Employee Advocacy Tools
Employee advocacy is the name of the game here, but what is it? “At its core, *”Employee advocacy” is the promotion of an organization by its staff members. An employee advocate is someone who:
– Generates positive exposure and raises awareness for a brand through digital media or offline channels
– Recommends a company’s products or services to a friend or family member
– Represents the best interests of the company both internally and externally
– Can help build employee ownership of the organization
– Is an expert on your product or service and can be a credible spokesperson for your company
*Definition: Sprout Social
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LinkedIn Elevate is DEAD, and the free replacement version too
LinkedIn Elevate is DEAD, and so is the free version that replaced it called the LinkedIn my company tab (removed by LinkedIn in November 2024). But the good news is that there are many more tools out there to select from. Here is a list of employee advocacy tools by Gartner
So let’s look at the 6 basic steps to get going with a new application.
Step 1 – Find an executive sponsor
All social media breakthrough projects need a solid enthusiastic executive sponsor. They provide essential drive and leadership and they might also be the financial sponsor of employee /HR activities.
"We found that by using an employee advocacy application, employees were sharing 4X more" Share on X
Step 2 – Appoint a social media admin
Naturally you will have a project manager and a team that includes or has access to people from IT, legal, and privacy etc. My advice is not appoint one of these people to be the first admin of the employee advocacy tool itself.
I suggest to appoint a social media admin lead to get things going when it comes to actually using the tool. Ideally that person should also be one of your social media marketers so that they are fully aware of what the ultimate goal is and what it means to the company.
Step 3 – Find content curators
Carefully select curators to provide the content to be recommended to employees. The most efficient is to select the very same people who create the content normally day to day. Make sure that they populate the application with lots of content so that when the first employees sign up there are many interesting articles to choose from.
I also suggest a soft launch with a smaller set of employees. This will iron out any bugs and redundant or incorrect steps or settings.
Step 4 – Appoint ambassadors
Employee advocacy ambassadors has a nice sound to it. I have sat through many event presentations where companies have given their employee advocacy ambassadors special names like “Blue Angels” etc. This makes them very recognizable in the company. They will be among the first to use the employee advocacy tool. Their activity will also populate the analytics section so the first proof points can be obtained.
However, the role of the ambassador is more long term. They will be the regional or business contacts that can talk locally and share success use cases to get more employees signed up.
Step 5 – Create training materials
The curators and ambassadors must be fully trained on how to use the employee advocacy tool. They need to be aware of the other content types available that can be shared like “employee milestones” and the ‘company news” etc. It is good practice to develop a mix ratio of these content types. Each company will have a different view as to the best mix of each type of content.
Step 6 – Measurement
In the early days of being a part of the first roll out of employee advocacy applications, I found it essential to get a grasp of the analytics. At Philips the early results gave us confidence. We found that by using an employee advocacy application, employees were sharing 4X more. This resulted in increased page followers, company page views and new hires that we could all link back to the employee advocacy application because each of the posts were auto tagged.
This taught me a valuable lesson. From the outset ensure that measurements are in place to check if the social strategy and executive sponsor objectives have been met, and share the tangible business results, and value them to give some form of ROI.
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