After some careful consideration, you’ve decided an employee advocacy program is a good fit for your company. Awesome!
…So, what next? Where do you start?
After all, you can’t just send out an email and ask your entire company to start sharing content. Some employees may not be social media savvy, and some may want to develop their personal brand in a different way. How can you ensure that this program is set off to a successful start?
Consult Your Peers
First, we recommend consulting with three key departments for rules and best practices with employee advocacy. These departments are: Human Resources, Marketing, and Legal.
- Consult with HR for employee engagement strategies. Does HR have any thoughts on retention rates? What areas or company culture need to be improved, and how can this be done through content?
- Consult with Marketing/PR to work on a communications strategy. What will your key messaging be? What kind of content do they think would contribute most to lead generation?
- Consult with Legal to ensure compliance with all policies and laws in your country. If, for example, an employee is sharing third-party content, do they need to declare in the caption or elsewhere that it is not their content? What kind of disclaimers need to be made when sharing content?
NOTE: You might have guessed, but the relationship between these departments needs to be ongoing to ensure a successful program. Requirements from each department change as time goes on, so be sure to keep in constant contact with one another.
Advice from Oracle Social
We teamed up with Neal Schaffer from Social Tools Summit and Maggie Huston of Oracle Social Cloud to find out what’s important to enterprise businesses when starting an advocacy program.
Maggie says that for Oracle, it was a matter of accessibility. She wanted her team to be able to share content as easily as possible – without having to search on their own and worry about whether or not they were allowed to say what they are saying. The key was to have pre-approved content organized in one central location so that employees immediately knew they could share it whenever and wherever they want.
Our Advice
Once you have an idea of what rules need to be in place for sharing, the fun really begins. As our Digital Marketing Manager Dan shared in the webinar, we at PostBeyond have created an 11 Step Guide to Enterprise Social Media Advocacy to kickstart your program.
This guide will help you shape your program in accordance with all of the various departmental needs. It will make sure that you’ve answered all necessary questions and are launching your employee advocacy with a clearly defined and well thought-out strategy. Download it here!
Have you started an employee advocacy program at your enterprise? What do you wish you knew before kicking off?
