmaceutical companies, construction companies, and whatever it is. We even have one tax office using our service. So it’s great to see a lot of different industries using it.

More on this topic at Employee Advocacy: The Ultimate Handbook.