0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi everyone and welcome to our webinar, how to use employee advocacy for content distribution. We're Oktopost, a social media management platform for B2B companies. For any of you joining us from New York City, you may have seen we've lit up Times Square with our customers faces on the NASDAQ billboard just to say thank you. So for anyone who's listening in, who's an Oktopost customer, thank you so much for your partnership over the years and be sure to keep your eyes out for our next big ad. I am your host today. I'm Alina Dalal, Oktopost's content marketing manager and joining us today is my colleague Jen Gutman, the director of product and customer marketing here at Oktopost. We're both so excited to have you all join us. We always love having questions so you can go ahead and pop them in the Q and A and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, all of you will receive a copy of the recording and this deck after the webinar. So with that, we're going to go ahead and get started. So Jen, we know buyers today trust people, not brand. This is where employee advocacy comes in to humanize your brand on social media while also positioning your employees as thought leaders. And the stats prove it. As you can see up on the screen, 50% of employees post company related content. Already your employees have a much greater reach than your brand. In fact, they reach 10 times more people than your brand's social accounts. And in the industry, we're seeing seven times more conversions from employee generated leads. But we also know that there are challenges when it comes to content distribution. As a content marketer myself, I can attest for all of us how hard we work trying to write valuable content all day long. This is from writing blogs to short form content and ebooks. But if our content isn't seeing the light of day, what's the point? So Jen, I'm going to hand over to you.
1:53
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So Alina, I think you nailed the challenges in content distribution and I want to quick give a shout out. I see someone here is from North North Dakota. I've actually been to North Dakota, beautiful state. And the next question I'm going to throw out to the crowd is if you want to drop what, what do you own at your company? Are you doing content marketing? Are you doing social media? What kind of marketing are you doing? Feel free to have the chat go off as I explain the power of employee networks, content and social. Fantastic. So basically, Alina, what you said is true, right? Is that as marketers, as social medias, as brand ambassadors, whatever it is we may be doing that creates or touches content in our organization, right? If we don't have a proper distribution plan for that content, there really is no point in creating it at all. The first thing that I do when I put together any plan for a new campaign or new program, as you know, is I'm working on a content distribution plan because I know when I go to my CEO, that's exactly what my CEO is going to be asking, like, Jen, great campaign, great idea. What's your content distribution plan? And where I think that question becomes so valuable, especially when it comes to employee advocacy, is part of your plan should always include your employee networks. Now, what does that exactly mean and why do I say it? The chart on the left. When we look at employee advocacy, what we're able to understand, right, Is that we know that our corporate brand only goes so far, but our brand page can't really go at it alone when promoting our content, right? And that makes sense if you think about who follows your brand, it's usually people who want to work at it, your current employees. And hopefully as marketers, we all cross our fingers, but hopefully we're. We're having all of our ICPs and our target audience following our brand. But then if you take the collective network of every single one of your employees, it just doesn't matter if you're a company of 200, 500, or in the thousands, right? The collective reach of your followers is far greater than your corporate page alone, right? So these are some of the numbers from our own platform and our own, in our own accounts, right? So with the help of our advocates, with the help of employee advocacy, we can see that the content that we're distribute, distributing through that program, inclusive of our corporate page, is up to 1.6 million followers. That's far more successful than if we were to just look at our followers of our corporate page alone, right? So as a marketer, I know that if I'm handing that content to my employees, that it's getting into the right hands, the right eyes, right? And then the graph on the right. It's the same concept, right? We are ideally right in the. And this is probably set for a whole different kind of webinar, right? Do we, when we measure, you know, engagement, should we look at engagement, should we look at web traffic, what should we be looking at? Right? But there is, as content marketers and using social for content distribution, we do have a Goal to get people to our website to be able to read that content and help them make purchasing decisions. So when we take a look, for example, even at link clicks, when we add advocacy and our employee networks to that, in addition to corporate, right, we see that's 22,000 link clicks. So when you think about that distribution, employee networks help your content go much further and much wider. So I want to talk about today, if you want to head to the next slide, a few strategies that you can keep in mind for successful employee advocacy. I put a ripple here because I always joke with, you know, customers and with colleagues that launching employee advocacy, it's, it's like a ripple, right? You find your core group of advocates, kits, your social enthusiast, you launch out the program and at each stage of the journey, you become a ripple in growing that program bigger and bigger, but also making sure the right people are getting involved. And more and more training and best practices goes into making sure you're creating these social enthusiasts. So I really like to have that ripple constantly in mind. How am I continuing to scale my program at every stage of the journey? Next slide. All right. I feel like as marketers, we're all here, we're all in this together. And I say that because when it comes to building an effective program, right, the first set step always in any program that we're running is set clear goals. And KPIs sounds so easy, but all of us, I know are probably sweating a little bit because when it comes to setting metrics to our own programs, it's not always so clear cut. So when you're building an effective program, I think it's important to think through, okay, we're building this program. Am I going to measure this program on the success of people, sharing meaning how many people are adopted, adopting the program? Am I going to measure success on how far my content is going? And because the theme of this webinar is content distribution, I would definitely make sure that one of your goals, right, would be to measure content distribution, brand awareness, and making sure that this content is going far and wide. You would include reach and impressions, you know, into those KPIs. The second two, right, creating shareable and engaging content and training and motivating employees. This is all part of building that effective program. Like I said, most marketers, we pride ourselves on our creativity, right? And so we're sitting there day in, day out, we're creating long form content, short form content. You know, memes are a thing right now. Anything that's interesting, creative white papers, and we need to make sure that what we're creating is engaging. And the. Also, the best way to test it is put it up on your advocacy program and see which advocates are sharing it and then measuring that engagement. And then the third is training and motivating your employees. So the tagline I always use is, employee advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint. And I say that because you can't just say, yes, we're going to launch advocacy. Show your advocates, you know, the Oktopost platform and this is what it's all about, and then walk away. That would be doing such a disservice. So you have to think strategically. Okay. Each quarter, what am I going to do to train and what am I going to do to motivate? You also have to recognize that a healthy employee advocacy program is going to ebb and flow. So when you understand the ebb and the flow, you're going to understand when you need to come in with training, when you need to come in with motivation, and you know when you're going to come in with, like, great rewards. So that's all part of the steps of building an effective program. Next slide. So some of the questions that I get as I build out these programs, especially when it comes to distributing my content, is, well, okay, we're B2B. We're primarily focused on, you know, B2B networks such as X or LinkedIn. What should I be writing about? What? How should I be writing my content to help and make sure it goes far and wide and is distributed effectively? So what we're noticing in terms of the writing style, right, there's no right or wrong. And we always are going to tell advocates to put that content in their authentic voice, make it sound like them. So if you have advocates a part of your program who are not people of many words, right, you're going to want to encourage them to use their own style to sound authentic. But what we have seen is that posts from the advocacy board that look a little bit like this tend to do quite well. Right? You start with a personal or professional introduction to give context to the rest of the post. For us marketers, I feel like this is part of our job. It's like the hook, right? But sometimes we need to train advocates on how to do this. I don't know if anybody here has ever experienced in their advocacy program feeling like their advocates are coming to them saying, well, I'm not a marketer. I'm not confident in writing like this. So this is something that you can include in one of your workshops or trainings to help guide them. Right. Once you have the hook, you want to add a few key learnings. But we're starting to see when it comes to engagement is it's much easier for someone to click on, see more and read a few points before heading into the actual article, white paper, ebook, or, you know, webinar sign up than it is to leave it blank and then end with a clear call to action. If you want them to join the webinar, let them know. If you want them to read the ebook, tell them that if you would like them to, you know, drop some insight into the comments, give them that call to action and make it clear and you will see slowly that they with this formula, the advocates start to feel much more confident in how they're creating the content and making it their own. You can screenshot this, you can give this to them to give them, you know, to pave the way. But I always like to include a sample of what we would identify as a powerful brand advocate, if you will, for our content. Next slide. All right. Incentivizing and motivating employees. I think this is the most interesting piece of an employee advocacy program because there's so many different elements that you can add into incentivizing and motivating employees. And I wish there was like a one size fits all playbook that I could literally just hand to everybody and say, follow steps one through seven and you're going to have the perfect program. But unfortunately, because every single company is different and every single organization has a different company culture, and it's really up to us as the marketers to one, understand our culture and then use that culture to be able to incentivize and motivate employees. So we can do this right? We can. The most basic, I would say, is the recognition and rewards. I like to sometimes start off before I even launch an advocacy program or even if I, you know, I'm three months in or six months in with a survey and I'll actually include some of these questions. What would you like to be recognized for as part of this program? Or what kind of rewards would you expect expect as being a brand ambassador? And I give multiple choice, I give some options knowing, you know, whatever our budget might be that quarter. But I like to hear from the advocates because when I hear directly from them, that's what's going to motivate them. It's going to help me put together a program that they're going to want to be a part of. An example of this is actually a Year back when I was running our advocacy program, I was giving 25 gift cards on Amazon because who doesn't love Amazon, right? And what I realized after doing a survey is that there was quite a bit of feedback around the advocates sharing that they would actually prefer that they would be rewarded by being able to make a charity, a donation to a charity of their choice. That had never even crossed my mind as a reward or an incentive to get people sharing. So I took that feedback and the next game that we ended up playing in advocacy, I made that the prize and I saw our engagement drive up. So it's sometimes worth throwing those questions in if you see you're in an ebb of a program to get that motivation and engagement back up. When it comes to gamification, it's fun, right? We know that usually the sales people and the customer teams, they're the ones that are leading the way, usually on the advocacy board. And I feel any salesperson usually has some friendly competition in them to make it fun. So be sure to gamify. And then I think too, there's a really strong and powerful way to motivate employees by creating a sense of ownership and pride. How do you do that? Right? Call out what we just saw, how you can write, you know, a masterpost, if you will, with a hook and the main points and a call to action. So when you see an advocate writing authentic content, call them out, you know, put them up on an all hands meeting, give them credit, maybe thought leader of the month, but have them and let them take pride in the post that they're doing because it's a bit addictive. And I also think it comes down right. Incentivizing and motivating comes down to also helping your advocates create habits. And when you recognize these good habits, hopefully more will catch on and you can think of that ripple again and more people will see that these people are getting recognized for what they're doing and it's going to ripple out and grow your program. And then lastly, right, a culture of advocacy within the organization. It's a powerful thing. And you can work closely with HR employer branding, if you're not already doing this, but maybe perhaps working together, you can incorporate, I know some brands, they'll go ahead and they'll create the culture of advocacy, right? In an onboarding. So a new employee starts and immediately the advocacy program is part of their onboarding and immediately the employee is invited to be part of that culture and be motivated and proud to share that content. So I think that's A great way to incentivize and motivate. Next slide. All right. The benefits of employee advocacy. There are many. We definitely in, you know, the 30 minutes that we have today, there are not enough. There's never enough time to talk about all the benefits of advocacy. So always happy to connect on LinkedIn or if you have any questions after the webinar, you know, feel free to connect. But I think that the main three that I consistently see, especially when it comes to content distribution, is it's increasing your reach and visibility through something called user generated content. Sometimes it's abbreviated as ugc and this is a huge term. If you Google it, you'll see that LinkedIn is all about user generated content lately. What does that mean? It means that content that is created by the member of LinkedIn, content that is created by the individual is favored and the reach and the visibility goes much further. So employee advocacy is great, right? You give them that piece of content that you want to distribute far and wide and the reach and visibility through your colleagues is going to go quite far. The second thing is enhanced engagement and trust. Alina called this out in the beginning, the beginning of the webinar in terms of people trust people, not brands. And I would say in B2B, that's more true than ever. We want to position our, our colleagues as thought leaders. We want to position them as powerhouses on social media, but not just as, hey, here I am, you know, come buy for me. Right? But we want to build credibility because when you think about when you make a purchase, you're more likely to reach out to somebody that you trust for insight, for feedback, for knowledge. And I always say knowledge is power. This is in everything I do, whether it's I'm looking to, you know, buy a new bend like to marketing tool or you know, even go to a new restaurant, right? Like I trust whoever may be talking or reviewing or giving information. Knowledge is power. And the third is amplifying your brand message, the personal networks. When you run an employee advocacy program, you are bringing together chosen advocates if you will, right? You're going to make them feel very special. But you're bringing together these ambassadors to take your brand message and you trust these people to amplify that message to their personal network works. And the, the benefits are beyond what you could ever imagine. And of course in Oktopost, you can see in social bi exactly how, you know, these benefits are turning into these insights and, and how you're able to actually go ahead and understand right, from the advocacy program how it's impacting your entire organization. But again, let's say you've created a new ebook and you need the right eyes on it. And let's say, you know, salesperson Joe, his vertical is the exact vertical that this ebook is for, perhaps then you're going to create, you know, the right channel, the right messages for Joe to go ahead and share with his network and because it's coming from Joe and they know Joe because they're connected, right. People to people, they're much more likely to trust when the time is right. Purchase next slide. All right. Managing social media. So this one's a big one. I feel not many people outside of marketing know just how absolutely challenging managing social media is. It's stressful. We're on the front lines of every breaking news. We are the face of the brand, the words of the brand. And you know, we have, I think as, as social media managers, there's a lot of stress on us to make sure we get the messaging right. And when it comes to managing social and employee advocacy, we often see that employee advocacy for good reason sits with the social media manager. So when it comes to launching your employee advocacy program. Right. You can think about how to balance the company channels and employee advocacy as complements to one, as opposed to like two very grueling things, if you will, that you have to manage. And why do I say that right? So here at Oktopost, we have very clear criteria about what goes on corporate and what we've done. Because a lot of our advocates and brand ambassadors will have great ideas for what they want to also include in their corporate strategy. We've created a way, okay, here's what goes on corporate, here's what's going to be approved for advocacy. And anything that doesn't really fit at the time in our corporate strategy oftentimes becomes super powerful for the employee advocacy. And then you saw early on, when I go to measure, I'm taking the collective of every kind of messaging and every follower right in every link, like to bring it together, to see the program as a whole, to adjust and add relevant content for your advocates. I think this might be one of the most challenging pieces of finding that balance because the social media managers, we're speaking on behalf of our brand when we're managing our social corporate channels. And when we come into advocacy, we have to put our advocacy hat on, write in first person, speak as the advocate would speak. Right. Try to get inside of their heads. We have one of our customers I think does something brilliant that they've actually, you know recruited within their organization a very special team of people from sales, from cs, from different areas of the organization to be their experts. Meaning that they've recruited them to write some of the thought leadership content that they need the experts for that brand to be able to distribute to sales. And why I think that's a brilliant idea is because they're already having this authentic tone. And if you are in need of content or you need to make sure you have the right content, that could be a really creative way to make sure that you're distributing the content in the right tone of voice for those right Personas who need to distribute it. 3. Right Integrate everything you do on social media with the rest of your martech stack. I think you know, it's 20, 24 everything. No data living alone in a silo is ever good data. So just make sure everything you're doing is integrated where it can be. And the fourth thing here, right is, is using social intent data to impact your ABM or strategy. I think where employee advocacy becomes so powerful as we move into, you know, understanding more and using employee advocacy, you can invite social selling and understanding how to use employee advocacy with that distribution of content to get it again into the right eyes. If you're doing an ABM or ABX strategy, getting using employee advocacy to distribute your content can help make sure you are breaking in even to the right accounts, right? So if salesperson A has a specific target account and needs to create something this great experience and become a trusted source for a target account to get them into the funnel, you can use employee advocacy and the content that you've created in your program to make sure the content is actually getting to the exact right account that person is managing. So I want to head to the next slide and the last piece I want to speak through when it comes to thinking through strategies for employee advocacy is how to build those meaningful customer journeys. Because we know today that when it comes to distributing your content, it's not only about getting it into the right hands, 100% about getting into the right hands, right? But we also have to think bigger as marketers and as marketers, it is our responsibility to contribute to building meaningful customer journeys. And I think advocacy is a really powerful way to do that. So I, I sketched this little chart and a shout out to Galia, our graphic designer because anybody who knows me knows my sketching skills are are questionable. But basically what I want to show right when it comes to employee advocacy, your advocates distribute your content. We've seen through this presentation it has the ability to go far and wide and reach all the right people. Your employee networks then start engaging with that content and you see that your overall reaches increase. You are succeeding in distributing your content effectively with that overall reach. As you create and place your advocates as thought leaders, you are the power behind strengthening the relationship between your advocates and their networks, which is invaluable, right? This is what social media is all about. Social was designed to be social, social was designed to build relationships. And this is really the power of using advocacy to distribute that content, right? Then you go in, you look at like, oh, wow, let's understand from all of the advocates, who, which networks engaged where, who engaged with what that informs your content strategy. You then go back to the drawing boards, you understand what type of new content to create or what type, what type of content you need to scale. And then you go back and you do the same thing again. And this becomes a very powerful cycle, very powerful machine to distributing your content effectively. So like I said, a very. Our CEO on my first day once said, right? If you can't measure, what's the point? Just like if you can't properly distribute your content, what's the point? And you can't improve what you cannot measure. So success metrics for advocacy, I think two of the most important are content engagement and reach, right? And measuring those two KPIs month over month to make sure that the program is growing, your content is getting seen by the right eyes. And then of course, like I said earlier, it really is going to come down to your goals. Is it? Are you looking to adopt your entire organization to become brand ambassadors? Perhaps it's defining what does a brand evangelist mean? And you can set metrics onto the onboarding, share rates, brand awareness, web traffic, link clicks, the sky is really the limit. But this is actually going back full circle, right? With when you start with your, your KPIs, you really want to understand what they are so that you can measure them. And then for the next quarter, you know, go strong and hitting them and, or adjust as you go, right? Great thing about social media.
23:36
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you, Jen, so much for the presentation. There was loads of actionable tips and practical knowledge that we can take away from this to build up our own advocacy programs. So with that, I'm going to wrap up. Before we move over to the Q and A section, here are the six most important things to remember from this webinar. First of all, content with no distribution strategy does not reach its full potential to impact, inform, teach and convince. We need to distribute effectively so content doesn't sit idle or worse become a missed opportunity for our company. Employee advocacy effectively distributes content. Employee advocates amplify your content's reach. Employee advocacy is simple, intuitive, but incredibly, incredibly powerful. And finally, advocacy complements your already existing social media strategy. So with that, we're going to move over to the Q and A session. If you haven't already popped your questions in the Q and A chat, now is the time to do it. In the meantime, if you would like to connect with myself or Jen to keep the conversation going, feel free to scan the barcodes up on the screen and you can also reach out to us via email@contact Oktopost.com and marketing Oktopost.com so let's take a look at some of the questions that we've got. Okay, so Rachel sent in. I work very closely with our HR and employer branding. How do you get buy in from HR to participate in employee advocacy when they know LinkedIn is a tool for recruitment and are worried about their employees being poached?
25:07
Jennifer Gutman
Great question. So what I always do is before I launch any program, I actually will list out on my plan the key stakeholders and I always include HR as a key stakeholder to have a conversation with because I find when I can break down what employee advocacy is to HR and share how it's going to positively impact company culture and also share. Right? People are going to be sharing about where they work regardless if you have an employee program program in place. So why not help the advocates, why not help your colleagues have some fun information even about the brand to share because we know they're going to be doing it anyway. And people who are happy, people who love their job, people who are motivated, people who are recognized for their work, which you can all do through an advocacy program, they're not going to go anywhere. So I always include the HR team, the employer branding team, into the conversation. At Rolex. I see another question, actually it's an interesting question from Maya. She says how do you track the analytics of user generated content if it's posted directly by the employee rather than reposted? So I think that's a really great question. So we what Oktopost does we actually have an entire platform for employee advocacy and we distribute it to each and every employee so they have their own board that they can actually share content from. And when you share that content through the employee advocacy advocacy platform, it's collecting all of the analytics so that you're actually able to see as the marketer in the admin side, you know what kind of engagement your employees are getting on the content that is shared from Oktopost and really understand, right how your user generated content is being generated. The power of it is that the tool actually gives your advocates the ability to change the message before it's posted, to put it in their tone of voice. But you're providing them with the actual asset or the content that you want shared. Shared. I see another question from Emily, which I'm going to read out loud. Can you expand on how social intent and employee advocacy impacts ABM programs and lead gen efforts? So yes, I can. So what I will first say is I think social intent data has become a dirty word. And I say that because I think intent data in general, it always has good intentions, right? We always, as marketers we love data. We're data powered, data driven data, data driven decisions. And so we, we're hungry for data. But I think when it comes to social intent data it can be tricky to understand which social signals, if you will, are the ones that we should be looking at and saying okay, I want to take this engagement and I think that there's a, an intent to purchase or an intent to engage. So what we actually, how we're able to understand how it impacts tax ABM programs is we're actually able to understand each advocate, they're sharing out right into their networks and all of the engagements that they get on those social activities on, on their social posts. We're able to then understand and track back to the opportunities and how and which accounts these contacts are from and we can see, you know, their, their engagement history and we're able to then use that. Right. If you're running an ABM program and you have a target, a list of target accounts, we can actually see from target accounts if they're identified in your CRM, we're able to actually understand that journey a bit better to see every single social interaction and use that to be able to properly guide, you know, that account into the funnel or what if they're the buying funnel or if they're in, you know, the to get them into the funnel and contribute positively to impacting pipeline. Happy Emily, There's a lot more to that, so happy to to make sure we follow up with you on the exact house. So I'm just going down here. Any specific. This is from an anonymous, so feel free.
29:08
Alina Dallal
All good.
29:09
Jennifer Gutman
Respect the anonymy. Any specific tips on boosting employee advocacy? So in terms of boosting employee advocacy, so I in terms of amplifying that Content further sometimes what we'll do. So this is actually something I heard about a few months back. I'm going to release my secrets now. But there's like something in the industry called pods. And this essentially is you get together a group of professionals that you, you know, maybe you've networked with or fellow marketers and you add them to a pod. And this pod could be a WhatsApp group, this pod could be like a LinkedIn chat, it could be a Facebook group. And basically anytime that you have a piece of advocacy content that an advocate has shared, you can actually take a link, whether it's on From X or LinkedIn and you can drop that link in your pod network and you can ask them to engage with it as soon as this has been published. And so you take the link, put it in your pod and then people will start engaging with it. And we do know that that speed and engagement does take that post further. So that's a, that's a fun kind of behind the scenes thing that I know marketers are doing now to get, get very specific pieces of content amplified even further. So if that helps. Another question here. We haven't yet implemented an employee advocacy program. So I hope you start soon to start. Would it be more effective to involve the entire team or focus on specific individuals? So my go to is always to focus on specific individuals and I have a methodology I'll share that like kind of goes through my brain when I'm onboarding employees. So the first thing I do is I look for what I call social enthusiasts in the organization. These people are usually, you know, they're very familiar with how social media works. They're digitally native. They like social media. They're posting anyway. Like I'm not actually telling them to post and maybe they're updating about something they've learned or a conference that they're, they're in. And I also then go and look to it like some of the people I think would be good advocates and how many followers they have. And then I'll kind of group that small group. I'll bring them together and I'll usually send them an invitation or I'll go like set up a meeting with them and I'll kind of give them a pitch like this, like hey, you know Sally, I see that you're super active on social. I'd love for you to be part of our Oktopost brand, brand ambassador program. It's not for everybody, right? You kind of create this. It's not for everybody. You are special to the program I need you to make this work. Are you in? 99.9 of the time it's yes. And I get that small group together, I give them a training on best practices on the networks that we are, we find of value at Oktopost for social and I start powering them up with content. I make sure that I have enough pieces of content to run if you will like that pilot program or those specific individuals to get going. And I also know to include salespeople and to include customer facing individuals in that smaller group because I need to prove results and I need to prove results fast. So I know because they get social that they're going to be the ones to help. Now if you think back to that ripple, you have this very selective group who were personally invited to be part of the program. They're now sharing content and their colleagues start to see that their content they become interesting on LinkedIn, they become interesting on X. They're getting shout outs suddenly and like all hands or in slack channels or in teams groups about like oh salt, leader of the month. And then people start wondering I, I want to do what that person is doing. I want to what, how are, how did you get into this program? And then they all internally start speaking and then I go up to the next round which I call the average Joe's which is basically the average social media poster which I find this is the majority, the social majority at your company. These people are the type of people where you're going to give them something new, a platform, a challenge, they want to help, they like where they work but they're busy people so they're not going to be doing it consistently. Those are the people I tackle next. And then lastly I've coined the social curmudgeons and social curmudgeons are usually the people that they could have some powerful networks and I know if I could get them posting on social media that would be fantastic for our brand. But I also know they're super busy and I also know they're the type of people that when I head over their way they'll either hide from me or they'll roll my eyes when I tell them they're going to use a platform to do something. And they're like, oh, you're throwing something else at me, what do you want from me, Jen? These are the people that I incorporate into the program last only because they sometimes require a different set of training and it takes a little bit more time to get inside of their head. But if you're looking to roll out a proper program and scale accordingly. I would certainly focus on those specific individuals, the social enthusiasts and ripple effect that out until you get right the right ebb and flow of your organization in the program. I hope that helps answers that question. We do have quite a lot, so I'm going to go through and I will say that if we don't get to all the questions, we will make sure that we reach out directly and continue the conversation. So. Question from Katie. What are some interesting or creative examples of organic social content you've seen from employees, particularly in B2B? Kate, I'm so glad you asked this question. I'm going to give you a person to actually go and follow. So his name is Neil Murphy, so he's the first person that comes to mind. He has taken social selling, you know, as an advocate to new levels. I am not even telling him to make videos and he goes and like we'll, we'll release a new blog post and he's making a video on it. So he's really interesting to go ahead and follow. In terms of the, the social content that I'm seeing from employees, another very creative thing that I see from employees is when there are live events, events going on and they do videos from like the booth or they do videos of like a quick walk down, you know, the trade show floor and they are interacting in that way and it could be done from the smartphone. I know Colin Day, our managing director, was getting ready to speak at Forester and he did a video like prepping for it and he showed us like his soft drawer. Right. But it's sometimes going a little bit beyond the more traditional themes and thinking bigger. Alina, have what are some of the. Feel free to chime in because there's so many creative examples that I've seen from our own employees and also our, our customers employees sharing content.
35:33
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. A lot of the time our advocates are also posting personal content to themselves that making them stand out on LinkedIn. So whether they're into sports, they're into running that, they are posting about it and they're posting about what they do daily as well outside of work, which helps them create more of a meaningful connection with their network of followers on LinkedIn. And I can see that in the comments. They're always making sure to respond, they're always making sure to engage and they're building these relationships with people online through personal content as well as brand content. So that's something I definitely think is a good one to highlight as well.
36:08
Jennifer Gutman
I'll also throw out LinkedIn has this great feature for it's LinkedIn PDF carousels. And I think that is also another very creative way that I see employees sharing content. Basically what it does is it allows you to upload a PDF and the way we use it is we create really nice designs in Canva of the like proper size. Lena I know that you make these all the time so maybe you want if you know the, the sizes off the top of your head, what is it by 1080, 1080 by 1080 in Canva. So you do these little squares and you can create all this creative content on brand and then you can take that PDF and you can share it company wide. And when they upload that to LinkedIn, it automatically comes through as like a slideshow. So their network engages even more because they actually have to click through something. So I personally love the LinkedIn PDF carousel because you can, it's so easy and you're basically creating engaging content for your advocates to share.
37:06
Alina Dallal
They also love posting it. We noticed when we did it, all of them posted it immediately. We also noticed that with videos. But just because carousels is something so unique that brands normally post, they were excited to be able to do it themselves and share it with their network. So varying the content types you do as well is also very important.
37:23
Jennifer Gutman
Agreed. And I think the PDF carousels for B2B, it's also right, you know, we always joke, we don't want to be like be to boring. I think the carousels are an interactive way that you can take a complex idea for B2B and you can break it down into a few images or even text. But sometimes it's just easier to read like a slide than it is the message. And the other great thing about this and this, you know, this can be a webinar for a different day. Alina like demand gen versus lead gen. But when you share a PDF carousel on LinkedIn, their network can actually download that PDF for later. And I've gotten some feedback within my own network that if you're targeting, let's say The C suite, CMOs, CFOs, CIOs, whoever that may be, and they, and you share those, this LinkedIn PDF carousel or even a PDF document, you know, directly on LinkedIn, if you think about the nature of LinkedIn, how you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and we're trying to stop the scroll. Right. Sometimes people are just busy, they're heading into a meeting and they cannot read this content right now. And there's not really a way to save it for later. So creating this LinkedIn PDF carousel, you can literally save the PDF to your desktop and you know they have your content. So I'm going to move on. There's a lot of good stuff with you know, the, the creative examples and this kind of goes into the next question from shock are what kind of content should you promote? Video, blog text, text with pictures and what theme should you choose it? Should it be company win wins company lifestyle etc? So this is another good question for me. I like to stick first of all to a content playlist that's called the 50 25, 25 split, meaning 50 of the content is created from in house, you know, Oktopost content. 25% of the content that I shared with my advocates is curated and the other 25% is, is what I call thought leadership slash personal interest. Now the content type, you can go ahead and experiment what works best for your specific, you know, employee advocates. We still see that video is the most engaging and I don't think video is going anywhere soon. Whenever that a video of any sort goes up on LinkedIn, it seems to do quite well. And I would also say that, that photographs like text with pictures or I would say message with a photo works well but not like a photo of people sitting in a conference. I what I see with our AB testing, what I put in quotes because I don't ever think you can actually AB with social but with our AB testing I've seen that when we post a picture for example of like a speaker on a stage with an audience versus the speaker, it's like a close up headshot, the close up headshot of that person. It doesn't have to be a professional photo, but it's like a more clear photo usually gets more engagement than just like a, a scene of, you know, our speaker speaking on the stage. I think blogs still do well but I do know that, you know, we want to keep people on the network and being social. So you might need to experiment or balance that out in your strategy. And absolutely, yes, I think when it comes to employee advocacy programs, company wins, company lifestyle, company culture, recruitment should all be a place and have a place in your program. That's really what is going to identify your brand as a great place to work and make people proud to share where they work. And we always see like whatever campaign we're running, whenever we have culture content in our advocacy program, those campaigns outperform any other campaign. So I would definitely say to go ahead and you know, put your company wins, your lifestyle, your, your Corporate culture. Get that up on the board. All right. Another great question from Natasha from metric side of things. Is there an easy way to remove the engagement from employees? I'm not exactly sure, Natasha, if you're still on the line, exactly what you mean. But I can say if you use Oktopost, you can slice and dice the metrics any way you see fit. So if you wanted to understand just how corporate is performing, you could certainly do that. If you wanted to, you know, look at just how advocacy is performing, you could absolutely do that and break down and understand and measure side by side as you balance, you can definitely, definitely break that down. So yes, we're coming up to time and we still have quite a few questions. So if I did not get to your question, we will absolutely connect and make sure that you get your questions answered. With that being said, I just wanted to thank everybody for joining. Oh, one popped up. Does Oktopost have any best practices guides for admin when it comes to creating content for employee advocacy program? Yes, we do. If you head to our website www.Oktopost.com we have a whole resource section so I will make sure that that over to your way after the webinar because yes, we, we definitely have a lot of experience. You know, we've been doing this for 10 years so we're happy to share all of our experience with how to roll these programs out and best guides for the admin running the program to make sure that you're running an effective and ROI driven program. So with that, Alina, I'll pass it back to you. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak and I look forward to the next one.
42:24
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. Thank you everybody for joining and we hope to see you next time.
