This week, I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Engaging Employee Advocates: How Electronic Arts is Activating Employees to Amplify the Brand's Message. We assembled an esteemed panel consisting of: Nicole Alvino, the co-founder and senior vice president of strategy at SocialChorus, Susan Emerick, the founder and CEO of Brands Rising, and Jenn Meiners Roumian, the Global Talent Acquisition brand manager at Electronic Arts. This webinar was sponsored by SocialChorus.
Nicole set the stage with a discussion of engaging employee advocates and she started with a point about turning social media inside out by starting with your internal advocates, getting them to engage in a dialog with customers. She backed up that point a few key statistics, including: Employees tend to have 10x more followers than a corporate Twitter account, 92% of an employee's Twitter followers are new to the brand and best of all, employees are 2x more trustworthy than the CEO!
All this made a great case to invest in an employee advocate program so Susan showed us how to put together the business case. She talked a lot about "aligning the business case with stakeholder value" and she showed a chart from her book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth that was a good reference guide to matching metrics for each stakeholder that an employee advocate program can impact.
After that, Jenn took over and give us an in-depth look at the EA Insider program. What struck me about her program is how embedded in their mission and philosophy is in their employee advocate program. They even branded it, EA Insider, much like any other EA property, which gave it some exclusivity. That exclusivity made recruiting the initial group of employee advocates much easier - like being invited into a private club! They are at a point now where they are scaling the program from 60 advocates to 500 and so far they have seen in excess of $25,000 in AMV.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered were: How did you sell it to senior management? What are the key KPIs? How do you get the culture to shift? Why are employees natural brand advocates?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on The Mobile Enterprise: Engaging Where Your Customers Are, sign up for it or you can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.