Social Media #EmployeeEmpowerment – Why it’s a MUST for Business

Social media employee empowerment has become a business imperative – but why? 

Because (as we have seen from previous posts – see below) brands do not have the social reach of all their employees combined and, more importantly, they do not have the trust and level of engagement employees can achieve. 

A recent story in Fortune magazine, Brands are using social media more than ever, and users are ignoring them more than ever, highlights the challenges of social media for brands. 

It points out that at a time when brands are using more social media than ever the percentage of posts that lead to user interactions keeps falling. 

The rates at which users interact with branded social media posts has always been low, but a 2014 study and a follow up study in 2015 by Forrester indicate the numbers are falling, the Fortune piece says. 

"Last year, Instagram posts from brands created interactions with 4.2 percent of a brand’s followers. This year, that number fell to 2.2percent," it says. 

"On Pinterest, interactions fell from 0.1 percent to 0.04 percent." 

It all adds up to brands doing more and getting less from social media. 

Citing Sprout Social research a recent Social Media Today piece, 7 in 8 Social Messages to Brands Go Unanswered, notes that more and more consumers expect a response to a social media inquiry on a brand's official social presence. 

Sprout’s research found "7 in 8 social messages go unanswered by brands in the first 72 hours," which Sprout likened to not answering your phone at your place of business.

The author of the SMT piece, A. A. Currey (@AjaMaybe ion Twitter) is a content hacker at Social Media Today and says what makes a brand have a great response rate and a good rapport with the customer is having actual humans on the other end of social channels.

"The way to a satisfied customer base is, yes, a quick and regular response rate, but there’s no faster way to a consumer’s heart than an authentic reply.

“And that’s something only a brand who values human-to-human connection can provide," she says.

A recent post on the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) website further explains why engagement matters for brands: "With an engaged, loyal online group of followers, you’ll cultivate an audience that will want to buy from you," it says. 

"And, here’s an even bigger benefit—they’ll share information about your brand with their communities, too." 

The IABC then goes on to offer its 10 questions to jump-start social media engagement. Among them are sparking a reader’s curiosity with a question and offering a single-question survey.

So, if social media employee empowerment is important to the brand how can an organization encourage it?

An example of how a brand encourages employees to engage on social media is found in Coca-Cola’s Social Media Principles: The principles start with: "Countless conversations take place online about Coca-Cola every day, and we want our Company’s more than 150,000 associates in more than 200 countries to join those conversations, represent our Company, and share the optimistic and positive spirits of our brands."

They go on to discuss company commitments (five key principles including transparency and monitoring), personal use of social media (including the admonition: "We encourage you to get online and have fun, but use sound judgment and common sense") and company spokespeople expectations.

So, social media employee empowerment is clearly a business MUST in 2015 … will more companies get on board?

Previous posts about SM employee empowerment

• Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand
• 2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program
• Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

Social media "employee empowerment" is catching on in a wide variety of companies.

It helps a brand leverage the social reach of its employees to talk to an audience that can be 10 times larger than the brand’s.

Social media employee empowerment programs are proving highly successful at brands such as Lenovo, Oracle and Cisco where employees using their own social networks become brand ambassadors.

Increased reach and engagement are just two of the often-cited benefits for brands.

I recently became aware of just how widespread employee empowerment is thanks to Stephanie Dobyns who does marketing at Dynamic Signal in San Francisco and who, via a Twitter conversation, pointed out some great examples of employee empowerment going on in various companies.

Her own boss, Russ Fradin, CEO at Dynamic Signal, has predicted that in the next 12 months a majority of top companies will be use employee advocacy (see image).

So, how do companies implement a social media employee empowerment program?

Social media employee empowerment resources:

Inbound Marketing: What Comes After the Tipping Point? - (a Cisco blog post by Dr. Christine Bailey, Marketing Director, EMEA & Russia for Cisco) says five big changes are coming to marketing in the coming year and No. 5 is: "Employee advocacy will fuel marketing.”

From Oracle: 4 Steps To Create A Culture of Employee Advocacy - looks at four key areas that companies and their employees need to learn to trust each other.

Leveraging Employees through Social Media with Charlene Li (email address required to view) - In this 55-minute video of a Dynamic Signal webinar Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, reports on research showing that a vast majority of companies are going through digital marketing transformations and that employee advocacy through social media is a key part of that change.

Lenovo created an internal social network to improve employee engagement - talks about how the China-based computer manufacturer got a huge lift in its marketing efforts by encouraging a relatively small proportion of employees to first share information on an internal social network before sharing elsewhere. It also reports this interesting detail: "Studies have shown that employees who are encouraged to share stories about the company on social media tend to stay with the company longer and are more loyal."

Employee Advocacy vs Social Selling & How to Drive Revenue Using Both - looks at the similarities of employee advocacy and social selling. Author Anna Stevens, Digital Marketing Manager at Recall, says brands can create long-lasting circles of trust. "Here's how. Your employees trust you >> Their social networks trust them >> So, your company's message, products, and events authentically reach new people."

5 Common Problems with Employee Advocacy - is an Oracle blog post that identifies some typical objections/hurdles to employee advocacy programs and offers solutions.

So, is social media employee empowerment for you and your brand? I’d love to hear other examples.

Related posts
Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand
2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program

2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program

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.

So that’s one approach to employee empowerment in social media, what about others? My next post will look at that and provide links to some great thinking around the whole topic.

Related posts
Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand 
Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

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.

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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