As 2015 is shaping up to be the "Year of Employee Empowerment" in social media more and more companies are wondering how they might benefit. Social media employee empowerment programs are proving highly successful at brands such as Lenovo, Oracle and Cisco where employees using their own social networks effectively become brand ambassadors. Increased reach and engagement are just two of the often-cited benefits for brands.
But how do you set up an effective employee empowerment program?
During a recent Brandwatch webinar called Social Monitoring & Gamification: Creating Employee Advocates at Cisco (the slides from the webinar are here) Brandwatch’s product manager Caroline Goodwin outlined one possible approach: Raise awareness of the value of social. She said organizations can do this by:
Putting social up on screens in the workplace where everyone can see social activity around the brand and its products and services.
Using reports to regularly show employees at various levels what is happening with social efforts and how they help the brand.
Integrating social facts and figures for the brand with other numbers employees are more comfortable and used to seeing such as sales figures or call numbers.
Enable your employees by:
Training them and providing tips and guidelines about what kinds of information can and can’t be shared about and around the brand. Also share how social media efforts are measured.
Promoting the type of content you’re hoping employees will share, the hashtags your brand prefers and any tips on the ways to share content from the company website.
Collating all of your employee’s social handles so you can accurately track their efforts. Goodwin says the surprisingly easy way to do this is to "just ask" for each participating employee's social handles.
Encourage healthy competition by:
Creating a table showing who has the greatest impact (either by using an existing commercially available tool or creating your own measurement) that looks at frequency of sharing, numbers reached, and numbers of responses and re-shares.
Harness the power of your advocates by:
Planning ahead, for example, by giving your employees a heads up on an upcoming marketing campaign and share the relevant hashtags and links to the content that will be going out in the near future.
Monitoring results by tracking specific links and hashtags and who is sharing them and how far they are going. Brands can also keep the momentum going by providing very regular updates to employees during the campaign so everyone feels involved.
Recognizing all participants once the campaign is over and sharing its success with all. But then also recognize the most successful social media advocates.
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. Related posts 2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works
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