Employee Advocacy: The Marketing Tool You’re Not Using, But Should Be
June 20, 2016 - David Hall
Category: Social Media Marketing
Shortly before her departure from a previous employer of mine, a friend of mine shared a news story about the organization accompanied by a negative—and incorrect—comment. Not important to the story, but her departure wasn’t as a result of the comment.
I badly wanted to correct her.
Not to argue. Not because I agreed. Nor because I disagreed. But, because, if she wanted to attack the company—rightly or wrongly—she should use correct facts.
What stopped me?
Despite being a member of the communications team, I wasn’t allowed to. There are about a hundred reasons why only official spokespersons could speak on behalf of this particular company—most importantly because it operated in a highly regulated industry—and I completely understood every one of them.
I was frustrated because this former employee should have followed the same rules about not speaking publicly as I did. We’d had the same training. We were bound by the same employee handbook. But she didn’t care.
What’s the moral of this absurdly long-winded story?
Whether or not you have an official policy banning employees from talking about your company, 50 percent of them are posting messages, pictures and videos that mention your practice anyway.
So, what do you do?
Turn your employees into advocates.
Research shows that patients trust the opinions of people they know—colleagues, friends, family members, even a casual acquaintance—when looking for a dental practice.
Your employees are connected to ten times more people than your practice. Leverage these connections by encouraging your employees to interact with your content. When employees tell your story; or react to, comment on or share your posts, your content appears in the news feeds of their friends and family.
An employee advocate—or ambassador—encourages interaction with your content, strengthens your relationship with current and potential patients, and provides a direct channel of communication with the practice.
Building a successful employee advocacy program for your practice.
Create a social media policy
Your social media policy plays a vital role in the success of your program.
Empower employees to be creative and to share your content by providing guidelines for appropriate behavior online. Try adding these tips to your policy:
1. Engage, engage, engage
We’ve created content that’s entertaining, inspiring, educational and—most importantly—shareable. Pass it along. You know the content is approved because we posted it.
2. Keep it real
Always be authentic, users can tell when you’re spinning a tale for entertainment value.
3. Do your job
We’re stoked that you’ve joined our social media efforts, but not at the cost of patient care. Your patient’s needs always come first.
4. Think before you post
Often gaffes on social media could have been avoided if the poster had slowed down. Think, is this content that lives up to the standards of our brand? Would I want my Mom to see my name associated with this? Are the technical elements of the post correct (e.g., Am I posting from the correct account? Is the spelling and grammar correct?)
5. Protect our patients
HIPAA violations are no joke. But more importantly, it’s the right thing to do. Don’t disclose patient information in a post. Check the background of photos for patients or photos of patients.
6. Love our brand
Lululemon employees may be the best example of this. They love nothing more than talking about the yoga clothing retailer, even using the hashtag #lululemonambassador.
PS, we love you too.
7. Respect sensitive information
We trust you. That’s why we shared with you that we’re thinking of partnering with a dentist who may retire soon. And, our quarterly earnings. And that we’re gearing up for a hiring frenzy.
We expect you to keep that to yourself. Tradecraft Baby.
8. Keep a lid on it
If you have a sibling, this concept is familiar to you. It’s okay to argue with each other, but if anyone else says something mean about them, it’s a problem. Same here. If you have a disagreement with management or a colleague, it stays in-house. We don’t throw our own under-the-bus in public.
A good social media policy delegates responsibilities and designate what roles each administrator plays, while defining consequences for violating the policy (e.g., written up or automatic termination).
Using the information in this infographic, we have no doubt you’ll launch an employee advocacy program that amplifies your practice’s voice.
Hey Heather! Great article on employee advocacy! It really has become the new necessity for implementing an efficient content marketing strategy, and it’s a great way to increase employee involvement with the company. What are your thoughts on using an employee advocacy platform like DrumUp? I think it greatly minimizes the time and effort required in the execution of the program through scheduling and automation.
I love the idea of an employee advocacy platform. While researching this post, I came across a number of platforms that I’d happily recommend. I haven’t had the opportunity to explore DrumUp, but I’m sure going to take a look when I’m done with this comment. In addition to scheduling–because I could do that in other native and third-party apps–I like that employees see the content and that they don’t have to hope it shows up in their feed. And, I love the gamification aspects so many offer to encourage participation and interaction. Sure beats wandering the office reminding the team to comment on your latest blog post!
Link Employee Participation and Performance Goals. Holding employees accountable always helps as it creates a sense of urgency. Create a content calendar and use performance goals to achieve this, but don’t overdo it to the extent of mandating advocacy because that ain’t going to work. Otherwise, linking advocacy and performance works like a charm. After all, being an influencer on social media can come with huge perks.Everyone wants to be appreciated for a job well done. Chances are that junior employees are the ones banging out great content. Sadly, they often don’t get credit for their work.
Employee advocacy programs are not just about getting more aficionados, making more leads, improving customer upkeep or looking extraordinary on the web. Really, they’re essential. Above all, your employee advocacy program should be an impression of your association culture, your focal objective and your total advantages. Employee advocacy is an open entryway for you to be really helpful to your customers and select your partners to empower you to move forward. They need to have important discussions. Also, an advanced imaginative can do only that. It can start and assemble discussions around your image. What’s more, the more individuals discuss you, the more your introduction. Some people may choose to invest in paid ads, but you can very easily boost the reach and engagement on your social posts by adopting an employee advocacy program.
Successfully rolling out an employee advocacy program requires consistent open communication. You won’t get widespread participation unless everyone clearly understands why you’re doing it, how it’s going to affect their daily workflow, and what’s expected of them.
It’s paramount to trust your employees with your brand’s promotion. We’ve established that multiple times by now. But that being said, it is also essential that this promotion, this communication does not clash with the brand’s overall image. After all, word – good or bad – spreads like wildfire in the jungle of social media.
Thanks for sharing.
While we’d like to think employees who love working for your company would become advocates without any persuasion, we all know this likely isn’t true. You need to provide some incentives for people to participate if you hope to get enough people involved and make a real impact on growth. Thanks for sharing great article,
With the updates to Facebook’s algorithm, where they prioritize meaningful conversations between friends, your employees’ personal networks prove to be invaluable in sharing your brand message with their own friends and families. Thanks for sharing a great article.