Finding the ambassadors: firing up a great employee content ‘engine’

Back in February I flagged up the growing importance of employee advocacy—that content that your staff share about your brand’s success, especially dealing with the real issues your market faces, has so much credibility.

A lot of LinkedIn folks have been very struck by the amazing stat I quoted—that content posted on LinkedIn by employees is trusted 70% more than if it's posted by a brand. So now that you’re on board with the idea, how do you nurture your own employee advocacy content creation programme from scratch? From experience, the steps you need to follow are:

Look for people who want to build profile.

Your candidates should already be interested in developing their online professional brand. You will immediately spot that that sort of means them potentially building profile to get a new job, but the Zeitgeist now, especially with Millennials, is that we nurture people for the next stage of their journey. You need to focus on how they are building their customer/vendor/partner network, and as they build confidence and credibility, they will want to showcase and share what they know, building relationships and building all of their knowledge at the same time. You can (and should) benefit from this. You’d start with the folks already active on social media, natch.

… and who are usually already customer-facing.

Where do such people tend to ‘live’? We find they are customer-facing—services people, support people, people who know the industry and the customers. They are already helping them solve these problems, so they know what's been applied to address those problems—and with what outcomes. They often have a huge amount of knowledge to draw from, they have stories to tell and have insights are based on real experience.

… and they’re not C-Suite

The voice of really senior people is for other (important) parts of your comms strategy. This tack needs people with roots in the market, and for once it may be salespeople. That’s one that we can't use very often in press; editors tend to turn their noses up at contributed articles from somebody with a business development title as unlikely to be that objective. But when it comes to employee advocacy, sales folks tend to be über-connected generally on LinkedIn, their job suggests they want to be even more connected in LinkedIn. Work with them on this, even set advocacy into their key performance indicators. This kind of ‘rock star’ role often appeals to that kind of personality, plus they do invest a lot of time getting to know the industry and its regulations, the customers, and the problems they are trying to address.

And don’t stress them out!

It is likely however that these advocates are not professional writers. So, first train them—work with them, show them how to do it, educate them on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it may be: show them the sharing etiquette that you want to create, teach them how to customise posts and the right quantity of posts based on the network that they're using. And finally, just because someone knows about a topic inside out doesn't mean they're a natural writer; we solve this one by using content people to interview them, to capture their voice. BUT—once the copy is ready, put it back in their hands to publish. This is where everyone makes the mistake—it needs to be polished but still owned by your employee advocates who need to let them publish on their channel to their readers and their followers.

That's how Sarum makes the content engine work. A final word of warning here: don’t let this shiny new advocacy engine you’ve worked so hard to curate get too wrapped up in corporate processes. I had an example of this two weeks ago with a client where an advocate did some lovely, timely work on a topic, but it got so wrapped up in quite torturous internal approvals so that by the time it was published, the moment had passed. Instead of appearing to be ahead of the curve, our subject expert just looked to be reacting a bit too late: damaging to him and the brand, won't have benefited much from it either.

Of course, there have to be corporate processes but don't let them get in the way of this programme, and the clue is in the name: it's called an employee advocacy programme —not a corporate advocacy programme. Follow these steps and I think you’ll really benefit from employee advocacy content.