Building a Successful Employee Advocacy Program, with Ed Nathanson | SocialTalent

So we talked about watering the garden with regards to your employer brand, but it also really relates to your employer brand advocacy, your brand ambassador programs as well. It again, is not a set it and forget it. This is about constant communication, constant reinforcement, whether through digital, through email, intranet teams, slack, or even physical things around your office. I've seen some companies have signs around the office like, are you following us on Instagram? Or look at, you know, John won this contest here and here's the prize he won. You can do all these things to monitors around the office of social shares of some of your brand champions, your advocates out there. These are great ways to keep that communication going. Same thing with the contest. You have to be consistent. If you're running a contest, you can't take a quarter off. You can't not deliver on the timing of when it's expected. You can't not have an equally good or better prize. So if you're given a MacBook the next year, you can't come back and say, here, we're giving $50 gift cards. It's not the same, doesn't carry the same weight, right? So you need to be consistent with the contest, with the rewards, and with the recognition. Again, internal comms is absolutely the biggest key to a successful employee brand program. Whether it's you doing the internal comms or your partner who's doing the internal comms or someone in the company who's doing an internal comms, this needs to be a very consistent message of, we like this behavior, we're rewarding this behavior, we're recognizing this behavior. Rinse, wash, repeat, reward, recognize. All of these things are things that need to happen over and over. Always share the executive examples when they happen. So if your CEO writes a blog, you need to highlight that and share it internally. If you're SVP of sales, does a video where he's talking about culture or she's talking about, you know, travel or whatever, these things, share those internally, make sure everyone's aware, hey, they're doing it too, so can you, right? All of these things are helping to do that, you know. And lastly, you've got to make this available and accessible to everybody. There are people who might never want to do these things. There are people who are clearly never going to do them. But if you at least say, hey, you're welcome too, when, whether that's through an email. We talked about where you can submit things without being social, to just being part of the process, to being included in photos if they want or not being included in photos and giving people that option. All of these things show we're not just thinking about the active, extroverted people. We're thinking about the people who might not be those extroverts but those introverts and people who aren't on social media and other people. If you make it accessible and welcoming to everyone and everyone will feel welcome and maybe later want to participate. For people who aren't participating now, long story short, again, water your garden. Also, if things aren't working, if you're finding you're not getting the results that you want, pivot, you don't have to be set in stone. So maybe a contest isn't the thing to do. Maybe it's more focused groups, maybe it's more Just stick to your champions, learn from what works and what doesn't, and then go back to it. So again, just like any garden, if you don't give it water, if you don't give it sun, it will not grow. It's the same thing with your brand ambassador program. Nurture it, care for it, learn from it, and it will succeed for you.