There are a number of best practices for employee advocacy and the first thing is, you don't need to buy any tech for this.  The tech is already available and in most cases available for free.

Another form of best practice is that Employee advocacy is NOT taking corporate content and stuffing this out through the employee social channels.  We work with a number of companies that try and do this and the following happens:-

1.  Everybody (apart from the marketing team) know that their audience do not want to read corporate content, so you will find resistance from employees.

2.  If employees do share this, you will find that none of their followers will care.  You will find little amplification.  At my previous company they tried doing this and the sales people couldn't grow their follower base.  I had to explain that nobody wants to follow a corporate robot.

3.  Most employees will give up as they know their audience doesn't want this.

One of my staff has unfollowed all the salespeople at his previous company as all they do is share the same corporate content.  He now follows the corporate account so he only gets the content once, rather than 20 times.  As he said the corporate content had become corporate spam.

The trick is all about empowering and activating the employees.  This is after all, a change of mindset and a change of habit, so we would highly recommend using change management techniques.

Employees need to look good on-line, so they don't look like spammers.  You need to therefore empower them to have personal brand.  We know that modern buyers are looking for experts, so it is highly likely that your employees will get inbound leads from having a personal brand.

They also need to be taught how to grow their network.  The network which will get your employee advocates insightful contact in front of.

Finally you need to empower them to curate and write their own contact.  Curating will be using a product like Flipboard and writing and posting blogs on LinkedIn.  Don't get people to write blogs on a corporate blog as sending people there from social media is in fact an unnatural act.

(One of our clients has saved £500K ($650K) in recruitment fees from the use of one blog).

Your prospects, your customers, your past, present and future employees will all want to work with a company where it's employees look good online.  Not as some corporate robot, but free thinking and sharing things that they see as insightful and educational.

It shows your company in a good light and people will want to work there and people will want to buy from you.