Is This The End? The Best Alternative to LinkedIn Elevate

Are you concerned about the security and governance issues associated with LinkedIn Elevate’s latest update? Try the #1 Fastest-Growing Employee Influence Platform, Worldwide, Free for 30 days.

This article was originally written for and published by DSMN8.com. Click here to view the original article.

Last month, LinkedIn announced the integration of its employee advocacy app, Elevate, with LinkedIn Pages. As a result, Elevate will no longer be available as a standalone product.

Elevate as a platform was limited, especially when compared to competitors, and for a price tag that didn’t quite seem to fit the bill. Still, it was the go-to for many enterprise companies as it meant no new third-party involvement, and the familiarity of LinkedIn meant getting employees involved was somewhat more straightforward.

One of the biggest issues factoring into its imminent decline is the fact that it poses a considerable security risk for brands. The looming threat is that just about anyone who chooses to say they work at your company can get access to your content. While top employee advocacy platforms will allow you to schedule posts for future sharing, Elevate users are skeptical about posting anything prematurely through fear of it getting into the wrong hands and being leaked.

“But what about my content? My marketing plan for the next year? How will I continue to match the shares and clicks we’ve been generating?”

No doubt, employee advocacy will still be part of your marketing plan, and you may have had plans and targets that incorporated your advocacy program for years to come, so it’s time to say “out with the old” and “in with the new.” It’s time to start shopping because you’re going to need an alternative.

If Not Elevate, Why DSMN8?

Well, I may be slightly biased, but in calling ourselves an alternative, you might assume we’re calling ourselves second best. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as in fact, DSMN8 is much more than just an employee advocacy platform, we are a full-blown employee influencer platform that allows your employees to create, curate, and share company-approved content.

From Huawei, OUTFRONT Media, and JCDecaux, to companies with no more than a few hundred employees, we’ve been quietly assisting some of the biggest companies around in fulfilling their advocacy needs for some time now. Check out our list of success stories.

Whether you’re looking to amplify your content marketing or create content at scale, we’ve got multiple solutions that should be just the ticket for easing your post-Elevate woes. As well as our flagship advocacy product, we also offer an internal comms tool, and increasingly popular employee content creation tools Lens and Author, that allow you to source authentic content at scale. So, companies big and small, fear not. We’ve got you!

Here’s what sets DSMN8’s advocacy tool apart from LinkedIn Elevate.

Employee Advocacy by DSMN8

If you’ve used LinkedIn Elevate until this point, you’ll be familiar with the idea of employee advocacy. However, for those of you who are weighing up your options, or thinking of starting your own program, let’s break it down for you. Elevate users stick around; we’ve got something new for you too.

Employee Advocacy, in its purest form, is the promotion of a company or an organization through its employees. Employee advocacy is about amplifying your company’s message through the most effective channels available, such as the people who are most likely to create a trusting relationship with your brand. After all, 83% of consumers say they completely or somewhat trust the recommendations of friends and family? (Nielsen). Supercharge your online reach and engagement by converting your number one asset — your employees — into social media advocates for your business.

The idea of employee advocacy is simple enough, but taking action and getting your employees involved and incentivized to share your content can be tough.

Step in Advocacy by DSMN8. DSMN8’s innovative app-based platform makes it easier than ever before for a companies employees to find and share pre-approved company content that is relevant to them and their networks.

What Sets DSMN8 Apart From the Competition?

Very glad you asked!

1. Leaderboards and Rewards

As we mentioned, advocacy as an idea is simple enough, but getting the wheels turning can be tricky. Well, have you considered tapping into the competitive nature of your employees through gamification?

Leaderboards and rewards will keep your employees sharing long after the initial launch process. Employees want to be seen to be performing well, and the friendly competitive nature of winning, coupled with the desire to win a prize, will encourage further activity within the platform.

A brand that championed this is Chinese tech-titans Huawei. Recognizing the power of their employees to support business objectives, they offered up their latest smartphones as rewards for top-performing employees, along with shopping vouchers and exercise-tracking accessories. Check out the full Huawei case study here.

2. User and Content Segmentation

As we previously mentioned, with the integration of Elevate and Pages, segmenting your company content to ensure that all employees have content relevant to them will become tougher than ever.

DSMN8’s advocacy platform allows you to segment both users and content alike, to ensure that users are always seeing content that is relevant to them, their department, and their networks.

Segmenting users and assigning admins to specific teams/departments means that you are also evenly dispersing the workload, ensuring that the platform does not become the burden of one program manager. After all, that one user may not specialize in all departments, and you don’t want the global admin managing users and content that they may be unfamiliar with. Here is probably the place to mention that DSMN8 offers multi-lingual capabilities, too!

3. Content Customization

To ensure authenticity, having unique and authentic-looking content is a must-have for any employee advocacy program. DSMN8 enables admin users to include multiple images and post copy, which allows the syndication of content at scale uniquely, removing in-feed duplication.

Naturally, a lot of your employees will share connections in their professional networks, so by adding multiple images/post copy, you are removing the possibility of duplicated content across different employees’ feeds, which removes authenticity and validity in the eyes of their networks.

4. Choose a Fully-Managed Service

DSMN8 recently launched our fully-managed service, which has been a phenomenal success and welcomed by both legacy clients and new opportunities alike.

Before you implement an employee advocacy program, you must have an effective plan in place to ensure it’s a success.

DSMN8 will guide you through the process from inception to post-launch, and you will have a dedicated customer success manager every step of the way.

Our fully managed service means we take on tasks such as approving content for sharing so that you don’t have to. In other words, customer success will do all the “heavy lifting” so that you can refine your strategy, focusing on the more important tasks such as onboarding new users, content strategy, and gamification.

Additional Features

SSO Integration

We help relieve any third-party angst and unfamiliarity by incorporating a Single Sign-On function. SSO makes it easier than ever for employees to log in, as it allows a single username and password to access a number of different products on a corporate scale. SSO provides a smoother and secure login experience to help increase usage.

Mobile Application

DSMN8’s mobile app is welcomed with open arms by most users within the platform, as it allows ease of access to content from both an office environment and whilst on the go. Our mobile app offers a familiar scroll-through feed layout, reminiscent of social media apps, that helps increase adoption rates and further usage.

There are also huge benefits here for our push notifications feature. Though notifications can be sent via email, mobile notifications encourage employees to return to the platform. Users are immediately notified of things such as; when new content is available, if they’re mentioned/tagged, or perhaps even if a colleague has shared something.

Of course, we did say that we’re much more than just an employee advocacy platform. At DSMN8, we believe that your employees can do more than just share your content, they can create it too. We say look inwards for your next engagement driving piece of content, and empower your employees to become full-blown Employee Influencers! Here are the content creation tools you need on top of your advocacy program to crowdsource authentic, engagement driving content at scale.

Lens

Most companies rely on their social media manager to take pictures and videos, but naturally, they can’t be everywhere at once. Lens allows employees to capture and submit those special moments within your organization. From an employee’s first day to team away day photos, leaning on your employees for photo content is a fantastic way to crowdsource company-based content for social media.

Once captured, media files are automatically synced with an online dashboard where you can approve images for use across your own company social media accounts. The platform even manages the assignment of the rights to your company from the employee.

Lens also allows users to submit their photos to specific folders. So, for example, if you had a blog post to write about an event your company attended, you could create an event-specific folder for employees to submit their photos to.

Then once used, you can not only credit the employee by tagging them in the post, but you can also assign points that can be exchanged for real prizes such as online gift cards, company perks, and charitable donations. If you’re looking to inject some authenticity into your social media, then Lens is the answer!

Author

Writing blog posts, or any written content, can be both time-consuming and strenuous, and remains a tricky practice at scale for organizations both big and small. Content agencies are often too expensive, and freelance writers don’t know your business well enough to add real value. Well, have you ever thought that maybe your next superstar content contributor is already within your company just waiting to be discovered?

Having a great blog is vital to boosting your SEO ranking, and also helps strengthen and develop relationships with existing customers whilst establishing your company as both industry and thought leaders. However, creating authentic content at scale has always been a challenge for organizations big and small, as often freelance writers are brought in who simply don’t know the company/industry well enough to add value.

With Author, you have access to a cloud-based text editor where you can create, save and collaborate on ideas. Not only does this include things like track changes, comments, and suggestions, but also automated alerts to warn of potential breaches to your companies tone of voice policy.

Want to create more authentic written content for your business while at the same time reducing your reliance on third parties? If so, then Author is the perfect solution for you!

So, with all said and done, there’s just one thing left to do — Get in touch! Click here to get in contact with one of our expert team to learn more about our services. Or, if you’re really keen to get started, we’re currently offering a FREE 30-day trial of our platform, with no credit card required.

What are you waiting for?