Employee advocacy has come of age. But how are big brands using it?

Back in the day, social media policies were simple and followed one of two patterns: either tell employees not to speak about the organisation online at all or allow employees to talk online with strict and inflexible guidelines.

In practice, both approaches rendered employees’ online communication about the company they worked for non-existent or worse, inauthentic and impersonal.

Now, the tide has turned. Where once brands were terrified of their employees talking about them online, now they’re embracing their potential.

Power shift

Big names like GE, Dell, L’Oreal have realised they have a ready-made set of brand and product experts eager to share online. What was lacking before was the means for brands to facilitate this at scale, measure the activity and manage risk. Not so in 2017.

The power shift to employees over the past two or three years has been seismic and employee advocacy has come of age – but how are the most successful brands using it?

1.   Marketing: quickly scale measurable word of mouth

Giving staff a way to share accurate, entertaining information on their social networks about their brand and its products or services is the untapped holy grail for many organisations.

For example, Iceland Foods turned a small number of employees into vocal online brand advocates, generating just under 40 million impressions for the brand on their personal social networks in the first 3 months of their advocacy programme.

“We knew we wanted to scale up our employee advocate programme, we just needed to find the right tool to do it. Qubist allowed us to manage this and give us the results to prove to the business just what our internal advocacy programme is doing.” Andy Thompson, Head of Social Communications, Iceland Foods

2.   Recruitment: attracting top talent and reducing recruitment costs

Marketing is only tip of the iceberg. In the social age, digital word of mouth marketing is also key to HR success, and there’s a growing trend for HR, Marketing and Communications teams to come together with employee advocacy.

People care less about what a brand says nowadays and more about what their peers say – and that goes as much for answering the question Will I be happy working here? as it does for Should I buy this product?

A great example of this is General Electric. GE has an employee advocacy program, where it ensures its people get regular updates about what’s happening at the company, team successes and product updates, making it easy for them to share. GE actively encourages its employees to share the culture and experience of working there with the world via social media.

“With traditional marketing, we’re trying to sell a product or solution. With employer branding, we’re selling an experience.” Says Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, General Electric. “It’s not like before, when you would walk into a store and just buy the first thing you saw. Everybody shops around now for their products and they’re doing the same thing for potential employers. GE is definitely making other companies, large and small, think about their employer branding and how they can get their own stories out there. In five years, we will likely see this become the normal way of doing things.” 

Katie Pawlik, Employer Brand Leader Europe for General Electric will be speaking at WAVE 2017: The Influencer Marketing Summit on 14 November at Kings Place, London.

3.   Driving sales through social selling

Social selling is gaining ground fast. The social web has changed people’s buying behaviour with more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions now influenced by peer recommendation. Brands are catching up and adjusting their selling behaviour to match:

“Customers don’t like being interrupted by adverts or cold outreach such as calls or emails… people don’t like to be sold to and avoid sales people as much as they can. Customers are on social media and we are now able to build relationships and connect with people. Social Media is a place where people spend their time, with people they trust… as a business, we need to go to where our customers are and they are on social media.” Tim Hughes, author, global Social Selling pioneer, innovator and co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates.

Tim, who will be also be speaking at the inaugural 'WAVE 2017: The Influencer Marketing Summit' goes on to say: “Done right, social selling used right across the business for all employees can have a massive impact.”

Want to learn more? Attend WAVE 2017 – get 20% off ticket price

Join brands including NSPCC, American Express, EDF, KISS, Orange, Costa, The FA, Warner Brothers, L’Oreal, Twitter at WAVE 2017, a unique one-day event hosted by Qubist, the UK’s leading advocate and influencer marketing solution.WAVE 2017: The Influencer Marketing Summit in London next month.

Use the code 'Qubist' to get 20% off today.