One of the problems we are often asked about is "how do we get more leads and meetings?" and the answer is pretty simple. We activate the employees in your company to help you get them.
Let me first talk about why and how, and why when people do this, it fails or the results are poor.
As soon as people start talking about activating the employees, marketing see this as a way to push their corporate marketing onto a public that won't read it elsewhere. Why not sneak up on somebody and surprise them with a white paper? No!
One of the skills that all have us has learnt in the last few years is to filter out noise. We filter out ads, we filter out spam and we filter out corporate marketing. It is after all, the same. Everybody telling us how great they are.
The other issue with employee advocacy is that fact based training is used. What do I mean? I know the logic, you know the logic so if we stand up and through the power of 150 power points we hammer home the fact that if all employees were talking about us on social how great it will be. The problem with this is in fact most people don't think like us. At my last company one day they are telling us if you talk to the press you get fired and the next day we want you to talk to people on social.
Then the social media policy is published which if you implement it to the letter, means you cannot post anything. It's totally confusing.
Most people are sitting there thinking; "I know nothing about social media", "will I get fired if I make a mistake?", "I'm not on Twitter?", "Where do I get the content?", "our corporate marketing is boring", etc etc.
The trick with employee advocacy is how to activate the majority and do it in a way they are not afraid to speak with their own, authentic, voice. It is this which is attractive to the buyer, it is this that will differentiate you in the market and it is this that will get you more leads and meetings in sales.
You also get your employees to blog, sorry, but again, not something you can do through webinars and 150 power points. But this is critical, why? Because as buyers we are looking for an "expert" in which can help us. Your employees are the most passionate and most knowledgable people there are on this subject, once buyers find them, they will be the obvious choice to buy from.
So what are you waiting for?
Before we really dive into why employee advocates are essential to the success of your social media strategy, we should define what this term exactly means. An employee advocate is someone who is highly vested in their work and your company’s goals, mission, and overall values. These employee advocates are more inclined to share company content with their social networks, promote their company, be active in company activities and more. Typically, this is called employee advocacy and has become a popular strategy in the last few years to boost marketing, sales, communications, and employee engagement. But to put it simply, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by its employees. Usually via social media outlets.
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