It's completely predictable - just when everything looks to be going smoothly, reality kicks in. That's the way of any project that involves people, which covers pretty much anything to do with employee advocacy. And so it was this week, when an implementation launch event with a London-based client threw up a few challenges that should have been, but weren't, on the radar.
Smoothly? Yes, that's exactly the word I'd have chosen.
The client is a digitally aware, knowledge-based B2B organization; the project has the personal and public backing of the CEO, an internal champion with plenty of energy and enthusiasm plus the authority to get things done, a professionally planned project program, a well-thought-through content strategy, internal briefing and training ... you get the picture. It should fly.
And, thankfully, it is flying. But it almost ran out of runway before it got off the ground, thanks to the unpredictable nature of the most valuable raw material on the planet - people.
Our Employees are Key to Our Success. Really ... ?
How many times have you seen or heard a CEO say something along those lines? Too often, leaders pay lip service to the ideal, but employee advocacy doesn't give you that option. As I've said before, it's all about the people; fail to get them onside, and you'll go nowhere. So when I sat down with the client's internal champion to review the program launch, that was where we focused our effort.
With all the positive factors going for us, I was confident that we'd get buy-in from a good proportion of the workforce. We had around 900 potential advocates, spread around several continents; most of the U.K.-based people were in London and we had a series of communications planned, including a brief video message in four languages from the CEO.
Very crudely, we categorized people into three social-media groupings: active; aware; and inactive. Around the organization, we estimated we had around 10 percent active and 70 percent aware; we ran our carefully prepared briefing documents and launch messages past several of the active group with the aim of fine-tuning them before running live.
And am I glad we did ... it turned out that the first question - and almost the only question - we got was:
"Employee Advocacy? What's in It for Me?"
So here are some of the things we learned:
Lesson #1: Most of our social-media savvy employees hadn't heard of employee advocacy and none of them understood how it works.
Because we had support from the leadership team and an ideal environment for using professional social-media networks to spread our message, we assumed that the majority of people would welcome an advocacy program with open arms. Wrong. Very wrong.
Not only did we rewrite almost all our launch material to suit the complete novice, we removed all reference to "employee advocacy." The clear message from the "active" community was that we should present the program simply as a social-media initiative, open to anyone wanting to make increased use of social channels to achieve personal business objectives.
Lesson #2: The average employee isn't interested in the business justification for advocacy. Voluntary or not, it's all about the employee benefits.
Any communication that leads off with: "The business benefits of the program include ..." - or anything similar - is a turn-off. We ended up repositioning the launch message through a hundred and eighty degrees; we needed to explain exactly what's in it for the average employee if we wanted to encourage participation.
People, particularly those already active on social media, were far more interested in the increased reach for their personal business messages than in any benefit to the organization. They also welcomed clarification on what they were encouraged to share; previously, there had been no universal guidelines across the organization.
Lesson #3: The most common reaction to our carefully prepared launch message was: "So you want me to be part of the company's marketing effort?"
Since I've always argued strongly against any attempt to hijack advocacy and repurpose it as a marketing-communication channel, I found this response particularly galling. Where had we overstepped the mark? I scoured our launch materials for anything that smacked of opportunism - and failed to find it. So what went wrong?
The answer lies in an old truism: Perception is Reality.
We'd omitted too many minor details - things that were so obvious to us that they didn't need spelling out. Or so we thought. Big mistake.
A few examples:
- It's not enough to mention once or twice that participation is voluntary; it needs to be a recurring theme.
- "Content is pre-approved" doesn't mean that people are simply sharing a canned message; explain the options for personalization - and then explain them again.
- "Sharing is easy" is only true if people are comfortable with social media from the get-go; more training is needed than you first think.
Employee Advocacy is an Outcome, Not an Objective
I've said and written these words more times than I care to remember. This week, I received a sharp and well-deserved reminder that they remain absolutely true. I'm glad I did, because in the end, our launch did indeed go smoothly ... but it could have been very different.
I'm also acutely aware of the role played by our internal champion. Without her efforts and personal involvement, we wouldn't have garnered the amount of feedback we did, and we'd still be on that runway. Never underestimate the power of someone who believes in the program - because advocating for advocacy is an essential ingredient for success.
Beyond Engagement is an exclusive Social Media Today column published every other Thursday.
Image credits:
Column logo by Marie Otsuka
Photo from Shutterstock