Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand

Increasing social media reach by 1,000 percent might seem like an unattainable goal for any business.

Well, that’s exactly what Cisco’s Marketing Manager Alex Montuschi reports as a chief advantage of his company’s empowering employees to use social media to talk about Cisco.

He was speaking during a recent Brandwatch webinar called Social Monitoring & Gamification: Creating Employee Advocates at Cisco. (Also, the slides from the webinar are here.) 

The webinar was looking at what is turning out to be one of the hottest trends in social media in 2015: Employee empowerment.

In a nutshell employee empowerment (as it relates to social media) is a conscious move by a brand to empower/encourage employees to support the goals of a brand using content and social channels owned by the employees. 

Why do companies use employee empowerment?Among the reasons cited by Montuschi:

• Cisco employees have 10X the followers than the brand
• 90 percent of employees’ audience is new to Cisco
• An employee advocate is likely to score 2X on any measure of trust than the CEO
• Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement that content shared by brand channels 

 According to Montuschi, whose particular piece of the Cisco pie is the area known as Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR), one of the most-effective tactics his company employed was creating a social leaderboard table that recognized the most-influential employees on social. 

These were not always those with the most followers or the most posts on channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

In addition to the massive increase in reach for Cisco message son social in the EMEAER region, Montuschi listed other benefits:

• Cisco employees’ social activities increased by over 140 percent in 6 months.
• Average number of tweets posted by employees increase by 5 percent.
• Some 232 employees are using the social leaderboard tables to measure their social impact.

Cisco also used the introduction of the leaderboards as an opportunity to offer 120 hours of social media training to 200 employees. The result of this, said Montuschi, was that those employees became better users of social media and more aware of their social impact.

So how do Cisco and others set up its employee empowerment program for social media? More on that in my next post.

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