Focus

Employee advocacy beyond “please share this”

Scope and purpose of the group

This EXPLORER group sets out to take Employee Advocacy to the next level by asking:

“How can organisations become truly and meaningfully social on social media - to the benefit of both the organisation and the employee?

Even if the term Employee Advocacy makes it quite clear, what the desired goal is - it is much less clear how it is done in the best and most impactful way; how it’s achieved in ways that are effective, manageable and both feel and are genuine. Some organisations have invested in apps that make it easy to amplify corporate messages on people’s personal social media accounts; these fail in one way or another time after time. How about you? Are you sharing corporate can-fodder? If the answer is yes, is it merely because you are part of the team tasked with promoting the solution (if you have to be really honest…)? Others have invested in training programmes for employees. Invariably (well, in the vast majority of cases) all these initiatives amount to what Tim Hughes, the best-selling author of “Social Selling” calls “Corporate spamming”.

As a recipient, the content feels impersonal, indifferent, formulaic and automated - because it is!

There are exceptions; rare, but memorable examples when employees share interesting and informative examples of how their organisation has made the world a better place - as seen through their eyes and told confidently through their words or images - signalling that there is enough mutual trust in the employer / employee relationship to allow this to happen without any style sanitation or corporate filters. That’s what it takes to move it from “thinly veiled advertising” to “advocacy”. And that’s when we take notice - perhaps partly because it is so rare…

Examples of topics to explore:

Framing the challenge: We discuss the challenges you have experienced and would like to explore in the EXPLORER group
Being social on social - what does it mean, how is it different from what we do today and what does it take for us to get there?
Exploring desired outcomes with Employee Advocacy. What do we want to achieve: do we want to attract new employees? Is the ambition to generate leads? Do we want to position ourselves / key stakeholders in the business as leaders? Is the Effort also aimed at retaining talent in the organisation by strenghtening their position and the image of the organisation? Is the expactation all of the above..?
What does good look like? Exploring best practices.
Which tool(s) and platform(s) should we be using? Why? And how?