0:04
Suz Barton
Okay, so, hi there. I'm Suze from the marketing team here at Oktopost. I'm joined today, of course by little Octi. He'll be helping me make sure we stay stay in sync with the sides and the, and the, and the talk track. But. So here at Oktopost we believe that social media has traditionally been somewhat overlooked compared with other own channels. So it's part of our mission to shine a light on the power of social media for B2B marketing and also to celebrate those people that we see really making an impact. So I'm the lucky one today that gets to speak to one of our customers, Helen Hauck from ifs. So, Helen, hi. Thank you for joining and welcome.
0:45
Helen Hauck
Thank you very much.
0:46
Suz Barton
And to kick us off, can you just tell us a bit about yourself? I'd really love it if you can tell us what got you into social professionally and also just tell us a bit about your role at ifs.
0:57
Helen Hauck
Absolutely. What got me into it professionally? Well, gosh, probably, probably using it in my outside work life, if I'm honest. I am old enough, I probably don't want to admit this on something that's being recorded, but I'm old enough to remember where there was no such thing as social media. So my first job out of university was website design and at that point then there was no consideration about putting your Facebook link on a page because it didn't exist. So I remember when Facebook was first created and being a bit kind of inquisitive but also questioning whether it was something that was really going to take off. I told you the lights were going to go off. So yeah, so I am. I remember just getting it, getting into it from then I did again back in a lifetime ago, it feels did some fashion blogging in my 20s and kind of got a bit more of the scene with some of the more high profile kind of bloggers and influencers in London. And again, this was long before influencer was even a term. So it was just great to kind of be on the, on the, on the fringes of all this stuff as it was coming together and just see, see it taking place and kind of be involved, but obviously never full time. And then an opportunity came up fundamentally last summer at IFS to take over the social media role. Prior to that I'd been in a industry marketing role focused on the manufacturing industry, which I really, really enjoyed. And a lot of what we were doing was for social media as part of that job. But then an opportunity came up to move into the comms team and take on the social media role. So I jumped at the chance and it will be a year in August. I've been doing this.
2:35
Suz Barton
Brilliant. Well, I think, as we'll discover soon, you're an absolute natural at this. So thanks so much for being with us today.
2:47
Helen Hauck
So, apologies.
2:52
Suz Barton
I will learn how to transition this slide by the next one, I'm sure. So today we're here to talk about employer branding and we've dropped a definition up on, on the slide here, but ultimately, you know, I think it just boils down to answering that question, what's it really like to work at or for your company? And it's about using your employees to do that, so using their voices to tell the story of your company culture, vision and values. And I think that by using your employees to tell that story in that human way, you also talk to what's it like to work with your company and really just share kind of in the most human, authentic way possible. What's your brand really like? What's your company really like to work for and to work with and all that good stuff. So that's really what we wanted to talk to you about today, Helen. So just jumping on, we wanted to talk to you specifically because of the Team Purple initiative, which I know goes wider than social, but we are Oktopost have seen what you've achieved on that channel in particular and just think this is a great example of an employer branding success story. So can you set the scene for us a bit about what this all means?
4:06
Helen Hauck
Yeah, definitely. I think you've hit the nail on the head, right? When you're applying for a job at a company, you get the job descriptions, you know what you're going to be doing on a day to day basis. But what you don't get from that bit of paper or from that, you know, document on a screen is, well, who will I be working with? What are they like? Am I going to like the culture? Am I going to like the ethos of this business? And I think whilst, you know, every job description probably has a summary on ifs is this type of company or any companies like this, how do you genuinely know that's the case? And in the three plus years I've been here, when I've done interviews with people, that's the one thing they want to know is what's it like? Do you like it? Do you actually like the people? And I think social media in particular is just such a wonderful platform for people to be able to go and find that information out Obviously, we want people to ask us, but then you're then seeing the opinion coming from other individuals, you know, are not the person that's trying to hire you effectively. So hopefully relatively unbiased. So that's really where I see that the power behind what we can achieve on social media from an employer perspective, in terms of the brand, but the Team Purple concept, if you will. I wish, I wish I could sit here and go, oh, yeah, it was all my idea. It wasn't. This was something that existed long before I joined. IFS in the fact that we are, you know, our brand colors are purple. Fundamentally, it's not. We haven't gone really creative with the name of it, but it differentiates us from a lot of our competition. So without naming names, a lot of them are, you know, blues, reds. Yeah, yellow. So from our perspective, it really gives us an opportunity to kind of differentiate who we are and the fact that actually we are Team Purple and what that means. And yeah, as I say, it's not something that we've set out with that concept in mind of. Right. This is going to be our employer branding. This is what we're going to do with it. It's really something that has actually just grown itself organically and we've just been able to, I guess, get on board with that and leverage it and really help shape where it's gone, especially from a social media standpoint.
6:04
Suz Barton
Okay, fantastic. Thank you. And so with that, from that social media perspective. So, of course, as marketers, we always want to know, is it working? How are we measuring this? So what does success look like for you when you're kind of defining how Team Purple's working on social.
6:24
Helen Hauck
Well, I think what interests me in terms of when I took over this role was I didn't realize how data driven it would be very much from a creative background. I have a degree in design. I really enjoyed that aspect of it. But actually I also really enjoy the metrics and the targets and how are we going to hit them and what impact does different things have on what we're trying to achieve? So for me, what does success look like? I really leverage the data that was accessible to me. So we have a relationship with LinkedIn, so I asked them if they could pull the usage for the hashtag Team Purple over the course of. Well, I asked for the last two years, I think they managed to do it up until the end of March was the. The most recent, the data that they had. So, you know, I should make it clear we're not the only People that use, you know, hashtag Team Purple, it's not trademarked, anybody can use it, but we're the ones that I think use it principally. So looking at this, it's kind of reflective of what I was anticipating seeing, which was a peak at the beginning of 2021, because that's when we did our big brand relaunch and we lit up. And I've got some photos later in the slide deck. We l various places around the world purple. And the phrase I think that really was used quite frequently during that sort of February, March period was that we turned LinkedIn purple, which was great. So a lot of people were therefore using that hashtag in association with that particular activation. But then really what I'm pleased to see is we made a concerted effort to adopt using it as part of our advocacy and as part of our corporate posts from January onwards this year. And I think you can start to see on this graph the increase in terms of the usage of it. And then if you can flick to the next one, that's actually a slide that we have pulled straight from Oktopost. So this is all the data that's gone out through Oktopost. So you can see here earned and owned. And you can see here, obviously the earned. Yes, we're putting it in advocates posts as suggestions. But obviously more and more people are now beginning to share those posts and really get on board with it. And I think what's really fascinating to me is that obviously this is the use within Oktopost. So arguably this is the bit that we have to a certain extent control over in terms of we're using that hashtag, we're making the decision to put it into suggestions, to put it into posts. But actually one of the things that I love the most about this job is seeing people use it themselves, choose to use it when they create their own posts and the way that they're using it to refer to us as a collective. And I think that, to me is the thing I'm most proud of, is actually that it's not something that's corporate mandated. Yes, we're starting to use it more often and obviously this graph here is quite representative of the data we just looked at LinkedIn for this year. But you can, you know, you. It's just, it's just great to see people genuinely wanting to use it and doing it with pride. And I think it just reaches so far beyond advocacy at that point that people are actually genuinely choosing to do that themselves.
9:16
Suz Barton
So just to. Just to clarify, so the distinction between the two lines, then. So when we're looking at earned, this is your own employees.
9:24
Helen Hauck
Yeah. So earned is the advocacy. So for us, that's our area of growth, really, from a. From a social media standpoint, our owned, if you will. So the one at the bottom is. Is our corporate channel. So I, I always call them the Steady Eddies. You know, they're fairly consistent. We grow at a particular percentage. You know, they. They grow regularly. We get good engagement. But actually the advocacy piece, and, you know, and obviously I'm. I'm preaching to the converted in terms of. But that's really where we have the biggest opportunity for growth, reaching beyond our existing audience. So that's been a huge area of focus for us.
10:00
Suz Barton
Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so just moving on then. So I think employer branding is often talked about in the context of recruitment in particular, so I wondered if you can share kind of, you know, what you've seen at ifs, as, you know, obviously we can see, certainly since September of last year particularly, there's been that real spike in the hashtag usage. Have you seen that kind of coming through in any conversation with your HR colleagues?
10:29
Helen Hauck
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're having a much broader conversation now around employer branding, where we take that to in the future and how we look at a comprehensive campaign and what are the messages that we want to get along, you know, we'll get out there. How does this align to what we're doing in terms of our Moment of Service campaign, which we'll come to in a minute. But actually, what I. What I did for this, because again, I'm obviously on social media every day, unsurprisingly, because that is my job, but I actually wanted to ask people that have recently joined IFS what their perspective was. So I put the question out on our internal social platform to my marketing colleagues and these were some of the comments that I got. So it was really fascinating to me that people genuinely, and I suppose rightly so, if you're again looking to join an organization, one of the first things you're going to probably do is go and look at their website and then go and look at the people on LinkedIn that you're potentially going to work with. And it was just great to see the comments coming through about actually how people felt it was really genuine, how actually, you know, they could see the kind of pride that people had working here and the culture and what came across. And it was really interesting because I was speaking actually yesterday to someone in one of my colleagues, and we've got someone joining the team in the not too distant future. And actually it was one of the comments that they had made during their interview was that actually when they went and looked at IFS's social media, they were really pleased to see that it wasn't purely about the product or corporate updates, but actually it really gave them. And it was, the quote was a window into who we are. And I just thought, oh, brilliant, because obviously that's, that's coming in from a corporate standpoint. I was thinking, great, because I think the challenge, and you touched on it in the employer branding piece about the human element. And I think the challenge for all social media, especially B2B, is that humanizing piece. How do you humanize your brand? So that was really exciting that they'd said that. And then secondary slide here as well with, again, you know, just great to see these kind of quotes and see that people could get an idea of who we were. And, you know, Nicola's comment about the IFS foundation, which is something that we're very passionate about and we partner with them. It's. We have a huge proportion of our workforce in Sri Lanka and it's our way to try and give something back to some of the rural communities. Again, it's just fantastic that, you know, that's all been gleaned from looking at us on social and just seeing the kind of things that we're doing. So, yeah, so I have to say I was really pleased when I saw, saw the comments coming through and, you know, it's great to feel like actually it is making an impact and if people are looking to join ifs, it's something they're considering and hopefully they're seeing it in a positive light and thinking, yes, this is a, this is a company I'd like to come and work for and I'd like to be part of Team Purple.
13:11
Suz Barton
Yeah, absolutely. I think when you shared this with me again, like, as you've just touched on there, I think the words like genuine, authentic, I mean, that's something that we talk about a lot. I know that you've spent time with Olivia, our own social media and community manager, and she's, you know, she's an absolute evangelist for that. And yeah, you know, you can, you can see the impact that it has and I love that. A window on who we are. I think that's what we're trying to strive for across every marketing channel these days because traditional methods are. The world has changed and I think so much happens digitally and you feel like you don't always get that kind of two way exchange. So do you really understand who we are? Do you really understand? So I think social is that unique platform that gives you that ability to really bring that out.
14:04
Helen Hauck
And you said authenticity. And I just think the one thing I always hope for or strive for is when people meet me in real life, they say, oh yes, you're just like you are on LinkedIn or you know, I want them to think, I feel like I already know you because I've seen Your post on LinkedIn and you are actually like that rather than I'm putting on a facade. And I'm a totally different person in real life than I come across on social media because I haven't, quite frankly, haven't got the time or the patience to try and be two different people. So I have to be myself. But again, I just think if companies can do that again, it's just is that authenticity piece and then people, you know, join and actually what you see is what you get kind of thing. And I just really hope that, you know, that's more and more what we're going to see in terms of social from a B2B standpoint at least.
14:49
Suz Barton
Yeah, I 100% agree. And I think, you know, like you say, particularly in B2B, it's not just about selling a product, it's about building a relationship and a partnership with customers. And so it's so important to get that across about what is that going to be like? What are we like as a partner from an organisational perspective? It's really important. I know, Helen, I did say that we would do questions at the end, but someone's just come in with something quite pertinent to this point. Have you seen any improvement on your Glassdoor or indeed reviews as a result of the campaign? I know you might not have that
15:26
Helen Hauck
to hand, but so we do focus on Glassdoor. One of my colleagues in our comms team looks at it. I can't off the top of my head tell you whether we've seen an improvement or not. And I will ask him and I'm happy to follow up afterwards, but I do know that it is something that we as a business do take really seriously and it's something we monitor and we make a concerted effort to reply to any comments, good or bad, and address them. And I think that again is just something that's really key both from a social standpoint and on sites such as Glassdoor, is that if somebody, you know, not everybody's going to be happy. 100% of the time. And if people say they are, then that's not being authentic, you know, going to be able to please everybody. And we're a growing organization with 5,000 people currently. So, you know, I'm sure at points in time everybody's going to be slightly disgruntled about potentially something. But obviously if somebody's that disgruntled that they potentially left or they're still working and they want to leave that kind of a review, then it's something that we do really take seriously. And it's not just from a PR standpoint. It's genuinely, you know, one of our company targets is around kind of employee engagement and making sure that people who work here are genuinely happy and genuinely feel fulfilled in what they're doing. And so it is something that we as a business do take quite seriously. So things like Glassdoor are great again, because they do give us a window. And there are times where we don't get things right. Of course there are, because, you know, we're a business, we're humans, we make mistakes like anyone else, but it just gives us that opportunity to address them in a public forum, which again, I think, or I hope at least adds to that authenticity piece.
16:59
Suz Barton
Lovely, thank you. Thanks, Helen. Sorry to put you on the spot with that one. Okay, so moving on. So, you know, obviously we've talked about employer branding, massive value and impact from a recruitment perspective, but where else have you seen, you know, beyond Talent Acquisition, where have you seen impact from this, this initiative and your approach here?
17:21
Helen Hauck
So for this, I think I really want to talk about the Moment of Service campaign launch, which happened back in February 2021. Yeah, yeah, a year. Yeah, a little over a year ago. And I've put there, you can see the year's engagement stats as a graph at the bottom. So you can see that peak in about February time, which was when we were quite literally lighting up various places around the world with purple with Moment of Service. And you can see some of the examples on this slide. And from a, you know, and I should add, at this point, I was in my manufacturing role. So although I was using social media, that was not my, my job at this point. But I remember the sense of pride. We did a, a full page advert in the Sunday Times and it's one of the, I mean, I've got young children, so I'm up early anyway, but I'm generally not rushing to Tesco first thing on a Sunday. But I did on this occasion because I was so excited to buy this paper, you know, and Be able to show everybody, look, this is my company, look, we're in the Sunday Times. How cool is that? And the same with all of this. And I, you know, and I think whilst this is all really exciting, obviously we're being able to join this now because obviously we had photographers to take the photos. But my excitement of getting the Sunday Times was not because I particularly wanted to read the articles, it was to get that picture of the IFS advert in the Sunday Times and share it on social media. That's what I wanted to do with it and that's the first thing I did with it. And what was really interesting to me about, about this whole campaign and the launch of it is that it wasn't. The goal was never about people seeing these adverts. You know, it was never about somebody in Dubai going, oh, I wonder who ifs are. They've just lit up the burj. I'll go and Google them. I mean, fantastic if they do. But what it was really about was creating something that IFS employees were really, really proud to share. And that's what we did. And I referenced it earlier on when I said we genuinely turned LinkedIn purple. And it was all you could see when you signed on was people sharing these great shots from around the world of iconic locations with the IFS branding on. So for me, that was really the value this brought was actually not so much somebody happening to walk past Times Square and seeing it in that moment was actually the value of our employees being able to be really proud and go, look at my company, look who I work for. And that's where you can obviously see that spike at the bottom left in the engagements was people sharing it.
19:46
Suz Barton
Yeah. And it's really interesting. So it's almost like social is that channel that just really knits everything together as part of an omnichannel strategy.
19:57
Helen Hauck
Well, absolutely, because I just think any of these things, you know, if you see great out of home stuff, do you see it in real life, as in you've walked past it on the street, or do you see it on social media? And I can put my hands up and say, the bulk of it I see on social media and I don't. I think it's fantastic. But very rarely do I actually see these things in my actual live walking or driving. And so, you know, what social media really gives you is that platform to amplify it further. Yes, we did this. Look at this. It's awesome. And actually, how do you get that message out there to a much, much broader Audience and social media is the way to do it.
20:32
Suz Barton
Absolutely. I mean it's, it looks amazing and I think like one of the quotes there that you said from that you kind of recently joined team members. They, I think they reference my, my feed turned pur. So it's, you know, again, like you say, just all those touch points coming together. So definitely.
20:48
Helen Hauck
And stuff like this. Again, you know, if in terms of attracting new people to come and join us, it's a great way to try and say, look, you know, we don't, we don't do these things all the time. It would make my life really easy if we did because our engagement rate, but obviously when we do do them, it's a great, it's a great thing for us to amplify it on social and it's a great thing from a recruitment standpoint to say, look, you know, we're an exciting company, we're doing things differently, we're going places, you know, do you want to be part of, of that, that journey with us?
21:15
Suz Barton
Yeah. Fantastic. So moving on then. I think I might know the answer
21:21
Helen Hauck
to this, but have you had it?
21:24
Suz Barton
Have you found it hard to get buy in at all?
21:28
Helen Hauck
No. And I think I mentioned it earlier on because this is never something, you know, I think it was interesting when you said about the campaign because the whole concept was never something that we really, you know, the corporate came up with or corporate mandated. We're going to use this hashtag. This is what it's going to mean. You know, everybody use it. And I think because actually that never happened. It grew organically and it grew because our employees were, they wanted to use it. I think, you know, a few, few people kind of led the charge, if you will. And then I started to see the value and. Oh, I like that. That's nice. That's a nice kind of colloquialism of referring to ifs but not, you know, we are team Purple. Great. And the posts that you can see on, on this slide are all original posts. So none of these, I mean some of them have obviously been, have been shared via Oktopost. Thank you very much, guys. But they've all been created by the author themselves. So none of this has been curated by us. This is all original content that people have created. And I just think it shows the, the scope of how people use it really. It's the, you know, obviously CSR activities, you know, through to people just talking about how long they've been here and their first experience of working, sharing kind of accolades and achievements. Sharing, managing to, to spend your day and you know, your. We all get ifs, it's a nice thing, you get your birthday off. So I think Emily was basically saying she'd had her birthday off and obviously taken her kids and her mum I think, to out for the day and obviously had managed to get them all asleep. So it's just a really, really nice example of actually something that none of this has been driven by a corporate kind of mandate or a direction or any of the above. This is all individuals using it organically and I think that's really where the achievement has come from, if that makes sense, is actually that people are choosing to use this. They're not being asked to do it, they're not being told to do it, they want to do it. And I think that's really been the success behind it.
23:24
Suz Barton
Yeah, and, and do you think any of those advocates have though seen a kind of. Yeah, we talk about like raising your own, like your personal profile on social and things like that. So for those who are in customer facing roles particularly are they using this to kind of raise their own brand as a bit of a domain expert or.
23:44
Helen Hauck
I hope so, yeah, I hope so. I mean we are now a standing fixture as a social media team on our sales boot camp. So when we're onboarding people in customer facing roles, they spend half an hour with us. We make it interactive, we make everyone turn their camera on so they've got to listen to us. But we also use that. I mean social media is fantastic in the sense that you can talk to a theory quite a lot but actually you can demonstrate your theory. So one of the things that we do as part of the boot camp calls is get everybody to turn their cameras on. We then get one volunteer, we screenshot the, the kind of gallery of everyone on teams and then we ask one volunteer to post it alongside some text, share that link back in the chat and then we get everybody to go and comment on it and engage with it and basically try and demonstrate the, the Power Hour phenomenon or the, you know, if you comment and engage with a post within, I think it's the first two hours on LinkedIn. LinkedIn then will amplify that further. So what's great about it is that we can talk about lots of theory but actually we can prove that it works when we do it. So yeah, that I think immediately gets them eng because they can genuinely see the tangible steps that you can take to do this. And I think that's the key thing in all of this is you don't have to overthink it too much. Just, you know, you don't have to write. I'm guilty of an essay length post myself. But not every post has to be really deep and meaningful and insightful. It can just be, here's me with a cup of coffee on a Wednesday, you know, happy Wednesday, something like that. It doesn't always have to be, you know, I'm gonna write you an essay about my deepest inner thoughts of my career or my progression or anything like that. I think it, you know, a balance is always key.
25:23
Suz Barton
Absolutely. I think one of my Most highly engaged LinkedIn posts is a video clip I took of me kicking a rugby goal because I wanted to learn a new skill during lockdown. So I learned how to kick.
25:38
Helen Hauck
That's quite a skill.
25:40
Suz Barton
Yeah, it took a few attempts but I was proud and it got shared. But yeah, I think very much for me, I think what's great about, well, all of marketing, but social in particular is just that it's so much more easy to measure now. And so like you said, when you can, when you can measure it and you can say, okay, this created this outcome, then it becomes like self fulfilling and it becomes something that you just keep like rinse and repeat and all of that good stuff. So moving on then. So wanted to just ask about your overall approach to social then. And do you think that it's, has it, has it changed over the last couple of years? And, and I think like the boot camps that you just touched on there, it feels like kind of preempting my next sort of sub question. But have you seen a shift in attitude towards social like across marketing and across the wider organization?
26:39
Helen Hauck
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, I think from a corporate perspective we are moving from being, we're trying to move away from being a broadcast channel. So here's our latest white paper. Here's this, here's that, here's the other. So definitely we've seen a change from that perspective. But I think also what I find really interesting is the amount of people nowadays that say, oh, I know I need to be on social, I know I need to do this. And they know intrinsically the value, they just sometimes don't know quite where to start. And I think that makes my life a lot easier because I can say, well, you can start by, you know, using Oktopost. That's a really easy tool to get up and running. Then when you feel confident, then go into what's on here, which I call the original post. So we used to encourage people to do these. And I used to refer to them as personal posts. And then people would look at me with horror as if to go, what on earth do you expect me to share? And I'm like, no, no, I just mean, I mean something that's unique to you. And you know, these are some of the best performing posts that I like to use as good examples. So it's, you know, the broad range of from, you know, Preeti on the left sharing something that she was given coming back from a conference. That's her daughter, you know, and what a great way of kind of combining work and home life because effectively you're sort of sharing something that you know, you're proud of, that you're proud of for work. And obviously your daughter's proud of it as well, which is lovely. In the middle you've got Steph, who's one of our sales managers in the uk and this was her collection of posts from our sales kickoff event where she won also sales salesperson of the year. So again, a fantastic selection of kind of social shots of people enjoying themselves but also obviously celebrating her success. And then, you know, one of my favorite power couple on the right hand side, our CEO Darren and his wife Melissa. And I just love the fact that we, because we've genuinely got these magazines in the office, they're both on the COVID and he literally just snapped a picture of that and obviously uploaded it and you know, what a great example of an ad hoc wasn't planned, just did it in the moment and look at the kind of engagement you've got. So for me it's that kind of, you know, some things you can obviously plan in advance. And actually I always find some of my best performing posts are the things that I hadn't planned to do, but I just do in the moment. And as I say, I think they just work, they resonate because they do just come across as quite natural.
28:58
Suz Barton
Back to that authenticity again.
28:59
Helen Hauck
Yeah, it is, yeah, I should. We should have played a game, shouldn't we have how many times I say the word authenticity. But I think it comes down to what we talked about earlier on is that humanizing your organization, you know, people connect with people and it's the age old adage, isn't it, about people buy from people and you know, it's true whether you're in a B2C or a B2B organization, you're still working with and dealing with people. So for me, I think the real shift from a social media standpoint that we've seen is Actually, people beginning to understand the value of actually humanizing brands and saying, look, we might be a purple logo, but actually these are all the people that are behind that that are really making a difference and making an impact. And I also think that leads then into the employee advocacy piece. And you mentioned earlier on about people genuinely seeing the value and the positive impact building their own personal brand has. Clearly it has value to the company that you're working for, but at the same time it has immense value to you because it's your, you know, it's your personal brand. And one of my favorite examples is Elon Musk and obviously Tesla. You know, Tesla has, I think, about 12 million Twitter followers, or at least did when I last looked. It's probably got more now, but I think Elon Musk has about 69 million, you know, and so actually his personal brand, even though you think of Elon, you think of Tesla in one of the same thing, but actually many more people follow him because actually it's probably, you know, less corporate, it's more engaging. It's an individual. We know he's quite controversial. And, you know, having an opinion can seem people, people worry about it, I think, but actually that's one of probably the best ways to get engagement is to, you know, is to, is to have an opinion and be prepared to share it within reason.
30:47
Suz Barton
No, absolutely. It's all about just trying to start those conversations. Right. So, thanks, Helen. So I think, you know, I think you've just given a great kind of walk through there. We can see the massive impact that this has. You know, that employees voices really are your kind of strongest channel, really, to connect with customers and to connect with prospective new team members as well. So just to kind of start to wrap up, can we ask you if you can share any kind of secret sauce? Like what can, what can, what can others do to, to look, to emulate your success?
31:24
Helen Hauck
I think it's, I think the secret sauce is, it's the people. They're probably not going to thank me for choosing these pictures from sales kickoff, but, you know, these are some of our regional teams at our awards night. And fundamentally that, that is the secret. It's the individuals. And if you can get people bought into what you're doing and understanding what you're doing and engaging and really accepting and adopting and get them doing it themselves, then actually that, you know, it's not so secret, but that really is the way to achieve it. What we can achieve on our corporate channels is only a very, very small portion of what we can achieve as a, as a company of 5,000 people.
32:04
Suz Barton
Brilliant. Thank you. So I'm just conscious of time. So we'll just open it up for a couple of questions. We've had a few come in, so if I can just ask you a few of these now. So I'm just going to start with what's the hardest thing about getting going and building momentum when it comes to launching a program like this?
32:29
Helen Hauck
I think I probably touched on it earlier on, which is it's just getting people to do it. You know, I think the challenge with social media and I speak to a lot of people obviously, and they say, oh, I know I must do more. I know, you know, again, on the sales boot camps call, we start every call with a picture of a Nike sneaker or trainer, depending on where you are in the world. And the reason for that is our kind of end slide is the summary. Summary is just do it, don't overthink. Because I think that the risk that people have when it comes to social is they tend to overthink and then they procrastinate and they don't do anything, you know, and I just think if you can just start somewhere with a post and obviously, you know, utilizing a tool like Oktopost or utilizing the kind of my company, the recommended content on LinkedIn that gives you a platform to start that will give you a post that you can personalize. You're not creating it from scratch and you can share that. But I think the key piece of advice I'd give to anybody is actually when it comes to an employee advocacy program, is definitely utilizing content that's curated, but also add your own original posts in there and have that balance. Because you're not all work all the time. You are an individual outside of work. And if you can showcase a bit of that personality, it will only serve to do your own personal brand so much better.
33:42
Suz Barton
Fantastic. Thank you. Another question here from Karen. Do you have any metrics regarding lead conversions or pushing people down the funnel based on your social campaigns?
33:54
Helen Hauck
So it's something we're looking at. So again, this is the first year, or at least the first, within the first 12 months where we have actually genuinely developed content just for social. Silly as that sounds, but it's the truth. And we would previously obviously share our marketing campaign material, but this is the first year where we're genuinely developing content that has no other purpose beyond being shared on social and obviously using that to look at how we engage with our prospects, how we engage with our existing customers. And obviously how that then plays further into the funnel and how we look to progress that. And it's, it's data that we have probably in disparate places at the moment and we're looking at the moment of how we bring all that together utilizing kind of an automation platform, utilizing CRM. And how do we get that visibility? Because up until now social media has very been, we looked at that purely from a brand awareness piece and now I think we're maturing that model to actually say brand awareness part of. But then actually how does it support us in terms of our business goals, in terms of sales and everything else.
34:56
Suz Barton
Yeah. So I think to me it does feel very much like social media is getting a lot more focus as a growth channel in B2B marketing these days. What do you think is behind that?
35:07
Helen Hauck
I think it's, and again I think I said this earlier on, but it's that people to people piece. If you're, you know, whether you are looking to join a company, whether you're looking to potentially buy a solution or a service from a particular company, it's that ability to connect people. And I think that to me is really where that focus is, is shifting is the reality is we're seeing, actually it's a great way to get through to people if it's, you know, our business development team, they use it obviously from a, from a lead generation perspective and how do you reach out and how do you get contact? It doesn't always have to be direct. I think when I say that everybody instantly thinks oh no, not another InMail from someone trying to sell me something. And it's not that, it's just actually, you know, such and such is engage with your post and I think it can be quite subtle, doesn't have to be in your face. Here's an InMail I'm going to try and sell you something. It can just be you've met somebody at an event or a conference, you don't hear for them again for a while, but then they start engaging with your content and commenting on it and their name appears in your feedback read and you think where do I know that person from? And actually that's quite subtle. And then when they do message you, you're much more likely to read it and, or reply because you think, oh hang on, Suze, yeah, I've heard, you know, we met, where do I know her from? And I just think it's that ability to try, you know, just to begin to subtly engage with somebody. It doesn't have to Be really direct and out the blue and cold. It can be, yeah. Insight into what people are talking about and their interests and their focus through using social media.
36:37
Suz Barton
Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of. There's no excuse to not try to be relevant because I think you can derive so much from those insights. Absolutely. Okay. I'm just conscious of time. We've got quite a lot of questions coming through, so we'll just try and do a couple more. So I'm going to combine Philip and Joshua's question into one. Really. So what have you done to kind of get people on board, but also how do you keep them motivated not just to become advocates in the first place, but just to stick with it kind of 612 months down the road. How do you encourage them to keep that consistency?
37:12
Helen Hauck
So I think in terms of encouraging people to get involved, we do incentivise. We run competitions, which is always great. You know, people are. A lot of people are by nature competitive, including me, so anything where I've got a chance of winning something, I'm quite interested. So, yeah, so we've done kind of incentive, you know, like number of engaged, most engaged post, et cetera, et cetera. So that's always effective.
37:34
Suz Barton
But.
37:35
Helen Hauck
But as you rightly say, how do you then keep them engaged? And I think part of that is making them realize the value to them as an individual rather than just ifs as a business. And one of the things we always say, if you're looking to move internally within ifs, maybe to a different department or a different team, actually what you're doing on social media, people are going to go and look at that and maybe they know you because they've seen what you're doing. And, you know, I've got a great example of Jem, who joined our team back in April. I knew of them long before I'd spoke to them, or long before they had applied for the role, because I saw what they were doing on LinkedIn and thought, oh, great, this individual gets it. So there's a great example of, you know, they weren't doing it because there was a role available, because at that point there wasn't. I don't think longer term, it was part of their plan, but it just so happened that a role did become available and it's one of the first people I thought of because I'd seen what they were doing. So, yeah, I think it does have a. You know, it may. It may be that you don't get that insight every day, but I think if you. If you are consistent with it. And you do stick at it, actually, longer term, you will start to see the value that it brings.
38:41
Suz Barton
And do you share those kinds of success stories internally?
38:44
Helen Hauck
Just, we try to. Probably should do a better job of it. But again, on the, on the boot camps, obviously that's very much geared towards a sales perspective, but we talk a lot about, obviously the benefits of touch points etc, with prospects, with customers. But the same is very. You know, the thing I always say to everybody is it's, it's your profile, so the time that you invest in it, it's yours. So, you know, I don't want to encourage anyone to leave, but, you know, people do move on. When you do, you take that with you. So the investment of your time is well spent because it sticks with you long after you potentially, you know, if you move within IFS or you move, you move on. In the long term, it's still, it's still your profile.
39:25
Suz Barton
Yeah, just very quick follow up on that one. Can you speak to the prizes specifically within the competition? So was it like gift cards or just bragging rights?
39:37
Helen Hauck
Well, it was actually, and I wish I've got one in the cupboard out there, but I haven't got one here. But it was actually sustainable water bottles, so we sourced them. Again, we're focused obviously on sustainability. It's quite, very important to us. We do a lot around. Around that as a topic. Also on social. But yeah, so actually a IFS unleashed, which is our big event that's happening in Miami in October, but it was an IFS unleashed sustainable water bottle. So again, I don't think it always has to be, you know, 200 pounds of vouchers or dollars, you know, as you rightly say, I think the bragging rights and people quite like just being told they're top of a leaderboard somewhere. So, yeah, we know who the competitive ones are now. So, yeah, they've already won a couple of water bottles which they've. They've donated nicely to their colleagues.
40:22
Suz Barton
Excellent. And just final quick point, so a couple of people have asked us about how you got the listening data from LinkedIn. Was that a bit of a struggle?
40:32
Helen Hauck
No. So I think if you do any kind of paid activity with LinkedIn, we effectively leverage that relationship. So we did a lot of work consolidating because we had lots of regional teams doing paid. So we did a lot of work consolidating and effectively leveraged our relationship with them from a paid standpoint. And it is an ad hoc request. There's no special kind of link I can send you that you could go to. But I just think if you have any kind of relationship manager either from a recruitment standpoint, if you have a careers package, if it's something of interest, then just ask the question because they can pull that data, so it's worth investigating.
41:10
Suz Barton
Lovely. Okay. Well, I think that's all we've got time for, so just want to say, Helen, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for taking the time to chat to me today. And I hope that everyone who tuned in. Thank you to you guys as well, for making the time, and I hope you found this as interesting and as useful as I have.
41:38
Helen Hauck
Thank you very much for having me.
