Last week's webinar, sponsored by Dynamic Signal and starring Nolan Carleton from AT&T, Kevin Hunt from General Mills, and the always enjoyable and knowledgeable Denise Holt, looked at how two different large brands have been using Employee Advocacy to great effect. If you've followed my posts on Social Media Today, you know that I'm a passionate advocate for employee advocacy. That's because:
- It unleashes your largest marketing resource, your own employees, to amplify your social network and more importantly, the actual humans who make up your enterprise;
- It puts the most trusted source of product information (slide 12) in touch with your brand narrative and with the networks that they are part of.
- In an age of transition, where we are redefining what it means to be an employee and where we are increasingly reliant on digital communications to create an engaged workforce, Employee Advocacy is the glue that creates those important emotional connections critical to productivity and loyalty to your company.
The topic was On the Front Lines of Employee Advocacy: How Brands are Measuring Effectiveness." Hunt's program, while still in the pilot stage, has garnered significant support because it takes the approach that advocating for the company on social is successful when leaders like Hunt are seen as a resource and not a scold. Carleton's company, in contrast, has been leveraging its Social Circle program for over five years and for that reason has seen interesting evolution of the program. Originally conceived as a marketing program and run from that department, the program is now more geared to employee engagement, which, for a nearly 250,000 workforce, is no small endeavor. While "Estimated Media Value" of employee participation continues to be measured, the more important value is the number of employees who are actively engaged on their platform.
My friend Denise Holt supported their views with a graphic which outlined how cultural change is both the consequence as well as the enabler of successful advocacy programs. I encourage you to listen to the entire webinar.