Organisations get this the wrong way round.
There is all too much talk about tools. The problem with tools, apart from the fact that "a fool with a tool is still a fool" is the psychology of a tool.
Take this tool Passle, it's a great tool for producing quick blogs. But when you say to people there is a tool to create quick blogs what they actually hear is "there is a tool to create blogs for me so I don't have to".
It's a big difference. Passle, still requires you to write something like I'm doing here.
With Employee advocacy, what happens is that people are given a tool to distribute marketings content. They are not "activated" as to why. Or better still, activated to create their own content.
When people hear "employee advocacy tool" what they hear is, "here is a tool that will do everything I've been told to do on social media and as the company has given it to me there is no fear that I will post the wrong thing".
Or put it another way, as one of my managers said to me in my last company "let's automate social media and let's go back and do our day jobs".
The problem for companies is ... social media is a strategy and not a tactic. You can give all of your employees a tool to distribute content but does that really move the needle?
Of course it will, by throwing more shit at the wall, more of it will stick. It's not exactly efficient, effective, or smart.
Social Media has changed the way we do business, it has changed society. It has also changed the way we recruit people, changed the way we work with suppliers in procurement and Finance. It has changed the way we interact with our customers, when things go right and when things go wrong.
Yes, they are naysayers, there are always people that want to block progress. That is why, any change like this needs proper change management. It needs to help people with the mindset change and habit change.
Tools won't help you, having a highly motivated set of employees that understand what they need to do and why they need to do it is where the wins are.
... and help is at hand.
The culture of employee advocacy and the nature of social programs is shifting. And we’ve been in this game for years — where in the beginning — only certain companies understood the value of getting their organization more socially active both internally and externally. Fast forward to today, many large and enterprise companies are adopting an internal social program. And not just for one particular reason. Employee advocacy touches every arm of the organization from marketing, sales, recruiting, communications, employee engagement, and employer branding. Traditionally, you might want to start small with your social program. A natural desire for something that may be fairly new to you. Or maybe, the idea of scaling to larger groups internally or enterprise-wide is intimidating.
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