0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, how to measure the impact of your employee advocacy program. I am Alina Dalal. I am the Content Marketing Manager here at Oktopost, and I will be your host today. I'm so excited to dive into this webinar. Dassault and Justin are genuinely perfect for this topic. But before we do, I have a few housekeeping things. So we'd love to hear from you throughout the session. So you can drop your questions in the QA box as we go along and we'll get to them at the end. And don't worry, everyone here will get a recording of the webinar after we're also, if you look over in the resources bar on the tab below, you'll find some great content on employee advocacy under the Link tab. And you'll also find links to Justin's and Dassel's LinkedIn profiles in case you want to connect with them. That'll be under the speaker tab. So with that, let's kick things off with our session about measuring employee advocacy. Running a program is no easy task. You are motivating employees, you're motivating your executives to share. You're training new hires, you're keeping participation strong. And that's really not all of what you're doing. But after all the hard work that we know you're putting in, we believe that every advocacy leader deserves the tools to prove their impact with confidence. And that's exactly what this webinar is about. It's about helping you measure and report on your program to your leadership with clarity. So this is where our guests come in, and I promise you, you are in for a treat. Both our guests were named as one of your B2B socials rising 30. And I can guarantee you will understand why when they answer the first question. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to them to let them introduce themselves. Dasil Justin, firstly, thank you for joining me today. Can you tell us your name, your role, what company you're from, and how you define a successful advocacy program? Dasil, I'm going to start with you.
1:49
Dasle Hong
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Dasil Hong. I'm the senior manager of Brand marketing here at DailyPay. And a successful advocacy program, I think I would have to start with how do you define advocacy? And for me, it's leveraging the power of our employees voices to advocate on behalf of themselves, of each other, and of the company. So a successful program is one that Empowers all employees to do just that and create a culture of advocacy.
2:19
Alina Dallal
Amazing. And Justin, how about you?
2:22
Justin Levy
So I'm Justin Levy. I lead content, social media and our influencer strategy for ZoomInfo. And Dassel got to go first, so she got to steal what I would say. But the only thing I would tack on to that is a successful advocacy program would also integrate your executive advocacy. And I see it as two separate things. Right. In enabling and activating your employees through a variety of methods, but also enabling, activating and working with your senior executives within your company.
2:59
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. They're definitely two different. They fall under two different umbrellas and need different strategies. Thank you, both of you for joining me and for giving us a little bit of intro to yourself. And I'm excited to dive in. But before we get into all the measurements and the tactics and things like that, please can you both first share what your advocacy programs look like today and what your goals are that you're driving towards? That's why I'm going to start with you.
3:23
Dasle Hong
Yeah, absolutely. So our advocacy program is run by our social media team and it's a little bit deceiving because we're a team of two. It's myself and my colleague Brandon and we're part of the marketing team, but we work really closely in partnership with our PR team, events team, product marketing, HR, and really any team in the business that has content to share. So we're working really closely with all those teams to surface any content and to make sure they're aligned to our business goals. So for us, that's really brand awareness and lead generation.
3:58
Alina Dallal
Amazing. And Justin, how about you? Similar things or different?
4:03
Justin Levy
Yeah, I think that the advocacy program looks pretty similar. Like I said, we integrate our executive advocacy into that as well. So we look at our advocacy program over a few different tiers with our, we have kind of tier one executives who get white glove treatment from our executive comms team and that is helping to draft content for them, working hand in hand with them on what their strategies are. Our next tiers, working with the broader kind of departmental level executives for specialized messaging that's just for their department. And then the kind of next tier is for our broader employees. And to Dasil's point, for us, it's just kind of it's my team, but also tacking on that partnership with exec comms. And we primarily look at the same metrics, awareness and demand, based on what the stories are that we're communicating and to who and kind of time and whether that's a product launch campaigns or essentially weekly content.
5:15
Alina Dallal
Perfect. So thanks for both sharing. It's interesting because obviously every company isn't one size fits all. We all measure different things. But it's interesting to hear that you both basically tie back to brand awareness and lead generation. Justin, I want to turn to you before we dive into measurement as well. You kind of already touched on it now and you've mentioned executive advocacy a few times and I know you mentioned your tears, but I'm wondering if we can dive into it a little bit more. So when it comes to an advocacy program, how do you divide executive advocacy and employee advocacy? Do you encourage your executives to be part of your advocacy program, which I know you already said you see them as separate or do you go straight for them?
5:50
Justin Levy
Yeah, so it's a good question. If you looked at our advocacy program with executives, it branches into two areas, right? So our tier one executives are folks such as our CEO and our CRO, a couple of our VPs that are very kind of out there, very public as part of their brands and on behalf of the company. And so they receive kind of a one to one treatment. Right. Our exec comms team works with them on the exact messaging that they want to communicate, the exact types of content and formats that they want to communicate. Right. That could be images or video or things that are pertinent to the company as overall and how they're personal networks tend to respond to that content. And then her name's Paige on our team will ghostwrite that content for them, sending it for their approval and then either she'll post it for them, they'll post it directly, or you know, someone within their circle will their chief of staff or executive assistant. When you look at the rest of the executive team that is really working at like a departmental level, right. So going within, taking a piece of content, if we're launching a new product, for example, but taking those messages and creating two different variations of it, one that's for the different departments. So sales executives are naturally going to communicate a different way about this product than marketing is going to or engineering or the product team. Right. So it's working with them. And then employee efficacy is the broader employee base. It's using the tool sets that we have, it's using the other communication methods that we have at our disposal. All hands meetings, all hands emails that our CEO or someone else in the executive team might send other options to communicate, whether it's larger slack groups or things of that nature. So that's how we approach it from kind of a broader view and then can dig into each of those audiences throughout the company.
8:10
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for sharing because I think also I don't know if anyone else realized, but the executives that zoom in for are very loud and active on social. So it's quite nice to see how it's happening and get an insights behind the scenes of how you're approaching both of these these programs. Dassel, I want to turn to you. So we know we're nearing the end of the year and today is the last day of Q3, so it's a very good point to reflect. So I'm wondering what the key metrics are that you've been tracking and how often you report on your program.
8:38
Dasle Hong
Yeah, I think for employee advocacy programs, people have pretty much standardized metrics that are available through the tools that they're using. So for us, the most important ones are earned media value, participation, impressions and engagement. But on top of that, one thing we introduced this year actually was the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. And if you're not familiar, it's the influence that you have on LinkedIn and it's measured by LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And that's been a really powerful way, especially for our go to market teams, to look at, hey, like, how is my LinkedIn content performing? Is my influence and my network growing over time? And for that we've been reporting weekly because those numbers move around pretty frequently. And we also report on what is the highest performing content that week, who's on the leaderboard for advocacy. And then on a monthly basis, I think that's when we look at earned media value, participation, impressions and engagement just to see the monthly trends over time.
9:39
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I think it also makes sense. Some of them are, as you're saying, they change so often. So to look at them weekly and see how things are going and you can track patterns in your program, especially when it's something weekly. And as I said, no company, it's not one size fits all. So seeing, hearing what you hear, what you measure monthly. I'm interested to now turn to you, Justin, as a leader. What do you expect to see from your team when they report to you and what signals to your team that they're on track?
10:06
Justin Levy
Yes, I think that when we look at our reporting, we certainly will look at the reports both on a monthly, quarterly and then yearly basis. And we want to see the growth in the overall base. So how many employees have we activated over both the total program length as well as who's been active in that past period? Of time. Right. It could be a month, a quarter or the year. Because obviously you can have every employee in a company be part of your program, but only a small percentage are going to be active with the program. So my team will report back the similar metrics that DASL is talking about, kind of impressions and engagements, leaderboard type metrics, but at a kind of higher level. We'll also look at what content is performing the best and see if we can gain any insights into that. Right. Is videos. Do our vertical videos over perform and that we're putting into our platform and sharing with our employees. Do we see that when we do one off newsletters or email pushes, are those performing better than the weekly newsletter or just the platform itself? Right. So looking at how that consumption happens and what type of content is being shared and I think that obviously those all the growth metrics help signal whether or not the team is on track or where we need to pivot the type of content or the placement of content. Right. So newsletter, for example, has different placements throughout it. So do we need to reprioritize for the next newsletter, next offering or whatnot?
11:59
Alina Dallal
Is it interesting you say that? Because it kind of leads in really nicely to the next question that I wanted to ask. So now we kind of know what kind of metrics both of you are tracking and what you expect to see. We have all this data now. What how do we use it to inform our advocacy content? I know that you mentioned that you'll see is vertical videos working or is this working? Should we change the placement in our newsletter? So once you do look at the data, what do we do next and when do we do it? Justin, I'm going to start with you.
12:25
Justin Levy
You know, we'll typically look at the content over say a month period of time or something. Right. You don't want to kind of keep pivoting. Oh, you know, vertical video work this week. So then next week we're going to change that because it could be a specific video. Right. You know, we know that our employees tend to share videos that include our CEO more than maybe other videos. Right. Or if it's a product launch week or period of time, obviously they're going to share something like a sizzle reel or customer video highlight. So things of that nature. You don't want to make very reactive kind of changes when you just see something over a week or two week period of time. So we'll try to look at it as a trend less than kind of trying to make an immediate pivot because we Saw something over share in a week?
13:24
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. You need time to notice the trends. You can't act on them too quickly. It's really good advice and dazzle. How about you? Is it similar or do you see different things?
13:33
Dasle Hong
I think we tried to get continuous feedback. So I am constantly finding ways to improve our program and build a quarterly roadmap of sorts. So whatever our teams are saying about hey, this content is helpful or this content is not helpful, we try to optimize for that and to the needs of the business. So one example of that is a prompt training for ChatGPT or Gemini and then also providing one on one social media coaching. So for people that need a little more hands on help, spending 15 minutes with them on, hey, how do you optimize your sharing on LinkedIn? How can we help as a social team? I think that's a part of support that we are able to provide so that we can not only improve on the content but also really help the employees share it in the best way possible.
14:24
Alina Dallal
Yeah, that's really interesting that you shared that because also I think as marketers we sometimes think things are simple or easier than we think. We don't realize that when people are showing up on LinkedIn, writing posts and all these things that they want the extra support and the extra confidence. So it actually leads me again very nicely to the next thing I wanted to ask you. We've spoken a lot about quantitative data so far, but a huge piece of the puzzle is our advocates, as you're saying, and hearing their feedback and the way they feel about our programs can't really be revealed in the numbers, to be honest. So the best way is through conversation. So I'm wondering, beyond dashboards and analytics, do you use other qualitative methods to measure employee sentiment towards advocacy and how do these insights then influence your program?
15:07
Dasle Hong
I think one thing that as marketers we might sometimes miss is the employee engagement survey. And typically that's run by the HR team. And why this matters is because it's a way to measure how connected employees feel towards the company. And of course that has a direct tie into how proud you are to work for the company. And of course how likely are you to share about the company. And so we partner really closely with our HR team to see, hey, what is the employee engagement level? Like, how can we make sure that employees are engaged so that they can then share content about the company? And I think a qualitative way that we do that is our team takes a really big role in new hire Orientation. So from day one we ask employees about their social media presence. Hey, like what platforms are you on? What is your social media usage? We onboard them from day one and we say hey, this is our employee advocacy platform. This is how you use it. Let's connect your LinkedIn and get you set up from day one. And of course it's a great way to get input about hey like this is what our new hires are reacting to in terms of our employee advocacy tool and also helps me think about how I position the program and communicate it on an ongoing basis.
16:23
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for sharing. And I think it's really good tactics that people that are listening can go ahead and use within their own companies to hear employee feedback. Feedback the next one I want to ask you, I think majority if not all of our listeners can relate to every single employee advocacy program ebbs and flows. So what signals to you that your employee advocacy program has plateaued? And do you have any tricks that you've used to re energize your employees? Justin, I'm going to start with you first.
16:53
Justin Levy
I think that you'll see just a natural plateau, right? You know we grew Last year in 2024 we grew our program from 100 employees being on it. So I came into the company last January. So when first came into the company we started to evaluate the platform and where we stood and things of that nature with the program. We had 100 employees on the platform and part of the advocacy program. By the end of the year we were at 2,000 and but out of 4,000 employees that it's a great success metric to report up and add to your LinkedIn and do all these things. But there is a natural plateau that's going to happen, right? You can only in an all hands meeting or in an all hands email encourage people to go join the program or do things like it's part of our okta so employees have access from day one. They don't need to sign up for yet another platform or something or get it support. So I think that that's one, right? Just member engagement. Member growth will always signal that that something has plateaued. I think what we'll do a lot of times is to try to help re energize employees is run some type of contest, right? Like a leaderboard contest. I tend to lean more towards the number of engagements than something like shares because I think shares are a method that can be gained in a negative way. So like an employee, if it's just shares, all you have to do is sit There and hit the share button with every piece of content does literally no good. Right. But quality engagements is a whole nother thing. And that's what you're trying to drive with the program. Right? So
18:58
Alina Dallal
interesting to hear. That's why I'm wondering do you have similar or different things? And then we'll talk about the M.O. after.
19:03
Dasle Hong
Okay, I totally agree on the shares. Like people will just do whatever they can to win those prizes, which is amazing. So how we got around that was we did it by impressions. So that way it motivates the employees to not only grow their network, but also share quality content that's getting a ton of reach. So that's how we've gotten around that. And yeah, totally agree on like you have to get leadership buy in. And I think we find different ways to excite people again. So one way that I see that our program has plateaued is like silly things like, okay, if you're getting less emojis on your slack messages on your content, that is a signal, right? And we'll do things like giving shout outs to people, being like, hey, this amazing content just posted XYZ already shared. Can you join them to build a little sense of fomo? Another one is seeing what's on your corporate handles and getting people excited again. So we actually have a meme going out today about September 30th versus October 1st. I think it's finding those moments where it can really excite your employees again. And it doesn't just have to be on your employee advocacy platform. It could be on your LinkedIn. LinkedIn, it could be on your company's Instagram, whatever ways to get people excited and engaged again, I think works.
20:29
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And I think as you're saying, you don't want people just to share and just to try get the prizes. You want people to share quality content that also represents who they are because that's the only way they're going to keep going. So they could do a burst of sharing at one point, but that doesn't mean necessarily that they're going to continue in the future. So it's interesting to hear the tricks you've used to re energize employees. And since today is September 30th, that's already an idea that people can take. The next question I want to ask both of you is if you can share a specific use case where employee advocacy has played a major role in achieving a big business outcome. What results did you guys see and how did you show advocacy's impact alongside other Marketing efforts. Justin, I'm going to start with you.
21:13
Justin Levy
I think where we saw, you know, that 100 to 2,000 increase, the real sharp uptick was last year, probably two inflection points for us. One was last February we rang the opening bell at Nasdaq and that was to celebrate Zoom Info going public. That happened over Covid, but we hadn't had that opportunity to actually go to Nasdaq. So we drove a lot of excitement with the employee base. There was multiple emails that went out from our CEO that we had messages that they could easily grab and share there. And then in May, we launched a major new product. And so that was something that the entire company in their, you know, different areas throughout the company and different kind of skill sets work to help to launch. So there was a lot of excitement behind it. And as you can imagine, we had a lot of content created from social team, the video team, other teams throughout marketing and elsewhere. So it became a social, became the end customer of all of that. Right. So we knew everything that was going out and had access to all of it. So that became this real push of if you want all of the content and want to choose something to share, you have to be part of the advocacy program. Right. And so that, that was a big opportunity to push it. And that's probably where we saw that, that largest swing because people were excited about it and really wanted the opportunity to, to share and didn't want to just go to the brand page and go, oh cool, you know, I'm just gonna engage with that. Which they did naturally, but they were proud of it and wanted to share that video or that piece of content.
23:11
Alina Dallal
Yeah, it's like they wanted to make it part of their own and show pride in it and show it off to their networks. Dazzle, how about you?
23:19
Dasle Hong
So this past summer we actually ran an initiative called Hot LinkedIn Summer. And that was a directive coming from the top saying, hey, we really want our customer facing teams to be more active on LinkedIn. How do we get them more influential on LinkedIn? Can we provide training, weekly communications? How do we show the value of this? And so from that we had prizes, we had weekly actions, we had guest speakers coming in and we just made it a part of our summer. And while people were in and out of pto, we also shared leaderboards and just made it a part of our company. And I think at the end of that, this quarter, we had some of the highest levels of sharing, especially in our go to market organization, which is our client success and sales Customer facing teams. I think we had like upwards of 85% of people sharing. So huge success for us. And of course it drove a lot more engagement and impressions than even our corporate handles. So yeah, hot LinkedIn summer was great. We got to find something else for fall. But yeah, it was a really, really successful campaign for us.
24:30
Alina Dallal
That's incredible. Congratulations. And as you're saying, it's something so simple that will just get everybody more involved and it'll help you with your business goals as well. So thank you both of you for sharing. It's really interesting to hear specific use cases from other people in other companies. The next question, Justin, I want to turn to you. So when you compare your advocacy results with corporals corporate social, what differences or trends stand out and how do you then take that from your team and highlight it to your leadership?
24:58
Justin Levy
Yeah, I think it's a great question. What you'll always see and I think that this is the same with any company. I'm sure Dassault will agree that your advocacy program will always outpace your brand channels. Right. The amount of sharing, the engagements, the trust that their networks have in a human essentially will always outpace what the brand has the capabilities to do. I'd say the only big difference that can happen is that app scale. From a paid media perspective, the brand has the ability to boost their posts. You can use and this is like goes down a bit of a rabbit hole, but you can use dollars to post to boost other people's posts. But at scale of 2,000 employees, you're not going to do that. Right. So the trust that people have in your employees, their networks are usually networks that the brand can't reach. There's those secondary and tertiary networks that can't. A brand can't reach.
26:16
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And I know you're saying with boosting posts and you can also, of course you can't boost 2,000 employees. Or you could try. But also hand picking like for example the executives or really important posts I think is also a good idea. But yeah, as you're saying, I think if a company's like talking a lot about themselves, people tend to trust a person who is talking about it. We know naturally day to day we trust referrals. So it's also no different. So with that I want to move over to the last question. I know I asked you at the beginning how you define a successful program, but now I want to ask both of you, how do you personally know if your program is successful? What's your North Star Dasil? I'M going to start with you.
26:59
Dasle Hong
My North Star goes back to what I said at the top of the webinar, which is leveraging the power of our employees to advocate on behalf of themselves, of each other and of the company. So if I'm able to provide a safe space where employees can speak up and advocate for those who might not be able to advocate for themselves, that's how I know my program is successful.
27:21
Alina Dallal
Amazing. That's such a nice piece of advice to leave off of. And Justin, how about you?
27:26
Justin Levy
I think it's, it's definitely continuing to grow the program and grow the engagement that's happening within the program. Right. So again, we could get to 4,000 employees if only the same five people are engaged. That's not, it's success at a, at scale, but it's not success at the kind of, of active kind of users level. So the more we can help and guide less engaged employees to participate in the program, I think is a big deal. As well as helping employees and teaching employees to not just hit the share button for whatever the content is that the brand puts in there. Right. It's, it's nice, it helps. But that is always meant in any platform to be a suggestion to help them put that into their own voice. So you see some employees do it, you see a lot of employees not do it. So trying to help that growth and that understanding to help them build their personal brands more Amazing.
28:36
Alina Dallal
Thank you for sharing. It's so interesting to hear like from the beginning to end how you guys define it and how you know you're, you're being successful. And definitely encouraging everybody to show up online is a really great message to end with. I'm going to invite all of you now to send any questions through to the chat or to the Q and A and we will get round to them shortly. Our QR codes are up here if you would like to scan them and connect with any of us on LinkedIn. I highly recommend connecting with Dassault and Justin if you want to see why they are B2B socials rising 30. You'll see why when you get to their profile. Before we dive into the Q and A, I just wanted to do a quick shout out. If you are an Oktopost customer, you can GET certified in B2B Employee Advocacy Program leading leadership and this is what you'll learn. You'll learn what to prioritize before a launch, how to onboard advocates with excitement, the power of early wins, how to achieve them, what to do when engagement dips. It happens to all of us. So don't panic if you get there. Tips to scale advocacy Program and how to track and measure impact So a lot of the things we covered today, if you are an Oktopost customer, please contact your account manager and you can get certified. If you want to know how Oktopost can help you manage and scale your advocacy programs and your social media efforts, you can also scan this QR code and you'll talk to one of our B2B marketing experts on whatever you choose to tackle with with them. So you'll get a tailored session based on your chosen topics to uncover how others in the field are elevating their B2B brand and see what you can do. So I'll leave the QR code up there for you guys to scan. If you'd like to speak with us while we dive into the Q and A. I'm just going to open it now because we're getting a few questions come through. Okay, we have a question saying we have a problem of too much content on our advocacy platform to the point where it might be overwhelming. What is your strategy for curating content on the platform for your employees to share out?
30:33
Dasle Hong
Okay, I can go first. So we actually partner really closely with our internal communications team and we have several newsletters that go out. One is like a culture newsletter. So we might have employee spot for our employee resource groups. So we'll spotlight that piece of content there. We actually do a roundup every week of like top content on our platform. So that goes out to all employees and then to our sales teams. We hand pick content that's really good for our customer facing teams. So I think that's one way where we can say hey, this team pay attention to this, this week. And we send that out every single week to our different audiences so that it could get less overwhelming because yes, I agree we have that problem too. It's a good problem to have. But I think being able to pinpoint things that are more relevant to each department is really helpful.
31:25
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. We have things similar. We also feature the main stories we want people to share out. We feature at the top of our board and as, as you said, we send out emails or a Slack. If something's going live and we need everyone, we'll message them on Slack. Justin, Similar or yeah, I mean so
31:40
Justin Levy
we kind of, to your point, will feature top content at the, at the top of the newsletter and within the platform. We also are fairly, or try to be fairly maniacal about expiring content. So you know, one of the things that's happened to us and I think happens to everyone is a webinar has happened already and then you have an employee share it three weeks later. Because they may have not looked at the actual date of the webinar. They only looked at the topic. It's great if it's on demand because they're still going to go to the landing page and be able to register for it to get the on demand version. But we try to be very aware of expiring content and setting dates for content to kind of move off the platform, even if it's a longer kind of stretch up time.
32:39
Alina Dallal
Yeah, we definitely all face that problem with a webinar being posted live afterwards. By the way, Shameless. Plug in ox post. You can do us a time limit for when the story is live. I did once forget to put a time limit. So I have been there. We have another question from Ricardo. He asked how do you encourage more advocates to join? We've done presentations and we're going to start a newsletter, but I'd love to get other ideas from you.
33:08
Dasle Hong
I can go first. So I mentioned new hire orientation. I would not underestimate that one. That's like fresh content. I mean fresh people coming to share your content and they just add new energy, new insights. They've never seen this before. So they just become a continuous flow of positive energy that will get other people involved. I think another way is look at who's sharing, who are the people who are most active and get ideas from them. Get a brainstorm with the, I guess like top 10, top 20 people to brainstorm with them on ideas to get more people. I've also done presentations to each department. So going to the finance team saying, hey, how can we get more finance colleagues on board versus the entire sales team? So I think going department by department and also looking at your culture, like who are the people who are really excited to share for you and grow your program from there?
34:08
Alina Dallal
Amazing.
34:09
Justin Levy
I think that we've, you know, and I mentioned this earlier, but relied on some of our senior executives and executives to help drive some of that messaging. Right. You know, the power of say our CRO sending an email to his entire revenue team will drive a lot more engagement than, you know, me sending a message into a certain channel or his chief of staff sending something because that team is used to hearing from her. So I, I think never underestimate the kind of power of your executive team and work with them. Obviously they understand the power of it. They're not just doing it blindly. You know, We've educated them and they're part of the programs as well. So I think that that's always a big deal to get their support behind it because then if again one of your senior executives says, hey, go register for this platform or we're going to ask you to share this out in two weeks, they are more likely to reply to that ask.
35:20
Alina Dallal
Yeah, absolutely. Just me. I actually have a question that just came in for you from McKenna. Roughly how many out of the 2,000 employees in the program are sharing weekly? We struggle getting folks to regularly share content even with quarterly incentive pro programs. Do you have any other tips?
35:38
Justin Levy
Yeah, I would say depending on what's going on in the company, it's probably 5 to 10%. Right. So that kind of 100 to 200 mark. There are some that, that really understand and leverage the program for their own personal brand and say that if I was to look at the kind of departments that are most active, it tends to be sales. And I've experienced this at other companies as well because sales teams really understand how and want to use their personal brands to help drive leads for them and help drive meet. And so they are among the first people to use the platform or even our customer success teams. So those are the people that if you are seen are more likely to share. You could make one of two decisions. You could either go sit with that team and highlight those people that are are kind of the superstars within that team or, and, or you could go the opposite way and go to the teams that aren't active and try to encourage them using sales or whoever that that kind of superstar team is. So depend on your time and, and how you want to go about that. You could do one or the other. I've had success with both. But it's just kind of a strategic play depending on what your campaign is or kind of, you know, a goal the company at any given time or something of that nature.
37:16
Alina Dallal
Thank you for sharing. We do have another question from Lanny. We're getting a lot of questions in so I want to try and make sure I can squeeze in as many as we can. She asked, how do you tailor advocacy strategies for different departments or roles within a company? So for example, for product to sales and customer facing to marketing, I think
37:35
Justin Levy
for us it's looking at the type of content. So if you take one piece, just use like the same piece of content. Right. I know like Dasl mentioned, like they kind of break some things up different ways. But if you look at the same piece of content a Product launch and it's going to be a sizzle video. Right. The sales team is going to want to communicate that out in a different way. Say with. And it's not this simple, but say with a very simple message of, here's this great new product. This is how it's going to help you. If you're interested, like, reach out to me, DM me or book a meeting or whatever. Right. That's something very specific to their role. Whereas product might want to say, we built this really cool thing, come look at it. Right. Because they were the actual builders of the product. Whereas marketing is going to take a broader, more brand awareness perspective on the launch of the program. They may thank the broader company whatnot. So, like, that's how we look at tailoring the same message or the same piece of content to different teams.
38:48
Alina Dallal
Yeah. Then we can't. We do things similar also. We also, like Dassel, we have an onboarding. Every time someone joins the company, we give them an onboarding into social media, employee advocacy, how to use the tool, etc. And one of the things I always do in those trainings, and we do reminders and refreshes throughout the year, but the trainings, when people first join, we give them like a set prompt. So if you're in product, when you approach this, talk about what the process was like, building it. If you are in marketing, talk about the process, what it was like, understanding the product and how it suited your audiences. We give them different prompts to help them when it comes to editing their own messages. And, um, Dassel, we have a question from McKenna that came in for you. She said, can you Talk more about LinkedIn Sales Navigator? What benefits have you seen from it?
39:33
Dasle Hong
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we got lucky with this one, where our sales team was already using it and I just happened to see the backend reporting where it shows you the number of connections that every single person has as well as what their score is for their social selling index. And so that motivates the reps, which I found to be the most impactful thing. They see their score and they're like, oh, my gosh, I'm 0.2 points away from being number one. And then they want to not only share the advocacy content, but they're also sharing their own thought leadership, which is the end goal. Right. We don't want them to just share, we want them to come up with their own content, be thought leaders in their own regard. And so having that score was a powerful way to be like, hey, you just have to like post a couple more times a week to get that score up. And I would say that if you can run that report weekly or even on a monthly basis, that will help motivate your sales team, which I thought was really impactful for us.
40:33
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And I thought we can always trust our sales teams to love a bit of friendly competition. So I can see how that works. We did have a question in from Priyanka. Basically said, how can we actually ask or make sure that our advocates are making sure edits or creating new content? Obviously we can't always ensure that's happening. So do you have any strategies to motivate them to do that?
41:06
Justin Levy
Yeah. So,
41:10
Dasle Hong
okay, how do we. Can you repeat the question one more time?
41:13
Alina Dallal
Yes. How do you make sure that your advocates are actually editing the content, making it their own or creating new content?
41:20
Dasle Hong
Okay. This is the hardest part of an advocacy program. Like, Justin's smiling. Right. One thing we've done is we put a Gemini prompt onto our advocacy tool and we literally bullet it out. Like, okay, like write down your audience. Who are you trying to reach? This is the tone of voice. Include this. Don't say that. But I have to say, like, some people do it and some people don't. And I think it's really, really difficult. But some people do really care about their thought leadership, personal branding. And so, yeah, you just gotta keep at it. Keep giving shout outs to people who are doing it really well and make it as easy as possible. So having that prompt has helped us and I think having live trainings also help as well.
42:08
Alina Dallal
Justin, do you want to add or shaime wants the next question?
42:11
Justin Levy
We can move on to the next question.
42:13
Alina Dallal
I think that's a people.
42:14
Justin Levy
I think, you know, any social team or person that manages the social advocacy program, that is probably the hardest and or biggest frustration that that people have with. With that program.
42:32
Alina Dallal
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think all of us feel that those struggles. We have a question from Avi and Alex. What prizes or incentives can you offer employees to make them want to post? Not just a pat on the back. Have you done similar things like this in the past, like prizes and things?
42:51
Justin Levy
I think a lot of times we will do kind of the most simple and basic thing has been either gift cards, you know, like an e gift card to some something or a piece of swag. And on the swag kind of depend on the company I've been at and we've done it here. It'll either be to our like our swag store. Our employee swag store. So they can pick out something that they want or a unique piece of swag that maybe not everyone has. Right. Using our gifting partner to create something unique for them like a, a yeti mug or something that maybe is not available in the store.
43:38
Alina Dallal
Nice. Dasa, do you do any like prizes
43:42
Dasle Hong
and incentives swag store for sure. I think having that like exclusive access like oh, you can only win this when you post on our advocacy platform works another one. I think this only works in certain cultures but like having a one on one lunch with an executive in your office, just getting really creative around what your employees would like. So that's one that's worked well for us.
44:10
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. Also, you can never go wrong with swag. The swag store. Everyone loves swag store. We have one more question I'm going to get to and if we haven't answered any of your questions, we will follow up with you afterwards. And if there's anything specific for Dassel or Justin, feel free to reach out to them on LinkedIn. Camille said we're having trouble getting to our employees to actually start using our advocacy program. Do you have any tips for starting the interest?
44:38
Justin Levy
Oh, I, I think that, you know I, I've been at companies, you know, I know that kind of before this when we're doing the pre call I talked about, you know, 15 years ago or so, you know, my company was one of the first two companies at that time. First two companies to come to onboard with, with a different tool. Right. And so I've been at literally employee number one in a company that was a very large scale publicly traded company all the way to here. Like I said, with that kind of growth of a hundred to two thousand. And I think there's a lot that has to go around getting people genuinely excited in helping them understand what's in it for them. Right. The, the, what's the benefit for them, not the company. And if people just feel like they're only doing it for the company, they're less likely to be part, an active part of the program if they think that they're doing it and they understand that it's a benefit to them. It's a benefit to build their personal brand and to con easily contribute content. I think that's where you see the most success.
45:52
Alina Dallal
Yeah.
45:53
Dasle Hong
And I think one thing that we didn't touch on today is like a company all hands, like your CEO or another executive just getting up on stage and saying, all right everyone take out your phones, take out your laptops. We're gonna all log in right now. We've done that once at like a sales kickoff. Super powerful starting point because you kind of had peer pressure like, okay, everyone else is doing it, so I have to log in too. So having a, a big, big launch like that was really helpful for us.
46:22
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. And having your executives talk about it and see how important it is will actually motivate more employees. I know, I did too. On the last question, we just got another one in that I want to ask you guys before I let you go. Maria asked, how do you manage inactive advocates? At what point do you remove them for inactivity?
46:40
Justin Levy
We actually, and I don't know if DASL does something different. I mean, we'll try to reactivate them and re engage with them, but we don't remove them as an inactive employee. Right. I think that actually does you a disservice simply because if they want to become active, even if they haven't been active since day one. Right. Like take the most extreme version, they are on the. In our case, if someone was one of those hundred people that have been on the platform for who knows how long, that doesn't mean that they won't become active at some point, that some piece of content won't cross their email that really interests them to share or a campaign. Take, take the my example from last February with nasdaq. You know, that's something that maybe someone that wasn't engaged, got really excited about and wanted to share. So I wouldn't ever remove anyone from the platform. You sometimes have to do sweeps and we'll do this of the platform to remove anyone that's left the company. But that's the only time we kind of deactivate someone.
47:55
Dasle Hong
Yeah, completely agree. I think even if people are just reading the content and not sharing, they're still getting information. They're learning about the company. And we don't ever force people to share content. So if they want to just read and never share, that's fine with us. I agree with Justin. We never remove people unless they're no longer with the organization.
48:17
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you, both of you for joining me. You guys have been incredible panelists and I'm sure everybody agrees. So thank you so much. Thank you for sharing everything and thank you to everyone for tuning in. If you have any questions or anything, please feel free to reach out to any of us on LinkedIn and we'll be happy to connect and continue the conversation. So thank you very much.
