Employee advocacy - how does it actually work and what are the do's and don'ts? I recently spoke to Glenn Gaudet, Founder and President of GaggleAMP, to find out what it's all about.
You can listen to the interview on iTunes, SoundCloud or embedded below.
What would you say is the main challenge that employee advocacy addresses?
"Well, certainly there's the aspect of the online marketing, and really getting the amplification impact of having lots of people who already have an affinity for your organization - your employees - to be able to easily share content that's being put out by the company. But there's also the engagement aspect of it - and really, the more engaged your employees are, the more it impacts on your culture. So you have this two-sided effect. One is certainly from the marketing, which usually leads to sales, while on the other side you have engagement, which really helps drive culture. So it's a powerful combination of bringing people together to be part of an overall strategy that impacts the sales, the marketing, and the culture."
Which social channels do you see giving the best results for your clients?
"It depends on what your business is. In a B2B setting, you're going to see a lot more activity on LinkedIn and Twitter in terms of results. While in B2C, you might see more on Pinterest, you might see more on Facebook. So it really depends on what you're trying to do, where the message should be landing. That's the thing that we advise all of our customers to do - when you're thinking about what platforms to develop your social strategy around, you really have to look at where your audience is spending their time. If they're spending their time on Twitter, you want to have a presence there. If they're spending their time on LinkedIn, you want to have a presence there. And you carry that through on your employee side, too, because this is where we need to be. Do we need to be on Twitter? Do we need to be on LinkedIn? As we're a B2B, we sell to other companies, and I can tell you, from our perspective, a lot of our focus is on Twitter and LinkedIn. That's where we get the most impact for what we do. But if you're out there and you're B2C, that's probably not going to be the same."
How can you make sure employees don't all share the same content at the same time?
"There are certain things that we do to help reduce that impact, but at the end of the day, you also have to look at what the crossover is. In other words, if you and I have exactly the same people in our contact list on LinkedIn, you might actually start seeing some of that because we might be connected to 100 people in the same company together and then we start seeing that. But the reality is, once you get outside that organisation, the people in the outside, they're not connected to everyone in the organisation. So they're not seeing the fact that maybe 100 people shared a message that was similar. People always look at it from the wrong perspective. Usually, when I hear that, I think they're not looking at it from the outside world, which is really the audience that you're trying to get to."
Follow Glenn on Twitter @glenng.