0:08
Shanie Zimerman
Okay. Hi, everyone. I am Shani. I manage Oktopost Strategic Partners. Before getting started, I just wanted to thank everyone who is able to attend today. I know the world is a little crazy right now and it's not so obvious that you would carve out this time. So we all really appreciate you joining us and listening to what we have to say. Joining me today are just a couple of members of the Oktopost Dream team. We have Jen Gutman, our director of Social strategy, and we also have Colin Day, who is our managing director in emea. And in today's webinar, we'll be talking all about employee advocacy, social selling, how the two are connected, and how we can prove a positive ROI from this type of initiative. Just as a quick reminder, you are all on mute if you have any questions at all. We'll definitely be able to get to them at the end of the webinar. But you can also feel free to drop them right into the chat box that we have on the zoom screen. Somewhere on the zoom screen. And I'm terrible at moving slides and talking, but like I said, I'm Shani and we have Jen and we have Colin. So what I would like to start with Jen. We have a lot of people on the call today, and some are Oktopost customers, some aren't. And those that are probably know what employee advocacy is. For those that don't, would you mind giving us just a quick little overview on what employee advocacy is?
1:36
Jennifer Gutman
Sure, absolutely. It's actually how Colin and I met, and we'll get into that, I'm sure, later on in the webinar. But at its core, the definition of employee advocacy is really, really simple. Right? It's the promotion of your company by the people who work for it. Really, really easy. It happens naturally that people are on social media advocating for their employers. You might have even found yourself doing it. Maybe if you go out to lunch with your colleagues and you post the delicious sandwich that you've eaten with the great team that you have, or perhaps you've received a promotion and you want to Update that on LinkedIn, you give a little shout out to your manager. All of that is considered employee advocacy, and it does count as employee advocacy. But what I found as a marketer is that that's not exactly what the marketing world is excited about. What really got us marketers, what made our jaws just drop to the ground, is when we started using it as a marketing tactic. So, right. It's basically when your employees are going to share thoughtful content that you're producing to make the reach go much further. So it's a strategic and sustainable way. Right. To encourage employees to share. It can be your brand values, your company culture, messages, content in an organic and an authentic way. What we're finding is that employee advocacy programs really should be strategic. Right. So you want to take and implement goals and metrics to track those goals sustainable. You want to keep employees engaged for long term success. And you need to make sure you have leadership buy in. And it needs to be organic. Right. The participation in the program should never be forced. Although us marketers sometimes would like to stand over our colleagues heads being like share, share, share. It really should come from a place of your employees feel inspired about where they work and share. So just to kind of get and take a look at the slide in front of us. Right. So by sharing that company related content, employees are able to amplify a company's message to their personal social media networks. And for employees, it's a great way for them to become thought leaders within their communities by sharing very insightful and educational content. And what we are finding is that every post shared by an employee is able to reach hundreds of new connections which essentially the brand is not always in tune with.
3:54
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. That's awesome. And it definitely sets the tone for today's conversation. Colin, I know that you spearheaded a very successful employee advocacy company at one of your previous companies. And I know this because you used Oktopost for that, which is where Jen's story will come into play a little bit later. But having played such a big role within that program, can you share with us what you learned by having the sales team involved in your employee advocacy initiative?
4:24
Colin Day
Yeah. Thanks, Shanice. So look, a key thing from a marketing perspective or from a sales perspective, I always say that selling is a team sport, right? And an important part of that team is certainly marketing. As we think about the sales role with inside that sales are one of the key constituent parties inside the organization for taking the content that marketers produce and putting it out there into the client base, whether that be a client or a prospect. Interestingly enough, I read recently that statistically across the industry, all the content that marketers create is probably only one in five pieces that actually get shared out there. So what an employee advocacy program allowed us to do was to take that wealth of content, that wealth of material, and get it out into the hands of our clients and our prospects. And the way that we did that was through an employee advocacy program. And the key people that we first signed up to that program were our Sellers, the way that we went about doing that, picking who were the best people to first engage from an advocacy perspective, we went out and looked at their social media presence, their footprint, their network. We looked at who had the most followers or who followed the most people across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And then we invited them to become our initial pilot group. We ran that pilot for a number of months, saw the results, and then rolled it out across around 1500 sellers.
6:11
Shanie Zimerman
Amazing.
6:13
Jennifer Gutman
Thank you.
6:16
Colin Day
But it is, you're right, it is how Jen and I first met. So we first met on that project. And Jen, I'm not too sure what story you actually wanted me to, to tell because I've got quite a few about you when I first met you, but let's keep it clean, I guess, right? But the way that I first found the Oktopost organization was out on social media. So I was doing my research, as most B2B buyers do today, like going out there on social, going out there on the web. And I came across a number of posts by a lady called Jen Gutman at a company called Oktopost out on LinkedIn. And you know, I clicked through, started to read that material and before you knew it, I started to get targeted with various emails from this company called Oktopost. And what they'd done in the background was saw that I was actually engaging with material from Jen and been able to, you know, capture my contact details or information about me like, you know, through my social profiles and then started to use that for targeting processes with inside their marketing automation platform. Sounds a bit weird when I'm saying there. And it's actually our now.
7:36
Shanie Zimerman
Right, but ours.
7:38
Colin Day
Yeah, ours collectively ours. But Jen, was that the story you were going to tell or were you going to tell one of the other ones?
7:43
Jennifer Gutman
No, listen, I think, you know, at the time so similar since that since we've met many moons ago, I've moved over to the marketing capacity. And so when I was in sales, essentially I was using the employee advocacy program. I wasn't writing any of that content, so you were just clicking. And I remember when we had our first conversation, you treated me as a thought leader and I was so excited because I understood very quickly from our conversation that you had been following my content that I had been sharing that my marketers were creating. And as a salesperson, all you need to do is click, share. And so when you and I started discussing that and talking about that and really understanding a little bit more, it was pretty exciting to see that you found me as a thought Leader. And then taking that a step further. I know one of the things you had commended me on a few times during our call was like, wow, you really hit the nail on the head with our needs. And a big part of that was because I was watching what you were engaging with on social media, and there
8:45
Colin Day
was me thinking I was stalking you. But it was the other way around. Right, Jen?
8:48
Jennifer Gutman
Exactly. So it just worked really well in the sales cycle. And, you know, I think we both. It was pretty exciting to see a sale come through that started with employee advocacy.
8:58
Colin Day
Yeah. And it's not unique. Right. Like, you know, the thing that I'd put out there. Right. Is from a social selling perspective, those of you that aren't using social selling tactics to. You can bet your bottom dollar your competitors are. Right. So your competitors are using it to hit their sales quotas. They're using it to share their slacker material. Slacker. You need to get on board.
9:24
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. Jen, I want to hear a little bit from you about where the overlap is between advocacy and between social selling. I know that there's platforms that support one, the other and both to some extent, but I want to hear from you how an employee advocacy program can really help in that execution of that sale via social.
9:46
Jennifer Gutman
Sure. So I think Colin and I, our whole story of how we met and the sales cycle, this is a perfect example of exactly how employee advocacy and social selling can overlap. Right. So you see, I was using an employee advocacy tool. I was engaged in the content that I was sharing. I was really a super enthusiast in terms of sharing content. And you saw Colin on the other side was engaging with my content, and he became a customer. And then this is like super employee advocacy because it turns out that he now is an employee of Oktopost and a team member of Oktopost.
10:16
Colin Day
And an advocate. Right.
10:17
Jennifer Gutman
And an advocate. So we literally full circle. But I actually, on a very serious note, this is a question that I get asked all the time, and I think it's. It's one that definitely needs to be spoken about. Because when you're searching for the right tool, which is a huge component of making sure that your advocacy program is a success, I think a lot of marketers can get very confused and a lot of sales teams can get confused because of the language that the tools are choosing to use. Right. So employee advocacy is a program that encompasses the entire organization. It's more than just social selling. Right. It's getting on board with. With the brand. It's being proud of where you work, and it's sharing content authentically and all of that we see. And I'm sure for those of you who have been following our webinars and pretty much any webinars during the past few weeks, authenticity being relevant, empathy, these are all ways of marketing today that are really speaking to consumers and speaking to those B2B buyers. So employee advocacy is a way to encompass all of that. Now with social selling, social selling is essentially just using social media to have meaningful connections with your network. And then, of course, having those meaningful connections go a step further and close the deal. Now, with that said, what we do know in terms of employee advocacy, there's a Gallup study or report that was done that was speaking about how engaged employees are. Psychological owners, they called them, and they drive performance and innovation to help move the organization forward. And I like to bring this up because when you look at employee advocacy and when you can get your employees, whether they're sales, customer success, I know many sales leaders can agree with me, right, that any member of the company should always be selling. And even though not every member of the company may consider themselves a salesperson, essentially, if you're proud of where you work, you're selling your company, you're selling about the company culture, and you're creating a meaningful environment, a meaningful community on social media when you portray that. So. So I think when it comes to employee advocacy and social selling, if you can have a strong employee advocacy program, social selling will come naturally. And so with that, speaking from the sales side and when I was in sales, we're on the front lines of the organization, and that can be a very scary place to be listening to customer pains. And you're hearing it firsthand, right? You're the first point of contact they have with the organization, and you're working within the framework of your organization to help them find a solution. And I think just as marketing has evolved in the past few weeks, very rapidly for their digital transformation, sales needs to do the same thing. So we're entering an era not only where marketers are going in 100% digital, but sales need to do the same thing. And they need to be confident on social media to drive any point of the conversation, any point of the relationship. Digitally and social is a place to do that. And so I think when it comes to social selling, if we can really make sure that sales can be a part of this digitalized social process, it's going to really help take sales further. Now, advocacy programs do differ a bit from social selling, right? Because again, social selling is strictly about closing the deal. But you can use that and see that in employee advocacy. Right. When you see all of the engagements and you're incorporating that into your marketing automation platform. And we see that with employee advocacy programs, those programs tend to provide trainings for sales professionals to confidently post and engage with their followers. And you're able to see in all of those shares, as we saw with Colin and I's story, that we're always happy to share the full conversion driven content that my marketing team at the time was sharing. I was taking that, just logging in to the employee advocacy platform, using that as pretty much like a blog, if you will, to pull curated content, send it on out onto my social channels and. And that's where Colin went ahead and started engaging with Oktopost. I know, it's a fact, right? Like sales, they say that we don't share as much as we can be because it can be a time consuming process to find the content. But I have to say that when it's right in front of you, it's pretty easy. It's one click and go. And then when it comes to employee advocacy platforms, I think, and now that I've transitioned over into the marketing side of Oktopost, I can say with confidence that an advocacy platform can really help connect marketing and sales teams to really drive a unified sales approach, which I know many of us struggle with. And marketing and sales don't always see eye to eye. So I think having that program in place, it forces. So Colin and I are talking on almost a daily basis about what content is going to be able to help you sell in the beginning of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the end of the sales cycle. And we can see all of that and help all of that through employee advocacy.
15:17
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. And just like any other aspect of B2B marketer strategy, employee advocacy does require resources and time. It is an ongoing program, not a wealth of time, but it is ongoing. It's something that needs to be nurtured. And as with anything that does require time and resources, we need to prove its value. Colin, how are you able to drive that value and ROI from, excuse me, of employee advocacy and just prove its worth?
15:45
Colin Day
Yeah, I mean, look, employee advocacy or social selling, right. Is part of an integrated campaign strategy. So, you know, it's not one thing or the other. Right. But you know, as with anything that we do from a sales and marketing perspective, if we can't measure it, we can't prove it. Right. And from a marketing perspective, the organization that I came from, that you Know the story that Jen and I were giving earlier on, marketing were responsible for driving 30% of the overall sales pipeline. That was the number that was given out to the marketing organization and it's what allowed marketing to actually have a seat at the table with sales. It was the first time in that company's 25 plus years of existence that marketing really did have a seat at the top table with sales. The way that we did it was if we think about how the marketing process works today, like the integration of the marketing automation platform with the CRM platform and the exchange and share of data there. If we think about that map, that marketing automation platform, most of the activities that we're tracking and measuring in there, where you're not an Oktopost customer or where you're not using like social media and employee advocacy to be able to track some of that engagement, what you typically see in those marketing automation platforms is the tracking of someone landing on the website because you drop a cookie on them at that point in time, what page did they visit, how long were they on there, what assets did they engage with? Or from an email perspective, like what email was delivered, how many bounced, what was the click through rates like? Looking at those ratios, what we're missing is in that conversation, what we're missing is the measurability of the engagement with our social channel. And really that's what we were able to bring to light at that organization. We were able to incorporate. Yeah, not just at the post level from a social perspective. The likes, the clicks, the comments, the reshares, the retweets, etc. What we were able to do was to go down at the contact level, the lead level, the level that we talk to as marketers and as sales professionals would be inside the marketing automation platform or with inside our opportunities in CRM. It's like the people themselves, we were able to get that information, that intelligence and we were able to say that do you know what Jen Gutman's like posted out through LinkedIn this particular post off of our advocacy board. Right. And it was engaged with by Shani. Yeah. And Shanice, like, you know, the sentiment of the comment that she posted on there was positive. Look, if I'm able to get all of that information and bring that back into the world of marketing and I'm able to say with inside my map. Yeah, let's use that information now for lead scoring purposes or let's use that information to see the impact that it had on my marketing attribution model. That's the secret sauce and then being able to give that insight and that intelligence back to our sellers, to our sales team, so that they can see when those engagements happen and treat them as interesting moments with inside an opportunity, with inside an account. Because it gives me another reason to go and have a conversation with the client and the prospect.
19:31
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. Having that additional touch point, I think, and one that is otherwise siloed or ignored or not giving that full picture, just having that impacting the rest of the data through marketing automation, through CRM, that's what's going to drive that ROI and that value a little bit more.
19:52
Colin Day
Yeah, absolutely. Let's think of it a slightly different way though, Shani. Right. It's like Jim was a salesperson that sold to me. Right. Does Jim want to engage with me through social where sellers can be. I'm probably going to insult every single salesperson on the phone now, but need to be careful. I say sellers can be a lazy bunch. Right. Or an interesting bunch, let's put it that way. Right. So in so much as sometimes you want, you want to be fed. Right. So you want, you want to be spoon fed. Right. You know, so having slacker, you know, my marketing team be able to provide me with the content for me to maybe slacken, you know, nip and tuck and change so that it, it has my tone of voice, but it's, it's 80% of the way already there. Right. So, you know, it becomes nice, quick and easy. Do I want that approach or do I want the approach of making cold calls? No one wants to cold call these days, right? Yeah. So if you ask Jen, did she want to cold call Colin Day or did she want Colin Day to come and find her through social.
20:57
Shanie Zimerman
Well, that's one of my biggest things also within employee advocacy. I don't really have a creative bone in my body, but when Jen is creating this content, she's already putting it in the voice of not a company, of an individual. So it just, you know, we can take it like that and send it off or it just makes it easier to get the idea of how I want to make it sound. And that's more than, like you said, it's more than half the battle. It's 80% of the work is done with that.
21:26
Colin Day
Yeah.
21:26
Jennifer Gutman
I mean, yeah, I'd like to make the case here that employee advocacy is the new cold call.
21:34
Colin Day
Yeah, No, I think I'd agree with you. I think I'd agree with you. Right. Look, what it's all about, Jenny, is people buy from people. Right. So what you're really trying to do is you're trying to find another means, another channel to help build those relationships, deepen those relationships and build that trust 100%.
21:53
Shanie Zimerman
And I feel like it's also like a kind of off the record conversation where you can just be a little bit more normal and a little laid back and human. I think we've said that in every single webinar we've done. Just be more human. Social lets us be more human as opposed to having the corporate email or our company email, you know, attached to that thread. I love it. I want to know some tips for getting started, because with any successful employee advocacy program or social selling program, there has to be a plan in place. So. So I know, Jen, I mean, you've launched our employee advocacy program and I know that you've worked with dozens of companies on launching and maintaining a successful program. I'd love to hear from you some tips just for getting started for those of you that are listening that haven't yet started.
22:44
Jennifer Gutman
Sure. So the first thing I'll say is just be patient with the process. It's a bit of trial and error and I think the best place to start. Right. Because I'm sure a lot of companies, if you're not doing employee advocacy already, you're kind of doing a weird old school version of it where you're maybe sending out your teams a little link somewhere saying hey guys, please, please, please share this blog that was written by person X or please, please please share this press release and you get people to share through email. So I think the first step is finding the right advocacy platform for your business that's going to be able to, as Collins said, integrate with the rest of your Martech stack. It can be a big task. We're here to help in any way that we can. But I do think getting the right platform is going to help you streamline the entire process and get the excited about the initiative. The second step I would head into, so here it says outline content strategy. And I'd like to, in that content strategy really emphasize to define goals of the program. So no two advocacy programs are the same. And that is because the goals are going to be different from organization to organization. So for example, I can definitely share. When we were building our employee advocacy program, we really wanted to strengthen and build relationships with our customers and prospects and increase our brand awareness across the industry as we got started. So those were two of our goals. And by defining the goals that you're looking to measure or track or succeed in, I think That's a great starting point because then as you do and get further on in these steps, with getting to the pilot, you have something to actually take a look at as you maybe start off with brand awareness or whatever it may be. I know here at Oktopost, one of our third goals was to really unlock new business opportunities. Colin, case in point. But that was really one of our objectives for the year. And we wanted to be able to impact sales positively at any part of the sales cycle so that we would never miss an opportunity. And I know that all the sales team members on the call, I'm sure that that's your biggest fear. Like, there's always so many bright moments in a deal. You don't want to miss an opportunity. So with that being our goal, we integrated our employee advocacy platform with our marketing automation. What Colin just spoke about, in terms of the touch points, our sales teams were able to see that and we were also able to measure it. So we were able to adjust as we go. Once the goals are established and you are outlining a content strategy to match your goals, something that I found really powerful, I was actually listening to the other day is someone they were talking about, we were having a conversation about employee advocacy and how when you're building your content strategy for employee advocacy, think about the power of your Fitbit. Now, it sounds a little crazy, but when you're writing content for your employee advocacy program, you want it to be able to motivate the employee who's going to share it and then take it a step further and get it to be clicked on by their audiences. It seems like a really big task. But if you can think about your Fitbit, right? And your Fitbit maybe just beeps once and tells you to walk 50 more steps, and just that little beep is enough motivation to get you to walk 50 more steps and you do it and you feel really great. I think that as marketers, we can certainly be a Fitbit and we can be those little reminders to our team that here's this content and we're gonna motivate you to go ahead and share it. It's right here. And you wanna be that motivating force. So as you're thinking of your content strategy, think about how you could be a Fitbit to your team. Then from there, I think it's very important. And this could also be arguably like step two, right? It's interchangeable, but you really need to get the buy in of leadership. I was really lucky because when I was selling to Colin Col, so he was already bought in. He had drank the Kool Aid of employee advocacy. And it made my job pretty easy. I'd like to think it was because of the content I was sharing, but he was bought in. And I think that this is one of the biggest challenges when you're running a program at any stage. Because again, you need to have a program that's sustainable, and in order for it to be sustainable, you need to have that buy in. So I would recommend putting together a business case, perhaps speaking on an individual level to the decision makers in your company, or make sure that you have that leadership buy in to back you up as you kick off this program. Even your VP Sales and your head of sales, you want them to have buy in. Because if the leaders aren't going to be involved and they're not going to be enthusiastic about this initiative, it's going to be really hard to pass it down to the guys who are on the field and the boots on the ground making these sales and getting them to use the tool and engage in the program after you have that buy in. And again, we've helped a lot of companies, a lot of our customers with business cases. So if you get stuck there, we're happy to share any and all of our secrets, if you will, of how leadership may get some buy in. And we're happy to help. Step 4 Choosing your initial advocates so this is another important step. And as earlier I mentioned, Gallup did a study about talking about what enthusiastic employees can do to an organization. And I actually had written about there's three different Personas that you can classify your organization into. You have your social enthusiasts, and these are the people who you give them anything and they're sharing immediately. You don't have to ask twice. They're, you know, right up front, center and waiting for the content or suggesting the content. Then you have the average Joes, right? They're usually a bigger chunk the organization or the sales organization. And they're bought in. They'll share here and there. They're not winning at the top of the leaderboard. And they're certainly not bragging about employee advocacy to their friends. But you want to get engaged and they're there. And then you have what I call the social curmudgeons of employee advocacy. And these are the guys that kind of, no matter what you do, they're like, oh man, you're giving me another platform to share on. I'm already, I need to hit my sales. I don't have time for this. This is complicated. So if you can start in your head imagining where your employees fit in those three areas, I think you can start to go ahead and I would suggest when you're choosing your initial advocates to lean more towards the social enthusiasts because you want to be able to prove value and you want to be able to do it quickly and it's a ripple effect. So when you get your enthusiast on board first, the rest of the company will see their success and they'll see if you're giving, let's say awards or initiatives for sharing in prizes, they'll see these employees getting rewarded and like a ripple in the sea, they'll catch on. And again, authentically and organically, you'll be able to build the program like a giant ripple. But it's very critical that you get the most enthusiastic employee advocacy or brand loving team members on first. And then once you have a small group of initial advocates, I would go ahead and give them a social media training just to get everybody up on the same page. Make sure in that training they know why you're doing the program, they know your program goals. Be transparent. People want to know and be motivated on to why they're going to do something. Perhaps a tour of the company's social networks may be helpful. Encourage them to like your social networks. Talk about the different areas, the mission statements, the followers, the audience members. Make them familiar with your social presence. Review your company's social media policy. I think this is a really good time to do that. I know we work with a lot of pretty big corporations and I know this is a big piece of it because right. No news is good news. Should we be on social. So if you review your company social media policy, you're going to give confidence to your advocates to get involved. We have a template if you need so you can always message us after the webinar. If you want that template, we can send it over. I would also in that training include. Right. And these are not always things that you're thinking of top of mind, you're thinking, okay, employee advocacy, train on the platform, train on the technology. But bringing in an aspect to give tips for helping your sales team build a top notch profile. And I say that because you'd actually be surprised. I think a lot of sales members aren't as confident as we may look on social media because we consider ourselves salespeople. So helping to coach your sales team on okay, hey, we're gonna do an audit on your LinkedIn and we see here that your profile picture is a cartoon image. Let's Try to change that up. Or maybe if you put the background image to be your location, you can resonate more with your audience. So give that kind of insight and training and coaching. We are looked at in our company as marketers, as the experts in marketing. So let's help our teams out in making sure that their profiles are presentable. And once you've done that, I think a smooth onboarding and training. Introduce them to the team, the tool that you've chosen, walk them through the technical aspects of the platform, run a pilot program, and then hopefully on a silver platter, you're coming on over to leadership with this great book of results that you can show them and keep it sustained going forward and continue to grow. So that's. I know it's a mouthful, and we can take you step by step through it if you need any help in any of those areas. But that's where I would suggest kind of the map to start.
32:03
Colin Day
Jen as well, you just really tied employee advocacy and social selling together there in one heartbeat. Right. When you said about doing that audit of someone's social profile, be it LinkedIn or something else. Right. Because it all starts or it ends there. When I was engaging with you through social, the first place that I went when I saw Jen Gutman's post was to find you on LinkedIn. Right. And, you know, first impressions last. Right. First impressions last when you're meeting with someone face to face. First impressions last. When you're meeting with someone on social, the other thing to pick up there, Right. Like with regards to, you know, point six, running, running the pilot. Or you could say it's also like point four, slack, choosing those initial advocates. You know, when I launched my programs, it was very much focused at the sales organization. And in order to encourage the second wave, the second wave of people to come on and buy into the program and the process. Gamification was huge for us. And we found that our sellers were an interesting bunch. As I said earlier on, very competitive. Right. Like, I think you have to be competitive by nature in order to be a salesperson. Otherwise you're in the wrong job. Yeah. So you could literally tell people that you finished top of the leaderboard or you finished in the top 10 of employee advocates for that month or for that period. Yeah. We'd give you, I don't know, a Starbucks coffee voucher. Right. Like, most people would say, hey, I could probably go and afford one of those myself. Right. But because there was an element of competition there, people wanted to outdo their friends or their peers. And their fellow salespeople. What we did was in order to encourage that whole social selling aspect, we actually got some LinkedIn sales navigator licenses and other licenses do exist, but we got some LinkedIn sales navigator licenses. We got 12 of them. And we said, you know, on a monthly basis, whoever finishes in the top 12 of that leaderboard, you get a LinkedIn Sales Navigator license to use for the next, you know, the next four weeks. And guess what? If you want to carry on using it, you got to finish in the top 12. Right. So it was an element of gaming or it was gamification, but it was also like a means to an end for us because it was another tool to encourage people to be social and to sell socially.
34:51
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And I just want to add in, I know a lot of times when we're going through kind of where to get started. We spoke earlier about how employee advocacy can really unite marketing and sales. And one of the tactics that I utilized when I was also outlining my content strategy that I want to share in advocacy, right, you want to help position your sales team as thought leaders. At the end of the day, they're the ones driving revenue hard into the company. They're the blood, sweat and tears, you know, working 247 to close those deals. So one of the tactics that I used was finding some of the sales team members to find a topic within our company that was that they found relevant that they'd like to speak to, and I would help them or write on their behalf, and they would, you know, just see it. A blog post. And in my content strategy, when your sales team members are seen on your blog as writing and contributing to content for their network, first of all, they're proud to share it. So they're going to be waiting for that blog to be published and they're going to want to share it because they're going to be proud of it. But their network, their customers, their prospects are going to say, whoa, this salesperson is writing on the company blog. They must be an expert. And I think it's a really great strategy to use to continue to unite the sales and marketing team, but also to again, be that fitbit. How are you going to motivate your team to want to share the content and how you're going to want to motivate their audiences to click on it. So that was one tip I'd like to share as well, Jen.
36:22
Colin Day
Also just picking up on the content side of things, right? It's not all about, you know, it's not all about the Company content either. Right. It's like it needs to be a blend and a mix. Otherwise it just becomes, you know, a monologue rather than a dialogue. Right. And it becomes like single threaded. So it is very, very important on those advocacy boards to mix up the content that is being shared and posted on there for the advocates to pick up and put out through their networks.
36:55
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And I think now is actually a really good time to play around with that, just because with everything going on in the world, we need to be relevant. So in your employee advocacy programs right now, if you wanted to go ahead and. And give that a go, give it a test and see what happens when you post videos about home workouts for advocates to share. Maybe not for your corporate side, but for the advocacy side. We've seen, at least on our side, that that's driving a lot of clicks and a lot of conversions because they're sharing relevant content and they become leaders and people are looking to their personal profiles and an individual is able to say different things than what a brand can say. So, again, I think now is a great time. If you're not already engaged in employee advocacy and kind of taking a little bit of a different spin, you have more freedom with employee advocacy to put some cool stuff up there. So I encourage you to definitely give that a go, especially with everything going on today.
37:53
Colin Day
Jenna, I think it really comes down to three points. Right. As an advocate, if I'm out there and I'm drawing stuff off of an advocacy board or an advocate program and putting out to my network, the thing that I'd encourage advocates to do is you got to show up. Right. And you've got to show up frequently. Yeah. I'm not saying it's like spam, Right. I'm not saying it's like post a million times a day. Right. But you got to show up. You've got to be, you know, you've got to be credible. Right. So, you know, it's got to be meaningful to the audience with whom you're sharing, and you've got to listen right. To what's coming back the other way. But you've certainly got to provide value. Right. And that goes along with that credibility stuff. And that's really where you then start to build up that trust and you deepen that relationship.
38:45
Jennifer Gutman
Exactly. What is it? Nail on the nose. Nose, Hammer on the head.
38:52
Colin Day
I have no clue what you're talking about there, Jen Gutman, but the nail on the head. The nail on the head. Oh, is that where we were going? Nail on the Nose. I'm like, okay, all right, fair enough, Jen. Also, you know, the. The way that, you know, thinking back to how do you choose those initial advocates?
39:09
Jennifer Gutman
Right.
39:09
Colin Day
The way that I did it was we actually did an audit of. So we socially stalked our employees. We did an audit and we got LinkedIn involved in that regards. But we did an audit of, you know, across the enterprise, across the organization, which employees were out there on which channels and how large were their followings. And then we selected it from there. Maybe we put an overlay of an element of seniority or position with inside the organization, but we knew that we wanted to go with an initial pilot of. I can't remember it as a number of years back now, but it was somewhere around 20, 25. You probably remember better, Jen, because you charged me and sent me an invoice for it. But yeah, we, you know, we picked based upon, you know, those that were more active than others and those that had a bigger client base or following than others.
40:11
Jennifer Gutman
That's actually really. Yeah, I remember you and I spoke about that when you were rolling out the pilot. And that was a very interesting approach to take. What we've actually done on our side at Oktopost, because we saw something, we wanted to include everybody, regardless of their following. And we wanted to. If those had less of a following, we wanted to be able to help them grow it. So what we actually did is. So in Oktopost, you have the ability to have multiple boards, which are basically where you can pull the content from. So we actually split up leadership from the sales team and different members because what we saw, kind of what you're saying, like you pulled the people who have the biggest following. But what we saw was that our leadership oftentimes had a different type of audience or perhaps a bigger following because they've been in the industry longer. So we actually split up our advocates onto different boards to be able to make the gamification and the competition and the content very relevant. So there are, as you can see, quite a few ways to roll it out. And I think it just comes down to really knowing your organization. So maybe an audit. I think that's a great idea to do an audit of your potential sales team. Don't know if that's GDR compliant. No, it's fine. But I think that's a great place to start. But if you already kind of know, you know, that you want to get everybody involved and you don't want to leave anybody out, another approach is maybe setting up different boards so that they can partake in different competitions in different areas. So again, we're filled with ideas. We're happy to help.
41:41
Shanie Zimerman
I just have one more because I just spoke about this with a customer like three hours ago. While it's not in the initial pilot phase, it is still worth considering for the pilot phase, but they are quite advanced in their advocacy program right now and they have a lot. It causes a lot of buzz internally and they have a lot of people that want to join the program. And for their auditing, they look at the individual's SSI score on LinkedIn and if it's less than 50%, it'll work in a couple of different ways. They're more inclined to onboard the individuals with a higher SSI score, but then they want to, like Jen, you said you want to kind of help build that following and build that social presence. So they'll kind of weigh the over 50 and then less than 50 to then onboard to the, to the advocacy program.
42:28
Jennifer Gutman
That's cool.
42:29
Colin Day
Sharing through advocacy actually helps increase your SSI score as well.
42:33
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, exactly.
42:34
Colin Day
That's part of the score is about relevance and reach and et cetera.
42:38
Jennifer Gutman
I check my daily, get very excited when it goes up and up and up.
42:43
Colin Day
I'm not sure whether that's something you want to admit in front of 400 odd people, Jen, but hey, carry on, Carry on.
42:51
Shanie Zimerman
All right, guys, this was super helpful. We touched on a lot of different points here and we do have a bunch of questions that came in. So I am. Bear with me one second. I need to find the questions box. We will get to those questions just now. And oh, here we go. What methods do you recommend to find your folks at a company who have the largest following so you can target them for the advocacy program? Colin, just taking this example, if you have a team of 150 sellers, are you one by one auditing these sellers?
43:26
Colin Day
Yeah.
43:26
Shanie Zimerman
I thought you had a trick up your sleeve.
43:28
Colin Day
Well, the trick was we actually, we actually went out to LinkedIn, right. And we were purchasing at the time a number of LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses. So if you are a LinkedIn client and you do have sales navigator licenses, speak to your LinkedIn customer service rep and they can actually look at the back end. And let's say, okay, for company xyz, you've got these people and these are their names and you know, this is how many people they've got, you know, that are following them and that, you know they're connected with else. It is unfortunately a manual task, but
44:13
Shanie Zimerman
it pays out in the long Run. I think just like with anything successful, it takes a little hard work in the beginning and then kind of the
44:19
Colin Day
amount you invest up front in planning with anything. Right. Pays you back in dividends. Yeah, absolutely.
44:26
Jennifer Gutman
I mean, if anyone's still working from home with kids and who aren't in school, this could definitely be a great homeschooling task.
44:33
Colin Day
Perhaps a bit of maths thrown into the date. Come and see how Mum and Dad work. And by the way, can you slack, go and find out over in this corner for this name, how many people they've got? I think that's called labor and I'm not sure it's legal in a lot of countries, Jen, but hey, I think
44:53
Shanie Zimerman
anything goes these days. Colin, let's see what we can get you.
44:57
Colin Day
Got it. Does that answer your question though, Shani?
44:59
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, I believe it does. Another question, can we explain please, what an SSI score is?
45:08
Jennifer Gutman
Good question.
45:10
Colin Day
Who's saying that one? You're me, Jen.
45:12
Jennifer Gutman
Take it away, Colin.
45:14
Colin Day
Thanks. You give me the difficult ones, right? Yeah. So an SSI score is Social Selling Index is what it stands for. It's a unique algorithm for LinkedIn. If you've got a LinkedIn profile, go on to your LinkedIn profile. It will show you under Jen. You go there on a daily basis. So you've told me, Slack, what are the buttons you push to get the menu options? Anyway, it's on your LinkedIn profile and it takes into account a number of things, right? It takes into account, do you have a photo on your LinkedIn page, do you have a title, how complete is your LinkedIn record? And then it also takes into account how active you are on LinkedIn, not just through posting content yourself, but how you engage with third party content and how people engage with you. It's a combination of all of those and then it becomes an algorithm that LinkedIn run against your LinkedIn profile and it gives you a score out of 100. It'll also tell you, though, where you rank right, with inside your peer group, whether you're in the top 1%, top 10%, so on and so forth. And it will also give you options on how to improve your score by filling in other parts of your LinkedIn profile.
46:48
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely helpful. I have just one more question. Is there an ideal size for an employee advocacy or social selling program? I think we can unanimously say no.
47:01
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to employee advocacy, again, you're essentially empowering your employees to advocate on behalf of your brand. And so it doesn't matter if you Are a startup with five people or if you're a giant corporation with 20,000 employees, there's going to be something in it for everybody to see value in an employee advocacy program. Size doesn't matter.
47:26
Shanie Zimerman
She said it.
47:27
Colin Day
I'm not going to answer. I'm not going to come back from that one. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I've worked with organizations that are 50,000 plus employees around the world to organize organizations that five clients or five employees. Right. Slack. You know, interestingly enough, the one that had five still had an employee advocacy program. Right. It was an email once a week saying, hey, we've posted this out through the corporate channel. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please go and share it with your own channels. Didn't work too well, but the intent and the concept was there, right?
48:06
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah.
48:06
Jennifer Gutman
I would say even the smaller teams don't be intimidated to get started with employee advocacy.
48:11
Shanie Zimerman
Exactly.
48:11
Jennifer Gutman
Even the smaller teams. What we find is that smaller teams tend to take on much more day to day tasks into the different roles. Right. You don't have a giant corporation where there is a person for everything and this giant team. So even when you utilize employee advocacy as a smaller team, it's actually very helpful because you can amplify your brand's reach and get much further. And perhaps because you're such a small brand, you might not have that reach. So I again would argue that even for the smaller teams, it takes the weight off the marketer's shoulder to do all of the heavy lifting. And it really helps bring the organization together as a team to reach and tap into those networks to hopefully find those opportunities.
48:52
Colin Day
Yeah, Jen, Obviously the bigger the company. Right. The more that reaches. Right. Interestingly enough, some of the clients that I've spoken with, some of the feedback there was when we started this thing, we were worried about polluting, polluting the pool, if you will. We're putting stuff out through corporate channels. We're now asking employees to put some of that content out. Won't there be an overlap? Interestingly enough, on average it's about an 8% overlap is what comes back to me time and time again. So it's not a huge overlap whatsoever.
49:32
Jennifer Gutman
No, and I know, Yeah, I agree 1000%. Actually, yesterday I was speaking with a team. They were concerned that if everybody, if suddenly all their advocates are sharing all this content from the board, is it gonna look weird? That was the question, you know, is it gonna be weirdly reflected that suddenly everyone has the same message? But what's really powerful about Employee advocacy when you think about it. Right. So the three of us on this call, my network is different from yours, Colin, and it's different from yours, Shani. Perhaps we overlap with one another because we work together, but essentially most of our connections are where we went to school. So the fear of even having anything overlap or look weird within someone's feed, it's not relevant. And also, if you think about it, if I shared something from the New York Times that was interesting and then maybe someone else from my network shared the same article or shared from me, maybe one of our mutual followers is also going to see I share this. Someone else shared this. So it means that it's a good piece of content. So I don't think you can go wrong in that.
50:36
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. Sorry, some background noise over here.
50:41
Colin Day
That wasn't my squeaky chair, right?
50:43
Shanie Zimerman
No, it wasn't. That's all the questions that we have today. And I just want to thank the two of you again for joining us and helping just kind of spread the word and share this informative, reliable information with the of the rest of the audience. And I just want to say again, thank you to the audience for carving out this time and joining us today. We will be continuing our from the Experts series. I don't have an end date, so you can expect to see us here once a month for the foreseeable future. And again, that main goal is just to provide you with as much information as we possibly can and speak to what we know. In the meantime and until our next episode, I hope everybody continues to to stay healthy and please stay safe and
51:27
Jennifer Gutman
we will speak soon.
51:29
Shanie Zimerman
Thank you.
51:29
Colin Day
Thanks, everyone.
51:30
Shanie Zimerman
Thank you, Colin. Thank you, Jen, so much.
51:33
Jennifer Gutman
Bye Bye.
