0:00
Jennifer Gutman
Hello everybody and welcome to the art of B2B social media, our webinar series which we are focusing today on the gift of employee advocacy. I just want to take a quick reminder to let everybody know you are on mute. If you do have any questions, feel free to shoot them over to the Q and A and Amanda or myself will certainly get to them either throughout the show or the end of the show. But we will certainly get to your questions and we're really excited to have you all on board. So with that being said, let's go ahead and meet our speakers. My name is Jennifer Gutman. I am the director of social strategy here at Oktopost. For those of you just joining, Oktopost is a B2B Social media management platform. And with me today, speaking about the gifts of employee advocacy, is our beloved customer, Amanda Venore, digital marketing director at Everest Group. Amanda, I'm going to pass it to yourself to introduce and perhaps maybe share a fun fact, but could you give us a little bit of a background of who you are and what you do on a day to day?
1:04
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So, so excited to be here.
1:07
Jennifer Gutman
I am.
1:08
Amanda Benour
I lead the digital group at Everest Group. We really focus on all digital channels, digital technology, really focus on the integration of technology and of course that brings us to social and integration of Oktopost and how we can leverage that as a channel. And so really focus across the digital stack for marketing. As far as fun facts, I love to travel. I am trying to travel again now that the world, well, it was reopening and it may not be some more. We'll see. Stay tuned. But I just love to travel and just really like to kind of get out in the world, so.
1:52
Jennifer Gutman
Well, Amanda, we're hoping we all can travel soon and perhaps very shortly this session can be a roundtable. We can all come together in person soon. But until then, I'll go ahead. Right, I'll go ahead and introduce our next guest, Little Octi. That's our cmo, our chief mascot officer. You may or may not see Little Opti throughout the presentation, but Little Offy does like to join occasionally. So with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. So I just want to set the scene a bit about this specific webinar, the gift of employee Advocacy and why December. As marketers listening in, we really love to get creative here. We're thinking, okay, it's the end of the year, we're all giving gifts to one another, receiving gifts from one another, and we really do think as marketers, employee advocacy has really been a big one. And just to set the scene, social media is now a mainstream business tool and it's also a professional skill set. Right. It's very rare that you're going to go into it, into a job in any role and not have social media incorporated in some way, shape or form as part of what you do. And speaking of employee advocacy, just to zoom in a little bit more, and Amanda is going to speak way more about this in a moment. But really, employee advocacy helps enhance a personal brand. It showcases expertise by enabling them, your employees, I should say, to share thought leadership with their social networks. It enables employees to be part of the conversation. Right. Not just the lurkers on social, but actively participating in it and discovering new and emerging insights from your clients and your prospects. And it's helping employees really establish relationships, which is very key in social selling with prospects and improving rapport and brand loyalty with customers. And something that we are seeing at Oktopost overall with many of our customers is is that content downloaded or event signup conversion from an employee advocacy program is averaging around 20%. And Amanda is going to keep me honest a little bit later on versus about a 1% conversion unpaid, which just right there, we're seeing that employee advocacy is outperforming paid every single time and we are able to measure it. So setting the scene with that being said.
4:12
Amanda Benour
Right.
4:13
Jennifer Gutman
Why you should be more social, we're going to talk about it today. It's a connected workforce today and it's more powerful than a brand. Right. When it comes to recruitment, your recommendation is always stronger when it comes from a friend or a connection. Lead generation. Right. Paid versus employee advocacy, social selling, establishing relationships with those prospects and of course, personal branding by showcasing your expertise. These are just some of the reasons why you should be more social. But we're going to zoom in today specifically on the gifts of employee advocacy. So I'm going to pass it over to my good friend Amanda and and she's going to really walk us through what an advocacy program has been able to gift to her as an incredible marketer and also to her organization. Amanda.
4:59
Amanda Benour
Absolutely. So honestly, we have just been so excited about this employee journey on employee advocacy that we've undertaken. We have onboarded with Oktopost actually just in Q2 of this year. And to say we've received gifts would be an understatement. The things we've been able to do so far has been really exciting. And honestly, as someone who's worked with a number of employee advocacy tools in the past, we've been really surprised by how quickly we've been able to really escalate results because of the overall integration and the overall kind of scope of what we've been able to do with the platform. So let's jump into some of what those gifts are. Really excited. I am, at the end of the day, truly a data geek. I love talking about measurements and scalability, mainly because you also, as a marketer get taken seriously when you can talk about real metrics. And one of the big challenges I think we all have in marketing we often face is that idea of fluff that we're kind of peddling fluff and we're doing these things that just feel good, look good, we're making lots of assumptions, and that's not really the world we live in anymore. Right. So all of our digital marketing is really data driven. That's a sweet spot. It's where we want to be. It is absolutely. At the end of the day, if we can point to what's working, what's not working, we know that's how we get more dollars, we know that's how we get success, and that's how at the end of the day, drive revenue through the right channels. So with that said, one of the things we've been really focused on as we've onboarded our employee advocacy with Oktopost is really how do we integrate it with our total stack and how do we make sure we have really clear direct attribution? So social this year for our company has gone from this just really soft channel of no, it's important. We're not completely sure why it's important, except that everyone talks about as you should be there. We know people are having conversations, but we don't know if those conversations are going from that online realm on social to actual bookings. Are they being handed over to sales in the right way? Are we being deeply embedded with these organizations? A lot of that it just was unknown. It was very anecdotal and I really hate anecdotal measurement. I'm sure many of us can relate to the fact of people saying, no, it doesn't work. Yes, it does work based on kind of one weird blush interaction with someone on an individual basis. And when you're kind of trying to drive a program across an organization, you can't rely on those very vocal people who may have had good or bad experiences. And because it really doesn't speak to everyone's holistic experience. And so the best thing we can do with attribution is really assigning clear dollars, assigning clear revenue to the channels that are and are not working. And then you just move past all of that. I think it is, it isn't. Maybe we should maybe assume this, all of that to just. It is working. It's not working. Let's do more of this. Let's put more dollars into this. Those are the conversations you want to have, just fact based, data driven conversations. So we love that we've been able to do that, particularly now as we're in Q4. We've been able to look back now at a couple months, a couple quarters of data and we can see clear trend lines of what is and isn't happening.
8:56
Jennifer Gutman
That's impressive. Yes.
8:59
Amanda Benour
So with that said, we can completely move past this kind of really soft met of. I think things are getting better. I think we're interacting, I think we're driving some bookings. One of the guys on my last sales call said he saw something on LinkedIn. Right. Like those conversations are nice. You want to hear people having those experiences but you can't build a program around these like soft metrics. And so it's exciting to be able to dig into what that really looks like.
9:33
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And you know, just kind of speaking about what you're saying. Right. The fact that all of the employee advocacy data, which would be all of the social engagements and the social interactions that can be pumped into marketing automation like your HubSpot or your Marketo, those integrations, it takes. Right. A soft metric into a much more actionable metric. And I think, I don't know about you Amanda, but I know on my side sometimes I get frustrated because we have all of this data. Right. We love being data driven but it can be really overwhelming when you're looking at all of these different pieces of technology and it's all pulling in great data. So the piece of having your social media management tool being able to connect to the rest of the Martech stack, the data scale can be overwhelming. But as data driven marketers, you have a little bit more of control over not getting hit by the data bus and driving it, right?
10:26
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things, and we've got a couple slides on this kind of as we progress, but what we've really done is we've integrated it just the same way that we've integrated our website interactions and all of our web data, our automation data email. We can treat social like we would treat other owned channels. And that is a complete 360 from where we were even just I think in the world five years ago. Right, people? It just wasn't technically possible. And honestly, I'm going to tell you the truth. I got a call with an Oktopost salesperson. I kind of thought the guy was lying to me. I really genuinely. I think I gave him a really hard time because I was like, how do you do that? I don't think it's technically possible. Some of the integrations that were available and the people matching database, being able to match person to person from all the social interaction into our CRM, Like, I genuinely. And I'm pretty on top of new technology. And so I was really impressed that we were able to do that and then just got immediately excited about wanting to pull this in because there is so much when you start to look at social and control it in the same way you do your other channels, and that's really where the magic happens.
11:51
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So I'm going to hop over to the next slide. I love the Grinch.
11:59
Amanda Benour
Perfect. So scaling this is, of course, the million dollar question. So the great thing about Oktopost is all of the data that you only get if people use it. So it is really important to us that we were able to get employees engaged and onboarded without engagement from employees, without kind of breaking those employee habits of going directly to LinkedIn or using other platforms. We really weren't able to get the aggregate data that we wanted. One thing that has been really successful for us is we've held a number of social media contests. Those are basically designed to incentivize employees, give them some just a reason to be thinking about social all the time, you know, Amanda, listen, I want to ask.
12:51
Jennifer Gutman
I want to ask. I'm going to, like, jump in here, but I want to ask because scaling is definitely a gift. And it's really important, you know, that we're able to scale an advocacy program. I would definitely say maintaining one is probably half the battle of keeping it going. And as you said, if you have no advocates engaging, you don't have a program. Can you share a little bit, if you can, with us today, a little bit about some of the contests that you do run? Because when we spoke about. I was floored. They're pretty interesting, but they seem to be working. And I know all of us marketers get together in a room. It's always like, oh, what are you doing? And how are you keeping employees engaged? And what are you doing and how are you doing it?
13:27
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So we've done a number of contests and we structure them differently each time so people don't Completely bored with us or over it. We also do something that I think most people would frown upon, which is we make the contest really long. And because we're trying to create habits, we almost draw it out to a point where people like, this contest is still going, but it is because we, we want to give us many opportunities to win. Because when employees win, we win, right? When people want to win, we win. And so we try to, first off, make the contest competitive. So we use the leaderboard. We use kind of our own kind of internal point system that we devise. And we found that people do like kind of nudging their colleagues and saying, I beat you this week and things like that. So we try to make it really public and make it clear who's doing well, and people can see those people who are doing well and hopefully get motivated. So that's an important part of it is just the visibility around the contest, making sure it's not in a black box, making sure people see that there are other people excited. And sometimes initially you also have to ask a few people, key people who are already excited to champion as well, to kind of get initial energy around the contest moving. Some of the challenges we've done, they've all really been about learning how to use social media, learning how to use Oktopost. So they've been really pointed challenges. We do things around tagging colleagues, sharing out certain types of content, how to use different features in Oktopost from like sharing gifs or sharing still images, sharing video. We go around and we'll put out themes. Certain weeks for one of the contests, we divide everyone into teams. So like there was a couple teams within our sales organization, there were some teams in our back office organization, among a research analyst, things like that. They got together and if there was a weak link, the whole team score dropped. So there was a little peer pressure we tapped into, which was nice. We did a lot of just different kind of structures to really appeal to everyone. We could in those contests. We also gave a ton of examples of this is what this person is doing. This is why it works. Take it, make it your own. So they're really just teachable moments throughout the whole thing. And in the end, you kind of come out the other side with people feeling excited because they've won these Amazon gift cards. And we also have people who also understand the platform, they know how to use it. And then the contest drug on for so long, it starts to be a habit, right? And that's the goal is how do you make a habit? Because that's what we want. We want people to do it weekly. So we made sure each week we had a different challenge and that focused on three posts a week or things like that and started to create those habits we wanted to see long term.
16:42
Jennifer Gutman
I love that. I think I read somewhere it takes 90 days to create a habit. So maybe you're suggesting that contest should be running 90 days, which happens to be a quarter, so.
16:51
Amanda Benour
Yeah, it does, actually. So I am suggesting that. And honestly, we have seen just those long contests. They really work. And when you're finished with them, you know, you really see, especially those core users, they've created their habits, and you start to see them doing all of those things you've showed them how to do. And it's like you're so proud of everyone for using all the tools they've learned. And so it's exciting to see that growth.
17:19
Jennifer Gutman
I love it. I love it. Let's. Let's hop to the next slide. So I just, if, you know, everybody listening in, if we could all see, you know, I would turn everyone's camera on. We give you, Amanda, a standing ovation. Because this, this is not something that's easy. I think any social media manager, anybody working with social, knows, right, that growing your network size, whether it's your employees or your corporate channels, it is not an easy feat. So one of the gifts you had shared was that it was growing your network size. Could you talk to us a little bit about that?
17:49
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, you know, again, those metrics are so important. You know, when we talk about our total follower count for our firm, you know, we're proud of our number. We've seen significant growth in that number. But where I really want to focus today, actually, is when we talk about our total employee advocacy network. So these are all of our employees who are on Oktopost. They're participating in the weekly contest challenges, they're using Oktopost, things like that. When we talk about the total number of aggregate followers since really starting onboarding of our employees, and I would say June, it happened early June, our first contest kicked off in July. We've seen 46% growth in total follower network just among our employees. And so that's 60,000 new followers that are just connections among our firm and our firm's individual employee networks growing. And so when we talk about total reach and footprint, for us, this is a huge leap in bound. Our reach is just under 20 million. And that's just employee advocacy networks. That's not our paid social, that's not our owned Everest Group. Channel. It's those employee advocacy channels. And those are those graphs there on the side of the screen. And those are the numbers we're just like very excited about. We want to shout it from the rooftops internally too, because it's been such a group effort for everyone participating in Oktopost. But we've seen the amplification of our messages. We see it in our webinar attendance. We see it in our increased sales pipeline. We see it in increased Contact Us forms, lead gen forums. When we roll out new campaigns, we always like to include that in a contest. If we can focus on a key webinar, focus on a key end of year campaign and get people to participate in amplifying that message. And we've just really seen that just be a really solid channel for us.
19:59
Jennifer Gutman
So congratulations, man. This might be my favorite slides because it's such a. It's not easy to do and you guys are rocking it. I'm going to move forward to the next gift that employee advocacy brings. And you're saying one of the gifts is engaged clients. So let's dive in.
20:17
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So engagement, of course, when we talk about social, we're always wondering, are people actually responding to your post? Are they engaging? And I think the biggest thing is when you bring a client in in the B2B space, and I'm sure many of you know this, you really want to get as intertwined as you can with that client. You don't want one person at that company and one person at your company to be the only two people who know each other. Right? You want to have just this beautiful web of connection where everyone at that organization knows who Everest Group is. Right, Everyone knows who your organization is. And you also want multiple points at your side too, so you don't have a single point of failure or a single point of contact. You want them to feel like. You know how you have those vendors where you're just like, oh, I love those guys. Everyone there's amazing. That's what you want, right? And so you want to feel like they're, you know, gosh, everyone at that organization are really talented. They're all so credible. They know what they're talking about. And so you really get that deep level of expertise coming across and you get these really deep ingrained connections. And so through employee advocacy, we have become much less focused on, do we have these single posts that are, I even hate to say the word out loud, but are viral or are like really impactful? We really want to see, do we have a number of Posts across our total network that just have really quality engagement. And we want it to be highlighting the right topics with the right people. Just getting more and more ingrained with our current clients, prospective clients, past clients. Let's get them re engaged. I mean, if they are interested in our topics, we just want to engage and have meaningful conversations with them. We really pull that in. And then what we do is, I talked about this earlier and we'll go into this a little bit more. We then pull them into our total digital martech stack and we measure and trigger based on all of those social interactions the same way we would do as if they opened an email, visited a landing page. We have all of these beautiful triggers that can enter people into nurture campaigns, can enter them into our pipeline, and just kind of overall how we nurture our community. Social is now part of that as well. And so the engagement happens both on social, but as well as within our larger marketing engine, which is something I'm very excited about.
23:03
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. That kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the webinar. Right. Where it's like it's never good for social data to live in a silo. And for so long it kind of did live in a silo because didn't connect necessarily to any martech technology, anything. And now it does connect. And I think that's pretty critical. Like you said that you can measure it the same, you're measuring everything else. It speaks the same language and, you know, engage clients. I think we can even put a price tag on that. I don't. I don't think so. I'm gonna move over to the next one and I'm gonna just, you know, maybe you can walk us through this. Looks like some of your. Your lovely. Is this HubSpot?
23:42
Amanda Benour
Absolutely. No. So this is Marketo and Salesforce. Grab a couple screenshots. They're. They're pretty basic. And then I think there might be an animation here. There's a text on top.
23:54
Jennifer Gutman
Here we go.
23:56
Amanda Benour
No worries. So basically our kind of. Our overall goal is to really track all of those activities that are coming from social channels and bring it into our large ecosystems. Sorry, tongue tied there. And really just focus on. When we talk about digital, we always think about how do we determine the next best action. We do that in a number of ways through our existing automation tools today. So we say there's a lot out there, predictive AI and all of these different things that can say, this is what content is relevant, this is the next best action for this person, this is how you push them down the funnel. What we've been really excited about is right now what we can do is we can pull all of that information from social. So LinkedIn is really our primary channel. We really focus on LinkedIn and through Oktopost, we push it into Marketo first, which is our automation platform. You'll see here we have things like click social, link comments on a social post, they shared a message, they sent a direct message, they mentioned us. So any of these kind of individual actions, both have scores just like we would score any other action. Open an email, clicked on an email, engaged with the salesperson, filled out a form.
25:21
Jennifer Gutman
Right?
25:22
Amanda Benour
Everything has a score, a weight, if you will, within our scoring system. And then those items are pushed into our CRM as well. So it's completely visible for sales. And they can see this person interacted with X person in this department on this topic. So when I talk to them, I should know they want to talk about that topic. These are things we've historically been able to do on websites. So obviously you can see, oh, they visited this webpage, so they must be interested in this. But so much more of that interaction is happening off our own own channels that are happening on social networks. So we want to still be able to glean those key interests and behaviors and still make sure we can action off of them as well. So it's been really exciting. We have been able to bring all of the social into our nurture program, bring it all into our automation and our CRM and kind of build things around it. With that said, it only works if your organization is there. And I think on the next slide, Jen, is if your data and stats are not organized, they are absolutely not actionable. It's kind of that data bus analogy that you were sharing earlier, which is just, it just becomes this massive amount of data that you don't know what to do with.
26:53
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
26:53
Amanda Benour
So what we do is we leverage both the campaigns, tags and topics within Oktopost and we have those, all of those aligned to our other types of content and campaigns across our Martech stack. So we have certain keywords, certain triggers, things that we say, yes, this person is talking about digital transformation, this person is talking about cloud, this person is talking about whatever the topic might be. We can see that they're talking about it, they're reading about it on web, on social, on email. Right. And then it helps us be more dynamic and predictive with our content that's served to them, whether it's in a handoff with sales or whether it's in an automated way through dynamic delivery and things like that. And so through Oktopost, what is exciting is we're able to dynamically append tags now. We have had employee advocacy platforms in the past. Actually at this company we had one prior we switched to Oktopost and one of the biggest things we struggled with is we couldn't dynamically inject data. We had basically static UTM links that will only get you so far. So we were able to do, let's say this link came from here, but we couldn't actually change that link to say Amanda shared it on LinkedIn and then she talked about this topic and it went here, right? And so we're able to get really, really niche and really personalized and that really helps give us that feedback mechanism that we need to track into action across across our total stack. Now I did see a question about operating in California and the eu. So compliance and privacy is always utmost importance, right. So we do a lot to make sure we are compliant. We do focus on GDPR as well as the California privacy law. And it's something that we focus on for our. We make sure we have acceptance disclaimers and things like that. There is a difference between people who exist today in our database and how we treat them because they've opted in and consented to some of this and how we treat unknown people. The great thing about using UTM strategies is it can respect it regardless. It shows us where people are coming from. It shows us this person clicked on a post and they did this action and but they're still unknown to us. However, even if they're unknown, we can see aggregate a number of people who are unknown took this pathway to meet us, they took this pathway to engage, they did these certain types of actions. So even in those kind of examples where we're not able to track back to the individual person for privacy reasons, we can still get a ton of really useful data about what is and isn't working. And it helps us kind of know, right? Who are the power users, what's the power content like, what are all these types that are working? And we can also drive those in the end down into our kind of revenue attribution as well. And on an aggregate level, we can see, you know, X amount of people who liked a social post on this topic ended up buying a membership related to that topic. Right. So we can see a lot of causation and really clearly map it down funnel. And so that's the kind of part where as your organization is set up correctly, you can really tie it into your overall attribution model and map it across things really well.
30:48
Jennifer Gutman
Great question and great answer. Thank you for detailing that, because I know the regulations and especially people listening in from regulated industries specifically, it can definitely be a little overwhelming and a challenge. So thank you for detailing that for us.
31:00
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, when you think about different industries, you always run into different types of compliance regulations. You really have to focus on what's right for your industry. For a long time, I was in the medical device and kind of healthcare industry and very tightly regulated, of course. But utms are really universal. I mean, you can use utms, obviously. I like utms. You can use them to track so much, even if you're not tracking down to that individual person. And so, because Oktopost allows me freedom with my utms, I'm very happy that I can have all of this dynamic data coming in, even within compromising and following those privacy laws and regulations.
31:47
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. So my big question to you as we kind of wrap up the webinar, and there's still so much to talk about when it comes to advocacy and measurement and data, but what's next in your advocacy journey? What. What does next year even look like, you know, as you kind of take on scaling and getting into the next chapter?
32:04
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think first and foremost, it's just that momentum question, right? How do you solve for it? How do you make sure you keep people just as excited as you are throughout this whole process? And that's always a challenge. You know, we use these contests. We. We will continue to do the contest. We love them, we hope. People are completely tired of us. They seem to be engaging, and everyone likes to win a little gift card, right? We try to make our awards and incentives as significant as we can, you know, but people, people also just like that competitiveness amongst themselves. So we really do, we hope that continues. But we need to find new ways all the time to keep people reengaging and then kind of that piggyback on to kind of our next core issue, when we think about habits of core users. So we have a group of power users, I would call them at our firm. They really are leading the pack in every way. They know what they're doing. They know how to use social, they're very savvy. They know how to talk. We don't have to give them a lot of coaching of, you know, this is why social is important. They know it, they get it. It helps their brand personally, it helps the company, it helps Their sales like they get it, but they also like to just do it themselves. And so if some of that is making sure we've brought those people into the fold appropriately, making sure that we provide them with the resource and just kind of breaking the habit of not going to LinkedIn natively and posting, we want them to go through Oktopost so that we can have all that beautiful tracking. Because when people go outside the system, then all of my attribution, it's not there. That is disappointing. But there's so many different ways to use Oktopost. That's one thing we enjoy. You've got a bookmarking bar, there's a mobile app, there's a web desktop app, there's a thousand things. And so it's just getting people used to it is definitely a long term challenge for us and just kind of keeping that engagement high. We love the metrics we've seen this year. You know, unfortunately I wasn't able to share all of our revenue network numbers. I'm really excited about those. I think it's just something that we are going to continue plugging and growing. We're also just rolled out the paid like LinkedIn paid advertising component within Oktopost. So we're getting that all integrated flare stack today as well. And so we do a lot of that paid social. So bringing that into our advocacy platform and tying that into attribution long term, it's something we're also really focused on. So that's kind of where we are today and what we're looking for next year.
35:05
Jennifer Gutman
So, Amanda, I couldn't, I mean, I could literally listen to you speak for probably another 24 hours on employee advocacy because you really raised some interesting topics, but also very relatable topics. You know, breaking habits of core users, getting them, you know, off native LinkedIn and trying to help explain to your employee advocacy army, right, the why behind what you're doing. And I think that's a big part of, right, breaking those habits and keeping engagement high. That when your employees know the why. Especially, you know, we love sales, right, But I'll throw it out there, especially sales, when they know that everything is going to be tracked and they're going to be able to see it in Salesforce rather than, hey, just don't post on LinkedIn because we can't track, right. We start to speak the language of the other departments. And with social being so centric to almost every department needing it, I think this becomes a really interesting way to get people engaged and maintain that engagement. But as we said in the beginning and perhaps next year. This is our last webinar of the year. Perhaps we'll have to have you back, Amanda, speaking about all the different ways we are trying to go ahead and maintain that engagement because I would say that that certainly is half the battle. But until then, I want to say thank you to you, Amanda. Thank you everybody for tuning in. It's the last webinar of the year. It's been quite the year. I keep saying, you know, last year was crazy thinking it's 2022, but actually that was two years ago. So I wish everybody a very happy holiday season, a very healthy and safe new year. And Amanda, if anybody here is looking to turn to somebody who is just an employee advocacy ninja, Amanda is your gal and you're going to want to speak to her. Feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to her. She's just phenomenal. So, Amanda, thank you so much for joining us. I'm just going to open as we wrap up the question box here. So we have so just confirming, yes, this is recorded and yes, this will be shared. And then I have one for Amanda. Let's see. So, Amanda, can you share with us what are you measuring employee advocates on for your contests? And also impressions, like I said, impressions, engagements like shares, comments, conversions. Stephanie is looking to start an employee advocacy program and she really wants to make sure that she's measuring people on what's fair but also meaningful. Could you give some insight there?
37:38
Amanda Benour
Yeah, absolutely. So our big thing is we really want to focus on that fairness that you talked about. We don't like to basically, I hate to use the word punish, maybe it's penalized is the right word. Penalize people that don't have as big of a footprint yet.
37:55
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
37:55
Amanda Benour
Maybe they're early in their careers, maybe they're new to social. You know, there could be a thousand reasons why someone has a smaller footprint, but we don't want them to be right out of the gate kind of discouraged because they can never compete with our, you know, really, truly more visible experts. So we actually, for the contest itself, and this is different than how we would like internally measure the total impact of the contest. But for the contest measurement, we try to do really level set, fair measurement. So we actually would assign points to actions rather than results based on we just want everyone to participate. So we would set weekly challenges, like three posts this week. You know, in one of the posts, you need to, you know, tag a colleague and start a conversation or different things that were very actionable. And we would assign Amanda.
38:54
Jennifer Gutman
I'm going to just chime in there for that one. So. So when you say one of your contests, because I think this is really interesting, was, you know, hey, post three times, and in one of those, you know, tag a colleague. Do you have, like, social media police and your marketing team, like, keeping your eye on LinkedIn, like, how are tallying this? How are you measuring the mentions?
39:14
Amanda Benour
Yeah. And with the algorithm, like, how do you do that? Yeah. So a couple things. So what's really nice. And Oktopost lets us really, like, visibly see what everyone's doing. So a couple things. In our very early days of these contests, and this is actually when we were on a different platform, we would ask people to send screenshots for our more complex challenges. So if you did it, send in a screenshot. And we had, like, an intern who would, like, count them all up and say, okay, I got this many screenshots for this person. So they got 50 points or whatever it might be. We've evolved past that because Oktopost makes it really easy. And so what we've done is we've set up a couple reports within Oktopost that allow us to see individuals who are sharing out. Let's say we ask them to share about a specific topic. We can go to that topic and we can see who shared it, how many people shared it. Let's say we assigned 20 points to each of those. We very kind of easily glean who gets 20 points. Now, there is a manual side to these because we go outside of those metrics that are automatically populated. Things that we should care about for marketing, like impressions, like Reach, those are very easy to run a contest off of. And I think those are nice things to do. Like, we had MVPs throughout the contest who reached really high engagement metrics. And we give them some kind of gift as well. Maybe like $100Amazon gift card and say, this person, you know, for the last three weeks got X amount of impressions or engagement. And those are the kind of metrics we pulled just directly off of the Oktopost leaderboards. The other things did have a manual component. We had a giant spreadsheet where we were grabbing from different reports within Oktopost and putting them into the spreadsheet to kind of aggregate totals. We had a coordinator who helps kind of manage that, but it's not nearly as time consuming as it sounds once you start doing it. And we would also structure our challenges in a way that were really easy to measure. So we'd ask everyone to use the same hashtag or we'd ask them to use a specific topic, do a certain number of posts and things that we could easily just look, grab and export like a spreadsheet with everyone's names. That did it right. Things like that make it really easy to count and measure. We didn't get into this like, well, they had 10 more shares than this person because we just didn't want to discourage anyone because the action of participating was enough. And that's what we. That's really, you know, it sounds like a low bar, but when we're talking about creating habits and people building an employee brand for the first time, we just need them to start. And so we try to really structure the contest in a way that the bar was low to just start getting engagement. And then they can get excited when they see these MVPs garnering tons of impressions and numbers and they want to get there. So maybe they're going to listen better and they're going to learn from others, you know, in a more sophisticated way. Amazing.
42:35
Jennifer Gutman
Amanda, thank you so much. And I'll say it one more time, if anybody is struggling with needing some ideas, I think we found our go to Amanda. But also, you can also lean in onto Oktopost. We were happy to provide all of the insights that we've gained to kind of rev up those contests, get those employees engaged. So with that said, Amanda, thank you so much for joining us. And we look forward to seeing what Everest Group and you are up to for Q1 2022.
43:05
Amanda Benour
Sounds great. Thank you so much. It's been great being here.
