On December 1, we hosted with Dynamic Signal's sponsorship a webinar discussing our results from the Hinge/Social Media Today study on Employee Advocacy as well as two case studies presented by Arwen Heredia of Spigit and Jason Spencer of Humana. Lee Frederickson, Managing Partner of Hinge Marketing, presented the survey results.
The study, which was fielded by both SMT and Hinge, had TK respondents from a variety of industries and company sizes. For those of you who work at large companies, the the results for large firms show that Employee Advocacy still has a lot of ground to cover before the results are there for sales, or for social selling. Only 21% are measuring success from increased leads, while the large majority is measuring success from web traffic. Also, the principal benefit by far (48%) as perceived by the large company respondents is "increased visibility" while sales and conversions combined only account for 15% of responses.
The good news here for integrated Employee Advocacy platform vendors is that only 15% are using them currently; more often than not large firms are relying on analytics and publishing tools but are not bringing those together. There's great news here for trainers and learning platforms: only 39% of large firms' employees have received any training and a majority would prefer to receive that training from social media experts.
The case studies were interestingly similar, given that Spigit is a high-growth but fairly small company and Humana is, of course, one of the largest health insurers in the country. Both Jason and Arwen are taking their Dynamic Signal implementations from pilot to company-wide deployment and had great advice on how you get the early success measures that allow you to do that. Here's the archive for details and slides.
This webinar had a highly engaged audience and the tweets were terrific. You can find the storify here and we've captured some of the best ones below.
The biggest take-away from the study? Companies on a growth tear are twice as likely to have employee advocacy programs than not. For all the study details, and a summary post, click here.
Thanks again to Dynamic Signal for sponsoring the webinar.