0:01
Jeffrey Thomas
Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar How Employee Advocacy Brings the human back to B2B. Produced by Marketing profs and sponsored by Oktopost. I'm Jeffrey Thomas and I'll be your host for today's event. Before we begin, a few updates and housekeeping notes. If you experience any audio or visual problems, please try to refresh the page or log back out. And log in if you're on WI Fi or if you have multiple applications open. It could impact your viewing experience. So so when in doubt, close it out. Check out the right hand side panel for some fun engagement options. You can use the chat to connect with fellow marketers and you can reply and send reactions to other comments by hovering over them. Please use the Q and A tab. It looks like a little Q and A to submit questions for our speakers in there. You can also upvote your favorite questions. As soon as our presentation is done, we'll get to as many questions as we can and we'll start with the most popular ones. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you'll see an emoji button. Feel free to share your reactions throughout today's presentation. I'd like to take a quick minute to thank Oktopost for sponsoring today's webinar. Oktopost is the B2B social company created specifically for B2B companies. It equips organizations to win on social media, achieve measurable business results, and amplify your organization's voice. And now please join me in welcoming today's speakers. Alina Dalal is the Content Marketing Manager at Oktopost. She leads and manages the company's Employees Advocacy program, trains employees on best social media practices, and helps her revenue team spark meaningful conversations throughout social selling. Chris Sheen is a two time SaaS CMO and now leads the social Media team at Celonis. He's passionate about pushing the boundaries of what's expected in B2B and showing that it's not just consumer brands that get to have all the fun. And Annetta Francis is Leading Client Solution Manager for Global strategic accounts at LinkedIn. She drives client growth through data driven insights, tailored business plans and cross functional collaboration while championing LinkedIn's measurement and AI driven solutions. And with that, I'm going to hand it over. Alina. Please take it away.
2:08
Alina Dallal
Hi everyone. Thank you for the kind intro. Jeffrey welcome to our webinar How Employee Advocacy Brings the human back to B2B. As Jeffrey mentioned, I'm your host today. I'm Alina Delau, the Content Marketing manager Here at Oktopost, we always love questions. You can go ahead and drop them in the Q and A and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, everybody here will receive a copy of the recording after the webinar. So today we're going to be talking about how you can humanize your brand with employee advocacy. To help with this, we brought in the true experts from LinkedIn and Salonis, both leading successful advocacy programs. They'll share practical tips on managing an employee advocacy program, keep momentum going long term, and why it's essential for building brand awareness and credibility. A quick note about who we are. We're Oktopost. We're a B2B social media management platform built from the ground up for B2B brands to win social. These are some of the incredible B2B brands we're working with at Oktopost. We're LinkedIn first. We help brands measure and optimize the things that matter to B2B, from leads to business impact. We integrate with your tech stack and we help make your entire organization socially active. And talking about making your entire organization socially active. I know I'm ready to get started, so let's dive in and kick things off with some introductions. Chris, Annetta, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and your background? Chris, we're going to start with you first.
3:35
Chris Sheen
Thank you. Yeah, really excited to be here. So I'm a wannabe journalist turned marketing man. So I studied journalism at university. That was my first dream. But then found a love for marketing and spent 10 years working in startups before joining Salonis And I lead the social media team at salonis. We're a 3,000 person company with a mission to make processes work better.
3:56
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for joining us and Annetta.
3:59
Aneta Francis
Hi guys, I'm Annetta. I am also wannabe journalist. I also studied journalism at uni and ended up in marketing. I've spent last 10 years in B2B marketing, initially starting in an agency and then moving to LinkedIn six years ago. Essentially my role is all about helping clients to drive real business impact. And one of the areas that I'm super passionate about is actually employee advocacy, which is why I'm here today to talk to you. So super excited to be here.
4:29
Alina Dallal
Amazing. We're super, super excited to have you. Thank you for joining us as well. So the first question I want to ask you both, let's set the scene. What is employee advocacy and why is it important for B2B brands? Chris, I'm going to start with you first again.
4:44
Chris Sheen
Yeah. Advocacy is huge. Huge for us. I think fundamentally for us, it's about making it as easy as possible for our employees to share company approved content on social media. And there's two reasons that it's so important. So the first one is reach. This is a number that my team hear me say a lot, but it's. We've got about 250,000 followers on the Celonis company account on LinkedIn. So we're really proud of that. It's been growing over the years, but across our employees, we've got over two and a half million connections. So the potential reach of what we can do, we can get our employees sharing content is obviously huge. And the second one is trust. It's fundamental. But people believe other people more than they do companies. So as much as we'd like to think we do great content from a company point of view, people are always going to believe that authentic voice of a person and our team more than they will the company say. So that reach and trust element is really big for us.
5:42
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. Annette, do you have anything to add?
5:46
Aneta Francis
I think Chris has already covered majority of the points, but yeah, I think the key thing for me is why it matters for B2B is the authenticity and sort of the ability to create a credibility with your audience and sort of create that engagement that you don't get from just a brand sort of messaging when you've got just a logo. Just a little start to throw into the conversation is we looked at, we did a thought leadership B2B thought leadership impact study with Edelman and LinkedIn together and it did find that about 90% of decision makers actually said that when they see a referral or sort of engagement for particular brand from someone that they know on a platform and they respect and sort of have earned their attention over time, they're actually 90% more likely to influence their decision. So that is a massive number of people that you can actually drive and potentially consider your brand in a B2B.
6:47
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. You both definitely hit the nail on the head there. It's about building trust, authenticity, credibility for your brand. And that's what B2B brands want. Right? We want to boost our reach and we want to be able to build trust like in the statistic that you just mentioned. The next question I want to ask Annetta, why should we encourage our advocates to be active on LinkedIn specifically?
7:09
Aneta Francis
Great question. So to start off with, I mean, LinkedIn is the number one professional network. It is the most trusted social media platform. And it does therefore create the perfect environment for thought leadership and sort of leveraging your employees to build that thought leadership. People do come to LinkedIn to learn to engage in industry conversations, to network and build their personal and professional brands. Some of us also do come to watch some brilliant videos of sketches from office environments. So those are great also as an on top. But ultimately when we come in, we don't want to see just a sort of brand messaging. We come in to engage with the people and sort of seeing the content from people. Secondly, when it comes to reach and engagement, it's amazing. As Chris has mentioned, when it comes to companies, obviously you've got particular organic reach, but when you see all the individuals and the posts that they share, they can incrementally grow and grow their reach. Let's say I post a post now, it will appear to my newsfeed of my connections. Then if any of my connections find the post engaging or they want to comment on it or like it or share, immediately becomes visible to their network and their connections. So again, LinkedIn helps you to just drive that incremental engagement with really authentic and engaging posts and like reaching the wide audience. And I guess thirdly, majority of companies of course are trying to attract potential customers. But also, let's not forget about talent brand and LinkedIn is a really good place where you can again use your employees or work with your employees in order to build that talent brand over time as they're sharing their authentic experience, their post, you know, they talk about the company's cultural values and that's something that is helping you as a brand to attract great talent. So really when we think of employee advocacy, LinkedIn is really the place to be.
9:14
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And LinkedIn is the social hub for B2B. It's where you want to be to expand your region. As you're saying, this is where people are scrolling, it's where they're making their micros buying decisions. So it's definitely the place every B2B brand needs to focus their advocacy program off in the first place and have it as the central platform to work with. Chris, I'm going to turn to you. Could you walk us through your employee advocacy program at Celonis? Why was employee advocacy such a priority for your team and why is it still a priority today?
9:44
Chris Sheen
Yeah, so our program is 100% focused on LinkedIn, which is great because we just heard. So yeah, we're focused on LinkedIn. We've got about a thousand what we call Sellenauts signed up to the program now. And I think fundamental thing for me is we encourage our seller notes to post all sorts of content. So there's everything from product updates, customer stories, promoting events, behind the scenes, life at Salonis type stuff. And the idea is there's something for everyone. Whatever your role, whatever region you're based from, there's something for you. And I think that's really important to. Annetta said it's really not about selling. I think sometimes people go, okay, social. Like this is about selling. It's like actually some of the best stuff we do is really showing the human side of Salonis, showing this kind of the stuff that you don't see on the website, the stuff that you won't see in the pitch decks. It's actually the people behind sl and that's a big part of social for me. And then why is it priority? It's who we can reach. I talked earlier about the size of the audience of potential selling, but the beauty of advocacy is how targeted it can be. So if you think of an example of a sales guy at Salonis who's based in Paris, who's wanting to connect with multiple target accounts and potential buyers on LinkedIn, or one of our recruiters who's trying to find a prospective new hire, people they're connecting with on LinkedIn may never have heard of Salonis. And they've been selected at a very personalized level as someone we'd either like to work with or we'd love to work with us. And so the content that our employees are sharing might be their first ever impression of the brand and of the company's loneliness. So it's really quite powerful when you think of it that way, that this is, this is the moment that they first know Salonis. So if we have those people sharing great content that we've given them, it means that they, when they start going through, I've never heard of this person, haven't heard this company. They start to see what they're sharing, then, oh, actually, okay, I'm interested now. And maybe that starts a conversation to work together, or they think, oh, this looks like a cool company to work at. And it's that targeted level that's so important to me.
11:50
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And first of all, having 1,000 selenaughts, which I love the term that you've coined, is an amazing achievement. Achievement to start with, but also it just shows how many more people you can reach by having that many people on board. And as you said, it's helping everybody in their different departments. It's helping recruiters recruit more people. And as we were both constantly saying, it's about the person over the brand logo, it's the people behind the brand, which is what's going to make those connections and humanize your brand in general. The next question I have, Annetta, how do you approach rolling out an employee advocacy program in a smaller company versus a bigger one? And what does the journey typically look like from start to finish?
12:35
Aneta Francis
Sure. Both great questions. I'll actually flip them around and I'll start with what the journey looks like. And I think first important thing to say and the first and most important step for any company that wants to kick off employee advocacy is getting actually their leadership team involved evolves. What I do find is that if employees don't actually see their leadership team active on LinkedIn or, you know, sort of sharing, talking about the company, they don't necessarily feel encouraged to engage themselves. Whereas when we see leaders that are very vocal on the platform, they share their thoughts, they engage in industry discussions, they set the tone for the messaging, and they set the tone for the rest of the sort of company to follow. So it really helps to create the culture where the employees actually feels comfortable and inspired to do the same. So for me, that's a crucial step. I think for companies that are just starting out with their program, they tend to take a bit simpler approach, which could look like, for example, the comms team will write a LinkedIn post. It could be a company update, it could be a press release, it could be an article. They then send it onto the internal employees via email or whatever. Their messaging solution could be. Teams, Slack, whatever, you name it, and they essentially ask them to share it. Now, at the beginning of these sort of advocacy programs, we see that some employees will either just re share it word for words, some people will not share it at all. And some people will maybe add a sentence or two to just add their own perspective and sort of repost that post. And that is a brilliant first step. When you sort of building the program. Now, when it gets to the point of, you know, that you've got this set, what it does is it's the problem with this is that it doesn't quite feel as personal and it doesn't build that sort of. It doesn't resonate with the audience as well. So then when we think about that, it's then when the team start building a second layer to this program, and that is a bit more mature programs essentially. So then what it does is they might identify, for example, key employee Advocates within the company who maybe have got already a social following or perhaps are very subject matter experts on particular topics and that helps them then to be more comfortable. The employee advocacy teams or the ones that are running the program then build the training program and potentially build a guidelines and guidance that will essentially enable the employees to know what, what to post, how to engage and how to build that personal brand on the platform. And they also give the employees tools to track the engagement and the impact so they can gain learning over time and potentially refine the way, you know, their approach and their tone and voice, etc. So I think this is where we go from the super beginning to very advanced programs. And essentially, I guess as I said, the start of having your leadership team being involved is super crucial. And now going back to your question of whether it's different for small company versus big one, I think the maturity ultimately is the key. But maybe smaller companies might be slightly more informal in their way how they run those programs. So they might just have few key advocates within the company. It could be the founder, the leadership team, maybe few employees who are comfortable posting. But then in larger organizations is where we see a bit more advanced programs where perhaps it's a bit structured with training, content hubs and incentives, etc.
16:23
Alina Dallal
Yes, absolutely. As you're saying, having your leadership on board, number one, will make your employees feel like they're part of something that their leadership is doing. And once they see them doing it, they're also more likely to join in, which is something you mentioned that I think is really important to highlight and also giving them the support along that way, and especially when starting out a smaller one. What I would say also is making sure you cherry pick those advocates that you know are going to help you get this off the ground running. Like the ones that are already enthusiastic on social, the ones that already maybe have a good large network of people that you want to reach. So definitely I agree with everything that you've mentioned. Chris, I want to come back to you. You said you're running an advocacy program of 1000 advocates. What challenges have you faced running an employee advocacy program? And how have you overcome them? Because I know you've been doing this for a few years now, so I'm interested to hear.
17:15
Chris Sheen
Yeah, so I think two sides to the challenge I always think about and these are all ongoing. This is not like this is one of the fun bits of running your programs that you're always learning, you're always developing it, and these are things that we're constantly working Through, I think as a team. So first part of the challenge is, I kind of almost call it an internal comms challenge. It's just making people aware of the program, aware of we use Oktopost or aware of octopos, and aware that this is a thing that they should be part of. So we do loads of different things to increase awareness. We've created some really fun video content to get that out there. We join company all hands meetings, we do lunch and learn. So for example, I presented to our team in Paris this week, virtually, sadly, I wasn't in Paris. Real shame. And we made it part of the new joiner process, those kind of things. And it just becomes this thing where I would say we almost want Oktopost to become a verb where people are like, oh yeah, we need to, you should be part of Oktopost. We need to talk, to, post that, you know, that kind of stuff. So this is an ongoing thing of getting people aware and wanting to join the program. And then once you've got them on the program, the second part of the challenge is how do you get them sharing regularly and staying engaged. And this is where we're big users of Slack as a company. So we have integrations with Slack for Oktopost, we have Slack notifications and Slack group set up, we have email notifications, we do competitions, which is maybe a talking point we can go into a bit more depth on a little bit later. And fundamentally, and really importantly, I think it's part of the campaign process for pretty much everything we do for a marketing team. So if we're launching a new ebook, for example, you're ticking through the list of things that will happen to get that ebook out there, from email marketing to website banners to maybe ads. And then social and advocacy is just on that list as a standard part of the campaign process. So that's really important as well because it means that the teams that we really want to be getting the message out there, that salespeople, customer facing people, those kind of guys, they just know that this is part of their armory really to get it out there. But it's a constant ongoing challenge, I think, because particularly with internal comms, part of getting the word out there, what I've really learned is there isn't a golden bullet really that does everything. I think I was really excited when we did the company All Hands and I was like, oh, this is going to be the magic moment. We're going to get hundreds of new users overnight and it doesn't work. You get a sprinkling from that and then you do the Paris lunch, and then you get a few from that. And it's kind of this constant. You've just got to make it a constant thing where you're always talking to people about it. I think.
19:45
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. We love to say Oxyposta employee advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint. It's going to ebb and flow. There's going to be peaks, there's going to be dips. It's just trying to find those ways to get out of it when it's. When the momentum is dropping tiny bit. So whether that's joining all hands, whether that's running a competition, like you mentioned, the two solutions that you mentioned that are so strong, one of which is having them embedded in the company culture. You want everyone to know what advertise and everyone to be excited about it. And you mentioned the Slack notifications, where if something goes up on the Oktopost board for content, it goes straight to employees. They see it, they can hit share now. So really embedding that in the culture. Um, the next question I have for you, Chris, is what types of content do you create for your advocates? And which kinds of content tend to drive the highest engagement among employees of sharing them and of their networks from engaging with them?
20:39
Chris Sheen
Yeah, I think. I think first thing is so much variety to what we post. And, and actually, it's probably my favorite thing about working in social media, full stop, is the variety of stuff that we do. I think one of the lovely parts of being in a social media role is that we're probably one of the few places we touch every part of the business. So, you know, if there's an event going on, there's a social element, if there's our Academy team, so, so everything. There's a real mixture of things that we do that we get out there. And I think that's really important because as I said at the start, we. We want there to be something for everyone, want it to be like a pick and mix of the things you might want to post. But if I was to say there are like three magic types of content that typically work well in answering both of those questions, really. One is photos. And it's almost this constant reminder that LinkedIn is still a social network and people want to see what's going on in the world and want to see stuff happening. And a really nice example of this actually is we have a huge annual event we do every year called Cellosphere. It's our big event. You can tell we love the space theme, right? At zealot zones, we've got Selling arts and Sellersphere. And it's a huge event and we did it last October and we did so many posts from it. It was fantastic. It was amazing. The amount of content that was created and all of the social posts we did did really well. And I reviewed the numbers at the end of the month and seeing what performed best and you can imagine it was like nine out of the top ten posts were all Sellersphere rated. But the number one post from everything on Oktopost for our advocacy program was Oktoberfest and it was photos behind the scenes of our settlements enjoying Oktoberfest for a Munich based company. So it's a big thing for us, having fun as a team, drinking beers and that had just gone everywhere and everyone was loving it. And it's almost like when I saw that I was like, that's a reminder of what social. It's a social media platform. You know, it's LinkedIn. It's the business platform but people want to see the people behind the brand, the company. You had like customers commenting on it saying, oh, it's great to see, you know, their customer success manager having a good time. It's great to see that, you know, and that it's almost. I almost reminded my team constantly that it's that balance of one minute we might be promoting a big press release or an ebook and then you've got to, you got to do that as well. So that was number one. Number two is video. It's. It's probably the coolest thing on LinkedIn right now is the new LinkedIn, the new video feed. It's you know, that TikTok style. So really leaning into that type of video and really important on this for me is social video, not marketing video. So we have amazing video content creator at Salonis which is perfect for the website and it's like cinematic, beautiful stuff that works best on social. Isn't that, you know, when we do that, it can do okay. But generally it's the stuff where you might have. We did these prediction videos at the end of last year, which was different members of our team doing their predictions for 2025 and it was more selfie style than walking around the office, you know, doing the. They did brilliantly. And it was again that reminder. It's a social network. You know, this is, this is, this is marketing with a wink really. It's, it's a little bit different. And then the third type is news and I think particularly what people want to share in as a seminar, like they want to share the big moments that are happening at the company. If that's like our garden, magic quadrant or so it's been part of a Forbes release and stuff like that. People really like the chance to share something that other people might not have seen yet or something they're proud of about the company and those kind of things. So sometimes I don't know, you can, it might be like, oh, we were voted best place to work and people can be, oh, you know, who cares? Actually, everyone cares. Like people do want to get that stuff out there. And actually things like that do always do really well as well. So photos, social video and sharing big pieces of news I think are really good and they're golden trio.
24:29
Alina Dallal
I'm actually not surprised that those are the answers you gave, especially because people want to share. They want to be proud of the place that they work and that it was voted the place to work. And the Same thing with B2B is that people still want to see the company being social. People still want to see that people are enjoying working at the company. And I'm also, I Scroll on TikTok on the LinkedIn the hours, the new TikTok feeds. So I'm also stuck on that. Moving to the next question I wanted to ask both of you and we touched on it really briefly before and talking about kind of helping advocates make their content their own. So how do you encourage your advocates to personalize your content before they share it to their networks? And why is this important? Annette, I'm going to start with you first.
25:15
Chris Sheen
Great.
25:15
Aneta Francis
So I've already touched on it a little bit in my previous answer, but I think there's three key things that I find that work really well and that is first of all offering training and best practices and just making sure that people are comfortable with sort of the content, they know the do's and don'ts. You know, maybe having a quick workshop with the employees to just help them to get their flow of the way, how they craft the posts, the way, how they think about the different media that they use, you know, all of those aspects of it. Second thing is making it easy for them. So almost maybe when there's a thing that you want them to share, whether it's a particular update or things like that, or you want them to talk about particular topic, maybe adding some prompts in form of questions that could help them to again just craft that message, which could be maybe why does this topic matter to you? Or what's your personal take on this insight? Or those small little prompts that will just help somebody to get out of their writer's block, let's call it, and really be able to, or sort of craft the post confidently. And then I think what really, really helps is recognition and sort of celebration of the amazing posts that get shared. You know, highlighting employees who are doing it well, whether it's in team meetings or maybe in internal newsletters. And sharing those posts is super, super helpful and it helps. It really makes people to feel proud of the work that they're putting out. I'm just going to use an example of what we, for example, do in one of our ergs, which is families. When we share our newsletter, we tend to put in always a post from somebody from the erg group talking about some sort of family related challenge or celebration or whatever it is that talks about, you know, their life or their life at LinkedIn with family, etc. And it's such a brilliant way to make people excited about posting and sort of sharing their personal stuff and sharing generally a bit more authentic posts on the platform.
27:26
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I think that's also a very good hack that you mentioned before about giving them prompts because sometimes the advocates don't know where to start with personalizing and then sharing what other people have done and giving the recognition they can be inspired by people they work with. Chris, how about you?
27:40
Chris Sheen
Yeah, I think one of the simple things is having a personal perspective always makes a post perform better. Like 100% of the time personalizing the post is, is, will make the post better. And one of the things that I, a lot of this is training actually. I think training is really important. It's a big part of doing these kind of things is that a little bit like I talked about the internal comms, the training's never finished. You've got to kind of constantly be thinking about teaching your teams, helping users with the little tricks. And actually one of the ones on personalization is sometimes people, oh, I'm not a copywriter, you know, I'm not, I'm not social media. What do I do? It's like write one sentence, just one line at the start of the post. You know, again, my team get bored of me saying that, the number 1, 1, 2 to them. But it's like there's 102 characters on LinkedIn before that little Seymour thing comes up. It's really not much. You haven't got to be, you're not writing a book, you're writing it, you're writing one or two lines. And I'll give an example for my Own my own world. We last week we published as a company a case study with Campari. Really cool video with the drink company Campari. And we obviously provide post option for foods post. And I was like, oh, I'll do my version. And I was, I love the story. My wife, My wife loves their drinks and she does. She loves Naparel Spritz. And it's immediately that makes the post different. Right? It makes it my post, not just the companies. The rest of the post I didn't change because it, it played great. It was like. And it's just that first line makes the post mine. And then the other thing is why it's important is that again, everyone's different. Everyone's got their own voice. You know, that's my tone of voice. We all speak differently, we all write differently. So I think it's really important that people see what they do on social as like representing themselves and the company. And I think that's a really important part of actually almost making it more fun as well. I think when people do that and make it their post, they're going to be immediately more engaged with how it does and they're excited to see it do well in those kind of things.
29:33
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I also think it helps them want to post more because they get excited that it's their personal brand that they're building. And I love the 1, 1, 2 thing. I think I'm going to start using that as well. But as you guys are saying, once they start making the content their own, that's what differentiates them on a feed. So not everybody's posting the exact same content and it shows their personality, which is also very, very important in employee advocacy. The next question I have, Annette, I'm going to turn to you. How can we encourage advocates create content aligned with their own voice? So continuing with what you were saying before, and why is it important for them to build their personal brands?
30:09
Aneta Francis
Sure. So I think first of all is just encouragement. I think a lot of us, when we think about posting on social media or especially on LinkedIn, maybe there is almost a little bit of a blocker of being, you know, do I have anything to talk about? Do I have something valuable to say, you know, oh my gosh, I need to post something. And I think reminding your teams that actually, first of all, anyone, even on this call, you know, the answer is you always have something to talk about. And absolutely you do need to post because, you know, we all have incredible experiences. We've got different backgrounds, experience perspectives. So when you share Those with authenticity and with empathy. It's a really great way to share the content with others and sort of enable them to see different points of views, but then also different parts about the, for example, company or the different initiatives you do. I think when it comes to helping really the teams to talk about and sort of post is maybe really helping them to find the why. So maybe, you know, get the advocates to think about what do they want to be known for as a person or, you know, as their personal brand, what do they care about in their industry or what experiences or insights they can maybe share and that will start bringing that personalization that is so, so crucial to employee advocacy. Because once they connect with the topic, it is much more easier for them to write about it. But then also it will feel much more natural to the reader and sort of feel more authentic to the reader to actually read that content and read and feel that passion almost from the post. And again, I think, as I already said, providing sort of different prompts around what lesson you've learned in your role or what industry trend excites you and things like that, we'll just get them think differently around the different topics and therefore they'll be also able to craft different messages because five different people will probably answer that question five different times even though they're sharing the same company update. So it's just a really, really good way to get people to think and engage. And I think something that Chris has mentioned earlier is the use of different formats and just making sure that they're either available or that the people know how to write them and how to potentially produce them, whether it's a recording video or whether it's using an image. Because not everyone wants to write an essay. Some people want to do a shorter bullet point. Some people prefer 120 characters before see more. Someone is really, really good on a video. So just use them. And then I think normalizing imperfection is something that needs to happen because I think again and I can, you know, I'm very, very guilty of that. Before I post anything on, on the platform, I'll rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it. And then I'm like, hang on, Anita, you need to stop now. It's not going to be perfect. It's okay. It's, you know, me talking and it's okay. It's fine for it not to be perfect English or perfect 100% message. Like it's that authentic part of me that's coming out essentially. And that's okay. So I think those sort of points really help and support the team in feeling confident and feeling okay to actually sort of post on the platform and from why the Personal Branding is Super Important. Again, I think it's something that not only helps your company in showcasing the brilliant talent that you've got because your employees are ultimately your biggest asset, but actually it also helps you to work on your personal development. It potentially can help you with future opportunities from career growth perspective and get involved in different trends and build different networks. And essentially it's a great way to build your brand and keep up with your brand.
34:17
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I think what's also so amazing is to get your advocates on board and if they're like why should I do this? This personal brand stays with them no matter where they go, this is theirs and this is their career, which I think is also something really important. And as you're saying, the whole way through the whole thing it's about supporting them and making sure the door's always open and helping them the whole way through the next question Annetta, stay with me because I have another one for you. We spoke about it briefly before, but I want to dive into it because I know you have a lot to say about it. But what impact does an active executive presence have for a brand on social media? And can we talk a little bit more about why advocacy leaders should include them in their programs?
34:58
Aneta Francis
It's the impact is tremendous and again I see it over and over when we see executives engaged. It's the results are incredible. We can start from for example when we launched thought leader ads last year it was with having thought leadership in mind and potentially having executives in mind when it comes to bringing the authenticity of the messaging. And we see for example this being used a lot for events, for different ways of sharing content either pre or post event and getting people to be engaged with variety of events. And the results from it are always incredible. And obviously this is a not organic but paid but we've seen over and over at least forex CTRs to the events, forex registrations, you know to particular whether it's a webinars, whether it's a in person events and things like that. And that is something purely because that post is coming from a person and from a person who potentially is already known to their network a little bit more as an executive of the company. So that is that sort of layer of, you know, building a relationship with the clients or sort of network with the clients. The second layer to that is then thinking about the Employees and I think, you know, lead by example for me is always super crucial in any scenario. And seeing authenticity from leaders is something that makes me feel okay to share stuff. And I still, you know, not me, everybody. So if they talk about the company updates or company posts, brilliant. That's one step. When they talk about particular values that they care about within the company or outside, whether it's the charities they work with, whether it's their family, different challenges that they might have through their career or through their sort of personal life and bring it back to the platform in very authentic way. It's something that, again, gives permission to the employees to do the same and to feel that it is okay to do the same. And, you know, LinkedIn, for example, is brilliant at that as a company, not as just a platform. Like, our leadership is very active on the platform. They often share all different challenges and all different things. So it feels okay for, you know, when I returned back from maternity leave and it was a whirlwind first few months to share actually on a platform of what a whirlwind it was and how much you learn and how much you struggle and try to spin many plates and eventually somehow succeed. But it was okay to say that because our leadership team makes it okay to talk about stuff like that. So the executives are a key to, or the leadership team is a key to really enabling and empowering their employees.
37:56
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. It's very clear that the benefits are twofold. One is, as you said, it's empowering their employees and making them feel like they can do this kind of thing and build their personal brand online. But also the impact that has from a marketing perspective and bringing more people to your website and brand awareness and things like that. So the next question I want to ask both of you, what common mistakes have you seen your advocates make when it comes to sharing content? And how can we help our advocates avoid them? Chris, I'm going to start with you.
38:29
Chris Sheen
Yeah, I think really simple, actually, two big ones for me. One is I think people get maybe turned, turned away from it and put off by the idea that they have to post loads. And actually, really simple, my guidance is try and aim for posting once a week. Start posting once a week, which really isn't that hard to do. It's five minutes per week and immediately you got 50 posts a year. And you know these people who are like, oh, I don't really do anything on social, like, okay, well, they start that small. And we'll say to people that if you can do five minutes a week, that's great. Or block 15 minutes once a month in your calendar, schedule it out for the month and forget, you know, set and forget. So that's really simple. And then I think someone put it in the chat. We completely agree with that person who said it. Use AI to help personalize the post. So, you know some amazing tools out there now to do exactly that. Make the post. Use your. Use AI to get you started and then just tweak it to make it. Make it. You make sure those last words are yours. But, but yeah, do those two things and, and actually it's very, very simple to get going. And you know, I even do it myself that I have a weekly calendar reminder to, to post every Wednesday. It's like my commitment to myself to do that. And actually it's really satisfying just ticking that task off on your calendar every week and going okay. And again, to Anita's point, lead by example. I think that's really important.
39:49
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. And Anetta.
39:51
Aneta Francis
Sure. So I think from the biggest mistake that I see is when people talk or post around about content that they don't care about or don't, are not driven by or not engaged in enough and not invested in, because you will immediately feel it from a post and it will feel very almost sterile. It will not bring up the personality, it will not bring up the passion, it will not bring up the engagement and therefore it will just not be successful. So I think always either don't post about the topic or really try to find something that you care about within the topic that you can actually then spin your post with. Your personality and your messaging, your authenticity.
40:33
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. I think these are two, both very, very valuable points and it's something that we can help our advocates along the way with. Chris, I'm going to turn to you. Let's talk results. What impact has employee advocacy had on your social strategy?
40:50
Chris Sheen
Yeah, I mean, we've doubled the reach of our content in the last two months. So I talked about a thousand seven months. That's pretty much doubled in the last 12 months as we've really invested in it. The key thing is it leads to more of the marketing metrics that the business really cares about. So whatever that might be, that might be marketing, qualified leads, it's people downloading, you know, ebooks. It could be people signing up to events like this. It could be selling tickets for events. And, and actually the data, data is king here. Like, it's really easy to actually put, you know, UTM tracking, which we do through automatically, and, and then See, See what happens. So my favorite story, I mentioned Sellersphere earlier. As you can imagine, we do loads of promo posts to, to sell tickets for that event. It's our big event in Munich. We, we looked at the data at the end, and just before the event, we'd sold twice as many tickets from advocate posts than we had the Salonis company company post. So actually, as simple as that, you know, it doesn't take much more persuading than that just to say, well, the data's there in front of you. Like, this is our, you know, our solenoids getting the message out there. And then the second effect for us as a, as a social team, obviously we, we run our social accounts as well, is it's had a major effect on follower growth of the main Salonis account. So if you imagine you've got, you know, hundreds of our employees putting posts out there about the company, very simple. We tag Celonis in their post and then people, they're reaching out going, oh, who is this Salonis company? Okay, let's follow them as well. So it has this wonderful kind of beautiful circle where actually you're all helping each other and it kind of, when it works, it's great. But yeah, the key thing is ultimately what does, what does the team, what does the business care about? Those metrics are what we're ultimately leading up to. And I think that's when it's exciting. That's when it really works best.
42:42
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Congratulations. I know you've, you've worked very hard and you've built a very strong and amazing employee advocacy program. And so it's amazing to hear the results you're having and how it's impacting you. Moving on to the last question now, and it's for both of you, and I think this is going to be very, very useful for anybody who's listening and watching us today. For those considering launching their own employee advocacy program, what advice would you give them? Annette, I'm going to start with you.
43:10
Aneta Francis
Sure. So for me, it's be patient. Rome was not built in a day, and neither will be your advocacy program. It's going to take a lot of time, a lot of, you know, power, a lot of messages, a lot of trying to get people to share and sort of learn and be sort of proactive and happy and be confident. So I think just be patient. It will get there in a while and I'm sure that Chris can probably speak to that.
43:40
Alina Dallal
Great advice.
43:41
Aneta Francis
What would you say?
43:42
Chris Sheen
100% great advice. And, yeah, talking about our Campaign. Our program's been in place for a few years now, so it takes time and, you know, you start one step at a time, so it's really important. So I think I can almost learn from the mistakes we've made over the, over the last few years. And there'd be like, three things, I think. One is keep it simple. The first iteration of our advocacy campaign, we're like, oh, we'll give people options. It's LinkedIn, it's Instagram, it's. We'll do Twitter and we'll do Facebook. And the problem is you, you end up creating this real beast for yourself of becoming very, very complicated. You've got to create different types of content. Some people, oh, it's not for me because I'm not on Twitter. Oh, no, you can, you can. You're on LinkedIn, so that's fine. So keeping it simple, not having too many topics and buckets of content, all these kind of things that are tempting but actually makes the barrier to entry much, much harder. Number two, that training part, you know, training, training, training, like, just keep reiterating, like, one post a week is fine. Get the message out there. Just all these things that we've probably been talking about in the, in the last 45 minutes, like, make as many people aware of that as possible. And then thirdly, it has to be part of the marketing process. So in the same way that, as I said, when you, you're launching a big event, it's just got to be one of the line items. It has to just become, yeah, social media and therefore advocacy is part of what you're doing. And actually that, that isn't as hard as you might think to do because once you, you put it out there and say, we can do that, most people are happy to get the extra support. You know, most people, like, if they're, If I'm in the events team and I'm running a big event and you go, by the way, include advocacy as part of your, your plan, then normally will go, great. Thank you. That's. That's great. You're going to help me sell more tickets to my event. So. So I think combining those three things along with patience, as Annette said, I think it's a good way.
45:28
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I think you've both left very, very valuable advice. The one thing I would add is keeping your advocates in the center and the heart of your program. If they have feedback for you, ask for it. If they have anything they want help with, give it to them. If they send a survey, that's Honestly, the best thing you can do, send a survey, ask for feedback, and if you can, implement just one thing as soon as possible. I feel so valued and want to continue being part of it. So that's just one thing that I would add to the advice that you guys have left. So with that, we're going to move over to the Q and A. I can see some people already left their questions in the box. We're going to get through them now. We have around just over 10 minutes to look at it. In the meantime, our QR codes for LinkedIn is up there. If you want to connect with us, continue the conversation. Is that any. If there's anything else you'd like to learn from Chris and Annetta, feel free to reach out so I can see the questions somebody has asked Caitlin, Caitlin has asked, could you share more about competitions or prizes you've done to get employees motivated? Have you had experience with this? And if not, I can also.
46:34
Chris Sheen
Yeah, we, I can talk. We. We do a prize. So we do a quarterly competition to incentivise people. I think incentives are really interesting one, because I'm personally not the. I think. I think it's a nice addition, but it shouldn't be the heart of your program, if that makes sense. I. The way you think of prize is almost a little bit of a fun icing on top of the cake, because ultimately I think you have to have intrinsic motivation of people wanting to be part of the program. But that said, what we use prizes for on a quarterly basis is to really incentivize the good behaviors. So we build incentives around people who are posting once a week, which I've talked about before, like, incentivize that behavior, incentivizing people to edit their posts and personalize those kind of things. And then, yeah, we do kind of like gift vouchers and those kind of things and have fun, fun with that. And again, it is what my experience of prizes is that if we've got a thousand people on the program, there's about 50 that will be really into the prize thing and are kind of obsessing over the leaderboard, checking it constantly, and they're like, oh, they're in it the other 950. They're not fast. So I think it's a really nice addition. But for me, it's like it's the icing on top of the cake. It's a nice thing. That's my view. But I know that other people might have a bit of different experience of how more fundamental it can Be absolutely.
47:55
Alina Dallal
I know for us, we do love competitions, but I agree with you. Sometimes what we're doing for our next one actually we're rewarding things like Rising Star. So somebody who wasn't posting so much but now is posting more. So it's finding different ways to reward those behaviors like you said, that you really want to show off on. We also split our advocates into leaderboards. So we know the executives have a bigger reach. We know that they have a wider network. So we put them in their own leaderboards so that we can give everyone a better playing field is also something else we do. Annette, is there anything you have to add to this one or.
48:29
Aneta Francis
I think pretty much what I mentioned before is also just the. Not always having just an incentive in the sense of, you know, a prize maybe, but also just the recognition across the company. Everyone loves to be called out in a global all hands or, you know, in a regional all hands, whatever it is. And just having those call outs for great posts and celebrating them is sometimes more powerful than actually, you know, doing a competition as such. So there's various different ways and I think you have to try whatever works within, within your teams. Also for sales, salespeople are very competitive. So I think leaderboards for those 100%.
49:10
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. I can attest to that one as well. We have another question, Chris, it seems like it's for you. It's from Rhonda. Are you using an Ad Scoop advocacy tool to push out the content to share or you're doing it manually? I hear you mentioning Slack and emails. She'd like to hear more about how you're doing it.
49:27
Chris Sheen
Yeah, quick answer there. Because we use Oktopost, so Oktopost is fantastic, can recommend them all. And, and actually the key for us is the integration into those tools. So we integrate into Slack, which is amazing and means that all of our advocates get, get notified through Slack. They get email notifications for key posts as well. So I think once you're hitting, you know, a certain number of people in your program, I think there's a company size question here. I think you really do need to be looking to invest in a tool to manage it. And yeah, Oktopost is fantastic. And yeah, I've tried this in the manual way before at smaller companies and I think up to about 30, 40, 50 people you can do it. But then it comes a point where actually you need the tools. And I think, yeah, that's my experience.
50:14
Alina Dallal
Annette, this question is, I assume it's coming towards you because we're talking a lot about executives and leadership buy in. Mary has asked, would you recommend ghost writing executive posts and taking over their social accounts?
50:28
Aneta Francis
I think mix and match is probably where it always ends up being. But I think ultimately, where possible, if it's the actual executive talking about, you know, the stuff and using their own language, using their own voice and tone, I think it will always be more powerful than having somebody else manage their social almost. But that is my personal opinion. Anybody can disagree.
50:54
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I do think there's. That I agree with you. There's. Having the executive voice come through is really important. I know some, maybe sometimes executives might be shy. They don't they, which is surprising, but sometimes they can be. They might not want to post on LinkedIn. We all have that. What I would recommend, if that is the case is interviewing your executive, working with them, finding out what they want to talk about, what they're passionate about and helping them, but making sure they always have that final read. So as you're saying it sounds like them once you hit post
51:25
Aneta Francis
to add to that is make sure. And Chris has said that already, simplify and just have a simple strategy. I think the best way that I've seen and I've worked with people is having just three topics, three key topics that you care about or values or whatever it is, and breaking those down into, okay, this is what the company is talking about under that topic or value. This is what I want to talk about under that topic. And then perhaps here is additional posts that I could be considering. And just having those three key areas that you concentrate, concentrate your content around really helps them to actually, you know, build up the cadence and build up the story. And then maybe once they feel comfortable with that, they can then start sort of looking outside on additional topics.
52:11
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. The next question has come in from, for both of you, it's from Dana. How can you measure the success of an employee advocacy program? Should it be based on reach the number of employees sharing content, or do you prefer to look at another metric or is it a mix of a few?
52:27
Chris Sheen
Yes, actually. Great. All of them. So yeah, I think, I think, I think exactly that we basically have three things we care about, say how many people are sharing the, the reach of, of the shares. So it's almost. And that's, that's really simple because you've got more people sharing multiplied by the number of posts and their followers. That gives you the reach. And then the third one really important is, is all of those other marketing metrics that you care about. So again, ebook downloads, selling tickets, you know, website Traffic and that sort of stuff. So that's where your kind of UTM tracking comes in. But yeah, fundamentally you've nailed it there I think, I think start with those two kind of key things, impressions which, and reach and the number of employees. Think it's. Yeah, it keeps it simple. I think I'm a big believer in, you know, keep, keep your metrics really simple because actually as a team yourselves, you can be like, right, can we increase it 20%? You know, I always say to my team, they know the number we're looking to reach because it's really simple. You know, we've got a thousand advocates, can we get to 1200 in the next year? It's like super simple kind of goals in that respect.
53:31
Aneta Francis
Netta, 100% agree with what Chris said. I think keeping it simple, looking at the advocacy almost as your brand messaging and measuring in that way, it's amazing that if you're able to tie it down to for example the sales of tickets or things like that, that's a nice added extra. I think a lot of brands want to almost measure every single thing down to ROI and that's not always going to happen. So see advocacy as your brand, as your sort of voice to your potential customers, your potential talent, future talents and just look at it that way. So measure what you can, but don't over measure.
54:12
Alina Dallal
Yeah, amazing. The next question we have, we got from Molly should I'm curious how others have gone about getting their marketing team to buy to buy into prioritizing employee advocacy and social selling while also turning a large amount of content across web and email which they may traditionally see as a bigger impact.
54:32
Chris Sheen
Yeah, honestly data, like that's where data is your friend. Really, really simple. So I use the example of the salesfor tickets, one of the favorite ones that we had. We have a dummies guide, very popular marketing thing to do, right. You create a dummy guide. So something says a dummy guide for process mining. And when that was launched, you know, the results are shared. Oh, here's where all of the leads have come from. And I was like delighted because organic social was the number one and then it was like email number two, paid as number three. So it's like, you know, you can. Data is your argument really with these kind of things. So particularly when it's lead based stuff like that, I think it's really straightforward. And again that power of the reach of advocacy like the number of people is huge. So can take time. But data is your friend.
55:19
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. Annette, is there anything you would add
55:21
Aneta Francis
to this one I think fully covered.
55:24
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I think Chris hit the nail on the head. I think showing them the proof and showing them, hey, look, this is working. This is going to help people see the work that you're creating is as you said, data is king. Like you just show them the results. I have another question from Zoa. She said, can anyone participate in the advocacy programs or are they picked by you? So I guess as you're building out the programs, how do you decide who to choose?
55:47
Chris Sheen
Yeah, I'm personally huge. I think it should be open. I'm kind of really, really strong on that. Some companies might say it's just for salespeople, customer service. Actually some of our best advocates are people you really wouldn't expect. You know, be like a junior intern designer. Oh wow. Their stuff's amazing. And it'll be, you know, someone really senior. That, that is almost the beauty of it is that it should be for anyone and, and anyone can be a brand advocate. You know, it really doesn't matter. I think, you know, a great, great companies have that right. All sorts of different types of people that are representing them. So I'm a been fundamental from day one. This should be open to everyone. That's my really strong.
56:24
Aneta Francis
Beyond that, 100% agree. I think every person that advocates for you as a brand is additional network that you're showing your content to like use or not use. Encourage everybody within the company because the more people you've got, the more your message gets spread. So yeah, absolutely.
56:46
Alina Dallal
I think the more the merrier in this case. And it's only going to help. And if people want to be a part of the program, it's, it's, it's an amazing thing that they want to be a part of it. So it's a win, win for everybody. We have time for two more questions and if we don't get around your questions, we will reach out to you with an answer afterwards. The first is from Maria and she said when will it be considered as a brand ambassador of a company? So at what point does an employee be considered as a brand ambassador?
57:15
Chris Sheen
So we kind of think of it as day one. Yeah. And actually advocacy is part of our brand ambassador programs. It's a really good question because we're talking about this a lot at the moment and actually we, we are doing a lot about brand advocacy as we grow Sonus and it's, it's like one of the, one of the items. Can you imagine like on a, on a slide of like five things to be a Bad advocate. You know, if you're in the office helping to, to be part of building the brand and doing events and stuff, advocacy is just part of it. It's that. So, so to me, it's, it's, it's day one, you know, as soon as you're becoming an advocate, you're helping to advocate them and put the brand out there. So. So to me, they are beautifully interlinked. And. Yeah.
57:55
Alina Dallal
Annette, did you have anything to add?
57:58
Aneta Francis
No. I think, again, the people are your advocates from the moment they're within your company and they talk about your company and they share about your company. So I don't think there's necessarily a difference between brand ambassador or there's too much pressure put on the word of brand. Brand ambassador. Everyone who loves the brand, talks about the brand, works for the brand, is the ambassador.
58:21
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. Whether they're talking about you on social media or not, that they're advocating for your brand. So from the minute they step through those doors, sign the contract, start working with you, they're your ambassador, in my opinion as well. So moving to the last question, there were two that I saw that I think that we can combine. So somewhere Sam asked, are there any guardrails. Sorry. That are important to put in place for an employee advocacy program, for example, topics that are off limits. And there was another question that I saw from, from Mark. It was, how does your social media policy support employee advocacy participation? So I think we can answer these both together.
59:00
Chris Sheen
Yeah. So for us, we have a social media policy. It's like probably the least fun part of my role is updating the social media policy every year and making sure it's all covered. But it's your classic practical advice that you'd expect in that really, which is things that are off limits, politics, those kind of things, talking about competitors in negative ways, those kind of things. So that you do need a policy to get out there. And whether people read it or not, you've got to try and get that again. It's part of the training. Right. And then the second part, having an advocacy program, obviously all of the content that we're providing through Oktopost is, is approved. You know, it's not going to touch upon those areas that were off limits. So. So actually it kind of, you know, kind of helps both sides of it, really, because you're like, well, if you want to stick to stick on message, here you go. Here's his tens to hundreds of posts that you can kind of go out with.
59:51
Alina Dallal
Annette, is there anything you would add to this?
59:53
Aneta Francis
I don't think so. I think Chris has covered it. You always need a policy of some sort just to make sure that, you know, everyone's aware of how. And I think it all goes back to the training race that normally will be part of your training of, you know, do's, don'ts, you know, topics to talk about, topics to maybe stay away from things that are. So, yes, have a policy, have a guideline. So there is no surprises for anybody.
1:00:19
Alina Dallal
Absolutely.
1:00:21
Chris Sheen
If I jump in, my top tip for social media policy, which has changed my life since three years ago. Right. My first this year is AI has made that such a, you know, such a help with something like that of updating the policy. You can really use AI to, to make sure you're up with the latest trends and help you write something really compelling. So that's my little, my little trick and everything.
1:00:43
Alina Dallal
AI can also fill in the gaps. Maybe there's something you didn't think of. So they can also come in and help with that. But with that, I want to thank both of you so much for joining me. You guys have been incredible, incredible, incredible panelists. I've learned so much from you and I know that our listeners have too. And I want to thank everybody for joining us today. Jeffrey, I'm going to hand over to you again.
1:01:02
Jeffrey Thomas
All right, thank you. That was a great conversation, everybody. Elena, Chris and Annetta really appreciate your presence today. Thanks again to Oktopost for sponsoring today's session and thank you all for joining us. We truly value your feedback. So please click on the link that will either pop up on the screen here in a moment or you can find the same survey link down in the chat. We can't wait to see you again at the next Marketing Props event. Have a great day.
1:01:27
Aneta Francis
Thanks, everyone.
1:01:28
Chris Sheen
Thanks, everyone.
