0:00
Whitney Blankenship
Hi, everybody. Welcome into Oktopost's newest webinar for how we earned 266 more social conversions with employee advocacy. I am so excited for this webinar today because this has been a project that was months in the making. So just to kind of give you some background information, my name is Whitney Blankenship. I'm a senior content marketing manager at Oktopost. And today I am joined by none other than Olivia Messina. Please introduce yourself, everybody.
0:34
Olivia Messina
Hi everyone, I'm Olivia Messina. I'm our social media and community manager and I'm so excited to be here today chatting about two of my favorite things, social media and employee advocacy, of course. So I'm very excited to dive in.
0:49
Whitney Blankenship
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me, Olivia. So let's just give a little bit of background information before we jump into the meat of everything. Why did we want to do this? So we performed this experiment over the course of all of Q1, and we really wanted to understand our own employee advocacy program because we had a ton of new employees, we had a brand new marketing team, and it was just time for that relaunch. It was time for the revamp. It was time for to give everybody a rundown on social media and really just to find the way that we wanted our employee advocacy program to function. So. And if you've joined a webinar that has me in it, you're going to see this slide because I keep citing it because it's powerful. We performed a study. It was the state of B2B marketing at the end of 2021. And what we found is that 78% of CMOs said that employee advocacy and social selling were their top best performing social media initiatives for 2021. That's a powerful statement, especially when you consider that it's significantly higher than paid ads, for example. So we decided to take a look at our own customers and we performed the employee advocacy benchmark report in the beginning of 2022. And we found that B2B brands that were using employee advocacy actually were earning 25 to 40% higher engagement than those who had no employee advocacy program at all. So what we decided to do was we wanted to put it to the test. We wanted to use the best practices that we learned over the years and kind of use what we were learning from our own customers as well and just perform a total relaunch of our own employee advocacy program. And so this comprised of a four step relaunch process which started off with education and launch. So we needed to educate our Advocates on various things over the course of Q1. We needed to maintain the program and we needed to motivate our advocates, which tends to be really, really tricky for a lot of people. We want to talk through how we did that. We focused heavily on creating new and innovative kinds of content for our advocacy board. And then it came down to results and really getting into how did this impact us and what were our results. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Olivia. Olivia, what was the biggest part of educating our advocates for you? Why was that so critically important?
3:53
Olivia Messina
Yeah, of course. So our first priority when launching this initiative was to educate our advocates and give them a strong foundation. We wanted to give them everything they needed to succeed because, interestingly enough, 72% of employees have never received any type of formal social media training, which makes sense because not everyone in your program will have experience in marketing and social. Within your program, you'll have advocates across many different departments, from customer success to sales, maybe your development team. And you also may have new employees that have recently joined your team or employees that are new to your employee advocacy program. So it's very important to educate your advocates and arm them with everything that they need before you kick off. So hosting a social media training where everyone hops on and you can kind of go through all of the best
4:53
Whitney Blankenship
practices, I think that's so interesting and I just kind of want to circle back to that stat. And I've launched a poll for everybody watching today. I'd love to know if anybody else has had any kind of formal social media training because honestly, I mean, I would be hard pressed to find a lot of marketing teams that have necessarily had formal social media training if they, if they don't do anything that's involved with social media specifically. And I mean, you get into other departments in the company and probably not. So what's interesting is it looks like we've got quite a few people that have already responded to the poll and it looks like the majority, at 48% have said no. They've never had any kind of formal social media training. We have 21% that are coming in with saying yes, and then we have 31% that are coming in and saying they've somewhat had some kind of formal social media training, which is interesting. I expected it to be a little higher because I feel like if you're coming to employee advocacy, maybe, maybe social is a bigger priority, but that's definitely about what I would have expected. Thanks so much for participating, everyone.
6:14
Olivia Messina
That was definitely an interesting mix so when we started off our social media training, we started off by teaching the different aspects of employee advocacy and what employee advocacy actually is, because many people have never participated in employee advocacy before. It was really fun. We did a little expectations versus reality. Because employee advocacy is so much deeper than resharing. The company's blog. I think that might be one of the first things you think of. Oh, employee advocacy. You're advocating for your company. Let me reshare the company's blog. So it was kind of fun to go through what employee advocacy actually is and what it actually looks like. Because, yes, your advocates will be sharing company content, but they are also building their personal brands and becoming thought leaders at the same time. So we found it very important to discuss the impact not only for the brand, but also for our advocates as well. And this was a great time for us to kind of go through and teach some of those best practices because we wanted them to be confident in building their personal brands, because as they start participating in the program, as they start sharing out content, they are going to start forming their own communities on social media with their own audiences, and they'll start to develop their own relationships. So we thought this was the absolute perfect time to talk about being human on social and how to still communicate these. The company narrative, the corporate messaging, and the messaging that your marketing team is trying to get across while still maintaining that authenticity that we all know is so critical when it comes to social.
8:06
Whitney Blankenship
Olivia, we hear so much about authenticity when it comes to advocacy and even just social media in general. Why is authenticity such a core part of social media?
8:19
Olivia Messina
Yeah, so authenticity is so key, especially on social, because when you think about how we use social, we go on social media to connect with others and be social. That's why social media has the name social media. And when it comes to employee advocacy, your advocates are not the corporate channels. They are not sharing the same content as the corporate channels. Their message and tone of voice is different than the corporate channels. And at the end of the day, it's their experiences, it's their stories, and it's their unique views that will resonate with someone else. You know, we're all natural human or natural storytellers as humans. And it's the stories of your employees that actually drive your brand. And what I think is really powerful is when you start to connect to an individual, you actually start to develop trust in the brand that they represent. And that is where that authenticity piece becomes so important. And that is really what makes advocacy so important.
9:25
Whitney Blankenship
And that's Kind of the thing like we've been, we've been seeing more and more that people don't want to interact with corporate accounts anymore. They want to interact with people. Right?
9:38
Olivia Messina
Yeah. So with that, we also thought it would be the best time to dive into the basics of social media and cover all of the best practices because again, you might have new employees, new people in your program. So we thought it was the best time to dive into those best practices. We spoke about how often you should be posting per network, what content performs best on which network. We spoke a lot about how to start developing your own voice on social media as you are building your personal brand. What do you want to be known for? Just really how to really form that voice on social. And then we also spoke about the differences between each network and the different types of content on each network. An example here is the lifespan of a tweet is much shorter than a lifespan of a LinkedIn post. So it would make sense to share best practice for Twitter around three to five tweets per day, where on LinkedIn you don't want to be sharing more than one LinkedIn post per day. So it's really important to get granular on these types of best practices because again, a lot of your advocates have not had formal social media training. And another thing to keep in mind here is you are probably a marketer, you probably have had experience in social media, but your advocates have not. And they might also not be comfortable yet sharing on social media. You probably don't even think twice when you share a post on social. But you have employees in your company that might not be fully comfortable yet, and they still might be a little on the fence, they might still be a little hesitant. So it's really important to get granular on these types of things. We also use this time to not only talk about social media best practices, but employee advocacy best practices as well. For example, when your advocates are logging onto the board, they have pre populated messages created by their marketing team. And a best practice is changing up the messaging and putting that content into their own words and in their own voice, maybe adding a little story or an experience. They have had to really make sure that that post is engaging and that just ties back into that authenticity piece. You want your advocates to be authentic in everything they do and you don't want all of your advocates sharing the same exact message. So it's very important to go over that. They need to be changing the messages up. Another thing we kind of discussed is employee advocacy habits, because when you Launch an employee advocacy program. You want your advocates to log on and share content. So it's all about forming those habits. So whether you are encouraging your advocates to go on to the board once a week and schedule out all the content, or you are encouraging them to maybe set a reminder in their calendar to go on every single day and share a piece of content, it's all about starting to form those habits and that will motivate them over time. But another really great way to motivate your employees is to have a reward. So after we armed everyone with the best practices, we decided to put it to the test. So we put together a friendly competition for advocates that would increase the valuable engagement coming from the content that they shared. So we actually decided to base our contest around the total number of clicks. And the reason we opted for the total number of clicks over the total number of posts shared is because we didn't want our advocates to log on and just share every single piece of content. That would kind of defeat the purpose. Because we were after valuable, meaningful engagement. And we wanted our advocates to go on. We wanted them to change the messaging, put it in their own words, and focus on being engaging and forming relationships. So we focused on clicks so that they had the ability to focus on value over volume. So it's also nice for them. They don't have to be overwhelmed like I have to share all these posts. They can really sit with the content, put it in their own words, and always, above everything else, focus on value over volume. And what really sweetened the deal, the cherry on top, was of course, a nice little cash prize to keep them motivated. So our first place winners, we had three winners. First place would win $100, second place would win $50, and our third place winner would win $25.
14:17
Whitney Blankenship
I absolutely love what you said about value over volume. I think that that's something that we talk about so much in any kind of content marketing, be it classic content marketing, social media, video creation. If not, it's just more noise, right?
14:34
Olivia Messina
Exactly. It's so important.
14:37
Whitney Blankenship
And I love that, you know, when we talk about, like the cash prize that we offered for the competition, you know, it wasn't ultimately something that was. It wasn't a crazy amount. It was something that, you know, sweetens the deal, definitely gets you. Gets you a little bit motivated to make a few more social posts than maybe you would normally. But we found that, honestly, what really was motivating was like personal satisfaction, right?
15:08
Olivia Messina
Definitely. And of course, employee advocacy isn't something that you can kind of set and forget. So that's why we found it very important to motivate our employees and empower them to keep going. So when you start an employee advocacy program, I think one thing that is very important is having a constant line of communication with your advocates. So what we found actually was posting a weekly Slack update. Here's an actual example of the Slack update that I would post. So we posted a weekly Slack update with the top five to 10 front runners at the time, depending on how close it was. And it actually was really close. Our top runners were usually only a few clicks away, which it really helped kick start that friendly competition there. Because even though, you know, the cash prizes weren't something like totally outrageous, but it's that friendly competition that really motivates them and keeps your employees going. And then at the same time, we also would add in these posts the rules of the contest. So if someone new joined the company, they could see what our contest was all about. And then we also recorded our training session so that they always had that to refer back to. And something that we also kind of did as a marketing team is anywhere the marketing team was. We were always reminding everyone of the contest. Whether it was on a zoom call with someone in a different department or around the office, we were always kind of reminding everyone of the contest. And something that I also wanted to include here is actually with our contest, we excluded our exec team and our marketing team, because our exec team, a lot of the leaders in our exact team already have very strong personal brands. So we didn't want to discourage those advocates that maybe don't share a lot. We really wanted them to participate and start sharing more. So to give everyone a fair chance, we did exclude our exec team. And interestingly enough, throughout the quarter, we found that even though we were only sending one Slack update a week, we found our advocates actually did such a great job motivating themselves. I think a big piece of this is because the competition was so close, but they were actually very good at motivating themselves throughout the quarter.
17:43
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely.
17:46
Olivia Messina
Now I really want to touch on content and content creation, because without your advocates and without content, you do not have a program. So if you really want employee advocacy to work, if you really want employee advocacy to hit home and see amazing results, the content that you share absolutely has to be diverse because first you don't want your advocates to sound spammy. And when your advocates are logging onto the board, you want them to share the content, you want them to be interested in it. But you also want their audiences to be interested in the content. So our content playlist looked like this. We had 50% of our content going out, it was Oktopost content. 25% of the content was industry related content and then the other 25% was personal interest content. So Oktopost content made up about half of the posts shared. And our focus that quarter was actually around employee advocacy. So we had a lot of content on the board focused around employee advocacy. We had the benchmark report, we had webinars, we had a new ebook go out, but we also had opt post content focused around recruitment and company culture. And then also some exciting Oktopost news like in the example here on the right. We launched our B2B Social Media Awards this quarter. So I have an example of a post that I created here for our advocates to share out. But we also had a few new content forms. And on the next slide I actually have an example of a Mad Lib style advocate post where advocates actually had to change up the messaging before they could just share it out. And even though this style of post, it didn't have a link in it, which I know we were focused on link clicks, but this post in particular had a very specific call to action. And we saw some incredible engagement from this post because it really called on the audience to engage. So we really did see a lot of meaningful engagements from this type of post which was really exciting to see. And then on the left hand side here I have an example of what a company culture post would look like for us. So this is actually an example of when our UK team moved offices in London. And what you will find is company culture content typically performs very well because your employees are proud of where they work and they have pride in the company. So they're always very excited to share out this type of content. But of course this content was focused on or this contest was focused on clicks. So on the next slide I have two examples of curated content that I created for the program. So the first one on the left is an industry related piece, but it's a fun skit about hashtags which I think it's important to have within each section of your content playlist. Have different types of content within because this isn't something that's very serious or very like tips and tricks oriented focus, but it's something light hearted and funny. And when you go on social media you want to feel good, you want to have a few, you want to learn a few things. So I thought it was important to diversify the Content in that sense. And then on the right hand side here, I have an example from the advocacy board of a more personal interest piece of content. So this content can be anywhere from work life balance to productivity to wellness. Funny memes, anything that your advocates feel kind of called to share. But this is something that I know has been going around a lot the 40 work week. So that's why I felt called to create a post around this particular topic. But overall, when you are creating content for your employee advocacy program, just keep in mind that it 100% needs to be diverse.
21:56
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. And I love personally, just as an advocate myself, I loved the diversity in content like the ad libs one, the Mad Libs one. I think that was probably my favorite post to adapt and share. Yeah, it was really. Sorry, go ahead. Oh no, go for it.
22:17
Olivia Messina
I was gonna say it was. That was a really fun piece because everyone had a lot of fun with it because you really got to add your own spin on it. And then everyone's audiences are really engaged as well. We had so many comments on those posts, like almost 200 comments on a few of them. So it was really fun to get everyone involved on that.
22:34
Whitney Blankenship
And that's my favorite part. Social media is supposed to be fun, so it's always great to have a couple of those posts in there that just bring back a bit of levity. Right, exactly. Moving on, we wanted to take a hard look at. Okay, so once the quarter was finished, once the competition was done, what was our quarter? On quarter, how did we do, how did we perform? And surprisingly what we really saw was it wasn't just clicks that we had more of, which was the ultimate goal, but it was every single metric across the board ended up increasing. And even though number of shares or sessions for our advocates wasn't the priority, we actually found increased sessions across all days of the week, including the weekend, which I'll touch on in a moment, and then increase shares across every single channel that we had. Now, as I mentioned before, we ended up seeing an increase across everything. We had 53% more sessions. So that's more employee advocates that were actually connecting to the board and wanting to look through and not necessarily shares, but those are how many more sessions we actually had in Oktopost. And then on top of that, we had 24% more posts quarter over quarter, which I thought was really interesting. And then in terms of engagement, engagement was at 63% higher than what we saw in Q4. And I really want to call back to the content that Olivia was creating during this time, because it actually called for our advocates to change something, to update it, to adapt it and make it their own. And when you have advocates that are doing that, you're going to get more engagement from the audience that's tailored around their specific voice and what they normally share. And then of course, our goal was clicks and we ended up with 50% higher clicks over Q1, 2022 over Q4 2021. Now I want to go into the session shifts that we had from Q4 to Q1. What's really interesting and if you have seen the employee advocacy benchmark report, either the downloadable or the webinar, you'll know that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday tends to be the best days for employee advocacy. And this is because our main channel for employee advocacy tends to be LinkedIn and best practices Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday also happens to be when posts perform the best on LinkedIn. So no surprise that we had an even higher increase quarter over quarter for those three days. However, what's interesting is Monday and as you saw a little while ago, Olivia was posting her contest updates on Mondays. Right now, Monday was classically not so much of a popular day for employee advocacy for us. So it's really interesting to see that that grew by so much. Now what's interesting is Olivia is located in the US and we have our team split between Europe, Tel Aviv and the US and she would post about the end of day for Europe and Tel Aviv, but then the US just write to the advocacy board after that post. So that's really, it's nice to see that that motivation we had a clear like correlation between how many sessions we were getting with our advocates and our efforts to motivate them, which weren't extensive. What's also interesting is that on the weekend we ended up having a much higher session. We had many more sessions over the weekend as well. Now I feel like we should preface this with we have half of our organization that works a typical Monday through Friday work week. We have another that works the Sunday through Thursday work week. So it would be normal that we would have more sessions on a Sunday, but Saturday in particular was that was our highest rate of growth. And it's not a lot of advocates, but it's a significant change from the previous quarter, which is always interesting to see. And then of course something that we anticipated, some kind of bump. But what we didn't anticipate was getting 266% higher conversions. And this was for lead gen materials, it was for employer branding campaigns, it was for a plethora of different Things, Right, Olivia? It was just across all kinds of content that we were seeing this jump in conversions.
27:39
Olivia Messina
Absolutely.
27:41
Whitney Blankenship
Oh, go for it.
27:42
Olivia Messina
One thing that I also wanted to mention, if you currently don't have an employee advocacy contest set in place, or maybe you're thinking to yourself, well, I don't think we have the budget to give cash prizes out as a reward. I think on the last slide, just showing that when we sent updates, just saying who was in the running, our advocates saw that and listened. So maybe you could try just incorporating having weekly updates or every few days sending updates, because that alone really motivated our advocates.
28:17
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. And you know, sometimes it's just nice to kind of get into that friendly sort of competition with one another. We had people in the comments, which was great. We had colleagues in the comments like, oh, I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you. I'm coming. First spot, number one. And it was just, it was really nice to see that they were motivating themselves. So it's kind of circling back to the formula that really, really worked well for us was that we started off by explaining and educating our advocates. We wanted to make sure that, you know, they understood how employee advocacy not only impacted us as a company, but also impacted themselves. Like what's in it for them? And they needed to know that and understand that as well. And then also included in that best practices for social so that they were equipped for success and from the door. And then keeping them excited about advocacy through our maintenance and motivation and just keeping them interested in the competition, keeping them interested and keeping employee advocacy top of mind for them every week. And then of course, personalized content with the means that would, that would arm advocates to change and adapt and really make these social posts their own. And with that, I actually have a freebie for everybody that's here today. We are recording the webinar. It will get sent out for everybody that registered and we are going to be sending a slide deck as well. And if you click on this link here, this funny little booklet, you'll actually see and I don't know if you guys can see this, if you're just seeing the presentation, which would be awkward. But we have, we've, we've created an employee advocacy toolkit with a lot of documents and guides and templates that you can actually use if you want to do a launch or maybe even a relaunch, or maybe you just want to motivate some people and, and just kind of want to get, get things. Kind of, kind of maybe your. The Wheels are stuck and you want to get them rolling again. And, you know, we have these resources that are set up for you, and everybody can access them, make a copy, and then apply it, including the actual deck that we used when we educated, when we educated our advocates for employee advocacy, including the best practices as well. So if that's something that you're interested in, that's completely available to you and you can have it when we go to do. When we go to send out the deck to everybody. So thank you very much. We really appreciate everybody that stuck around with us today and wanted to listen to our kooky experiment that we dreamed up at the end of Q4. And now we'll go ahead and open it for questions. So we have our first one. Hi, Reagan. What was the average amount of connections your advocates had? Did it help them grow their connections? That's a really, really good question, actually. I would. I would venture to guess that we would have perhaps more connections than the average bear, but I would actually need to. I would actually need to go and look into the data because that's not something that I've got under my hand at the moment. If you have, you have this link here which will take you to my LinkedIn. If you'd like to go and add me or message me, I believe you can do so freely and I will go ahead and I'll try to get that answer back to you, but I just don't have it right under my fingertips at the moment. Do we have any other questions, though? How many employees do you have on your employee advocacy program? Did the competition increase those numbers? So what I would say is, so when you join Oktopost as an employee, you're automatically enrolled in the employee advocacy program. You're automatically an advocate. You get sent the board. It's part of your onboarding kit. However, it's true that we do have a lot of people that, you know, maybe they're not super interested in social media. That's a totally normal thing to happen, by the way. It's normal to have employees that are, you know, just social is not their thing. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. And what we ended up doing is through the competition, we actually saw, especially by preventing the C Suite, our exec team from winning the competition, we actually saw that we had more participation from people who weren't normally ultra interested in advocacy prior. We definitely had a bump of advocacy engagement, if you will.
33:28
Olivia Messina
Yeah, it was very exciting to see, as we hosted the contest, to see the leaderboard with names of our advocates that have never been in the leaderboard before, be at the very top. So it was very incredible to. To see those types of results.
33:46
Whitney Blankenship
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, just reading. I'm trying to build an employee advocacy program in my company. The problem is some people's networks aren't connected to the topics we're covering and therefore their posts don't get a lot of traction. What's another method to measure success besides clicks? That's a very good question. So I think, and Olivia, feel free to keep me honest here. Sometimes clicks are not necessarily the end all, be all. This was something that we had used for us because we didn't want advocates just spamming everything from the employee advocacy board without really reading it or altering it or using the best practices that we were teaching them. I would say that your best bet, I mean, Olivia, is probably engagement. Right?
34:35
Olivia Messina
I was just going to say the total number of engagements is probably your golden metric right there because that also focuses on creating content that is meaningful and valuable that will bring in engagements other than just trying to get clicks. Because if the content isn't something that is meaningful, you know, you want to get clicks on something for a reason. But of course, I think focusing on overall engagements would probably be one of the best metrics to focus on.
35:11
Whitney Blankenship
And also if you're having some people's networks that aren't super connected to what your employee is posting or what you as a brand is, what that message is, that's okay. What I would suggest is also opening it up to your advocates. When your advocates can suggest content for the advocacy board, then that, that actually creates this really powerful feedback loop where your social media manager can actually look and say, okay, you know, my sales guys, they want to share more on. They want to share more on ABM marketing or they want to share more on actual sales tactics like, okay, so maybe we can tie this in somehow. Maybe we can create advocacy content that better responds to that. And then even having your. I would always encourage employees to share the things that they're passionate about as well. Like for example, you know, I talk a lot about social media on LinkedIn, but I'm also talking a lot about remote work because this is something that I'm passionate about. So I think that it's definitely good to encourage those passions and encourage your employees to really hone that personal brand as well. I hope that answered that question. So it was kind of a multi parter. It's kind of a multi parter for the advocates that are hesitant to share on social, what's the best way to tackle explaining how using social can really benefit them? What do you think, Olivia?
36:45
Olivia Messina
So I think employee advocacy and social media is something that's mutually beneficial for the both sides here. And I think there is a stat. Quote me if I'm wrong. I think it's around 86% of salespeople that use social media in the sales process outperform their peers. And when you think about social media and the modern B2B buyer journey, people consult social media before they do anything else. Even with when you're joining a new company or you're researching a product, you usually go to social media. So when you are in a more customer facing role, it really puts you as a thought leader in the industry and builds up you as well. So you can really start to form more, deeper relationships and like meet more prospects and things like that. So it really benefits you in the end as well in the position that you're in.
37:43
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. And also what I would say is, you know, I would kind of. And that stat is perfect by the way. I believe that's actually from LinkedIn itself. But what I would do is also I would really like focus on kind of showing the benefits of building your own personal brand. I think that when employee advocates, when advocates begin updating and sharing content that comes from their own voice and they start to see results from it, that's going to be the motivation because they're going to say, oh wow, like a lot of people really resonate this or I had a really great conversation because of this post like, oh, I want more, I want to do more of this. Now again, there's going to be some people where social is just super not their thing and there's nothing wrong with that. That's okay, that's their choice. But for your social majority, we actually have a couple of different segments for employees, for employee advocacy, we have your social conventions. Like those are the ones that they're super not interested in social. And that's okay, you have your social majority. So that's like the vast majority of the people that are probably in your company. And then we have the social champions. Is it where. It's your, what is it?
39:00
Olivia Messina
Enthusiasts.
39:00
Whitney Blankenship
The enthusiasts, I'm sorry, the enthusiasts, which are your champions or your cheerleaders. They're the ones that want to go out and share things and they want to really participate in all social initiatives. And you know, your majority and your enthusiasts, those are the ones that you know are probably going to get the most work done for you. Honestly, but definitely a great, great question. So we have one final question before we wrap up. Do you have any thoughts on the ideal cadence for contests? We ran one for about a month and we're struggling to decide how often to continue running them. What do you think, Olivier? Do you want me to take this one?
39:42
Olivia Messina
I can take it. I. So we ran our contest throughout the entire quarter. So for three months, this was great for us because it gave our advocates kind of like a ramp up period to get comfortable with the content and for new advocates that have just joined the program. And then it gave us time, especially because we were focusing on clicks and not total number of posts shared. It gave them time to get comfortable with the content and feel comfortable within the contest itself and to share out content. So for us, spreading it out over one quarter made sense. But I guess it kind of depends on the metrics that maybe you want to focus on. But I think the longer it is, I think the better idea you have when it comes to kind of like the results and going into the analytics and things. I think one quarter would probably be optimal. But what would you say, Whitney?
40:40
Whitney Blankenship
I think you're. I would definitely say that you're right. I would, I would definitely like to run something for at least 90 days, at least. That's. That was how we did ours. And we found that that was really successful for us. For other companies with different buying cycles, that, that might be different for you and I, you know, social is very much a choose your own adventure if you'd like. But what I also would say is that, you know, during the employee advocacy benchmark report, when we looked at the data, we saw that advocates in general had fewer sessions during certain months. And this is, you know, summer. The summer months were awful. Everybody's on vacation. The end of the year was kind of a, kind of a dead zone. So what's interesting is what I would do is take a look at your average sessions and take a look at, you know, okay, so when are my advocates the least motivated? That would be when I would launch a competition. That would be when I would say, okay, so let's motivate you. Let's keep that fire. Right? So I think that, and that was very much why we ended up doing this in Q1 too, because we noticed that with our advocates we had a lull right around the very beginning of the year. And so it was time to kind of ramp things up and get them motivated again. So that's, that would be my suggestion and again, test and try and see what, what really works for you. But I think that that might be a good place to start. So I just want to thank everybody for coming out today. We had some amazing questions. I absolutely love getting questions like that, like challenge us, make us think, make us, you know, really think about what we're gonna say. And I'm going to, we're going to go ahead and send out the deck for you guys. This will be recorded. It is being recorded. So we will have that out to you as well. And Olivia, thank you so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it. Of course.
42:36
Olivia Messina
Thanks for being here and going through everything with me. And thank you for everyone for tuning in and joining us here today. I loved hanging out with you guys and chatting all things employee advocacy.
42:47
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. Thanks so much. And we'll see you next time.
