0:01
Sapir Segal
Thank you all for joining today's webinar titled Unleashing a New Social How Nice Harnessed Employee Advocacy before, during and after its conference. Today, we are going to walk step by step through the story of how a global company, nice, successfully utilized their employees throughout their biggest conference of the year, the Nice Interactions Conference. So whether you're completely new to the idea or you've already got a program in place, we hope that this webinar will offer you a valuable discussion and even a takeaway toolkit on what employee advocacy can do for your company. Now, before we get started, let's go over some housekeeping items. Firstly, this webinar is being recorded and will be sent to you once we conclude. If you have any questions at all throughout the session, feel free to use the chat box on your right and we'll answer them during our final Q and A session. If you are posting to Social, please don't forget to use our custom hashtag octowebinar. Now, in case this is your first time joining us, I'm Sapiyur Segal, the director of marketing at Oktopost, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Zoe Bermond, who manages the social media marketing for nice. Zoe, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and the company?
1:10
Zoe Bermant
Sure. Thanks, Sapir. Hi everyone, I'm Zoe. I've been managing nice's social media accounts for nearly three years now. Prior to working exclusively in social media management, I was the global corporate marketing director for a major cybersecurity company and also director of marketing at an international airline. I live, breathe, eat and sleep on social media and I love helping companies find more visibility and give more value to their followers socially. A little bit about Nice when the world's leading companies want to improve their business performance or increase their operational efficiency, they want to prevent financial crime or ensure they're fully compliant or enhance their safety and security. Security. They come to Nice. Not only does Nice have offices in more than 35 local offices around the world and a network of resellers and distributors, we also manage multiple social platforms and followers from many different verticals and regions around the world.
2:10
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Zoe, and thank you for joining me today. Now, to kick us off, I'd love to hear your view on what employee advocacy means for B2B companies like Nice and maybe some of the benefits of having a program.
2:23
Zoe Bermant
Well, I think empowering employees to positively promote content across their personal social channels is really the main reason. Fostering a positive company culture in which employees are proud to promote their company. When employees love the work that they do, they feel more comfortable to positively speak about their company to their social media connections. And also as the traditional barriers between buyers and companies are splurge, it's more important than ever to deliver the messages in in new ways. Employee advocacy is that new way of engaging with customers and telling your brand story on social media. It's about unleashing a new social voice that can best deliver your company's message. You, you might want to know, you know why, why that is? Well, there's several reasons. One of them is so social amplification. Employees reach nearly 10 times more people than all of your corporate social accounts can combined. Instead of casting just one net of audiences, you're casting many nets. And this enables marketers to catch far more conversations and engagements than they do with one single account. There's also increased engagement beyond increased visibility. Employee advocacy also pays off in that it bolsters engagement. In fact, research in this area shows that posts shared by employees generate eight times more engagement. It's about building trust because with every company establishing a presence on social media, there's a lot of mistrust. That's what makes employees your best brand influencers and your most trustworthy source. They infuse that element of personality into your brand, which makes your audience a lot more receptive to what they have to say. And it also makes the message must much more relatable because it's coming from somebody that they know. It's more cost effective. The idea of trust is that is is also what makes employee advocacy a more cost effective strategy than just using paid social ads. You should see a boost in sales. Employee social marketing generated leads convert seven times more frequently than other leads. And we've seen that according to market, you know, research and things that are going on in the market and thought leadership, it's a very important part of it. So far we've mentioned that many ways that employee advocacy can contribute to a company's success. But the impact is two ways. Employees also benefit from being positioned as thought leaders. The more they share high value content, the more they will be perceived as professional, knowledgeable and trustworthy.
5:08
Sapir Segal
Thank you Zoe. And I completely agree with everything you said. I think at the end of the day, you know, we're all on social media. We all know just how much information is out there and how difficult it is to get our message across. Especially as a marketer, I believe that it's really our responsibility to engage with our audience on a more personal level. And when you look at employee Advocacy and getting them to share a message in their own words to their own people. It's no longer about marketing, it's about what we think is having a meaningful conversation, a two way conversation. On that note, I would like to remind our listeners that they can use our Twitter hashtag octowebinar in if they have any questions or feedback about our discussion. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Now, in the last few years we have seen companies take very interesting approaches when it comes to employee advocacy. But one of the more unique approaches that we've seen nice take has been with the Interactions conference. So using employee advocacy as the primary channel to promote the event. Now, it's also worth mentioning that this is their biggest annual conference. And before we discuss just how employee advocacy helped NICE before, during and after the event, Zoe is going to share with us some detail about the event itself and its significance.
6:21
Zoe Bermant
Thank you, Sophia. Interactions is actually the customer Experience industry's premier event. Every year, thousands of industry peers, analysts, journalists and influencers gather for three days to hear real use case examples of how companies are using NICE technologies to enhance their businesses. Presentations have included guest speakers from some of the world's biggest companies and industry influencers.
6:47
Sapir Segal
Thank you Zoe. Now we're going to jump into the next section where we discuss the role that employee advocacy plays before the conference. Now, as we know, before you launch any marketing initiative, especially something as big as a conference, the first step is always to identify your primary and secondary goals. Now, with these goals, you can have a very clear understanding of what success looks like for your company and then determine the roi. Why of the conference. So Zoe, would you like to share with us what were Nice's goals or KPIs for the conference? And specifically what were you hoping to achieve through employee advocacy?
7:21
Zoe Bermant
I guess the most important thing that is an increase in reach and generating engagement around the conference. But our primary goal was lead generation. In this case, we wanted to make sure that employee advocates were attracting as many visitors to the conference, which translates into ticket sales.
7:42
Sapir Segal
Yeah, I agree that increasing reach is definitely a key goal when it comes to employee advocacy because you want to see them just getting more visibility for your conference in order to eventually increase your ticket sales and boost the number of leads that you get. And later Zoe is going to show us just the impact that employee advocacy has had on those KPIs. But for now, let's go into the next step which is choosing the right participants. So of course, when you roll out an employee advocacy program, it's Extremely important to identify those individuals within the organization who are very social savvy. And now by that I mean that they not only have the largest following on social media, but they're also very well connected to industry thought leaders and decision makers and therefore they have the biggest influence as the voice of your brand and to get the content in front of more relevant eyes. So back to you, Zoe. When NICE launched the program, how did you go about choosing the right employees to deliver your message in the conference in the best way possible?
8:45
Zoe Bermant
It was a bit of a no brainer to choose those customer facing employees. Targeting sales and product marketing enabled us to carry out an initial deployment for those who were already comfortable communicating in a professional, you know, professional capacity on social media and aware of best practices. Then we were able to roll it out to people in more senior positions and look at those already quite comfortable and active on social media because they are always going to be, you know, already engaged and give buy in to joining a program like an employee advocacy one.
9:26
Sapir Segal
Yeah, exactly. They are going to be a lot more natural and more enthusiastic about social media and obviously going to share more content for your company. And speaking of content, when you're heading into a conference, it's always important to have everything planned in advance because it can be quite intense and this also includes your social media content. So Zoe, how did you map out your social media content plan to make sure that employees have enough content to share before, during and after the conference?
9:56
Zoe Bermant
It was important to us to understand what type of content employees were willing to share during and before the conference. Anything that was time sensitive. So when we were pushing our early bird prices and tickets, you know, that sort of stuff was easy to get people to share. We made sure that we were creating content around landing pages, guest speakers, agendas, registration. We set up the advocacy content board specifically for the conference and made it easy for them to find and share that content. And we prepared things well in advance so it wasn't, oh, something went up live, now please share it. And we came up with unique hashtags and educated them on how to use those hashtags and what that would mean for finding and engaging with other people.
10:54
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Zoe. And once you've selected the right content and the best employees to deliver it, in this case, NICE has chosen the product marketing and the sales team. The next question is how do you encourage employee participation? Now, although we mentioned that focusing on the social enthusiasts in the first round of the program is essential for high employee engagement, at the end of the day, there are Always going to be some employees who participate more and then those who participate less and share less content. So my next question for you, Zoe, is what did NICE do to establish employee buy in prior to the conference? And were there any special incentives in place?
11:33
Zoe Bermant
Well, what we actually did for the interactions conference is that employees were able to win points for their sharing activity. This is actually very easy to do in Oktopost because there's a leaderboard that tracks all their sharing and the engagements that they get. And they were, they competed against their colleagues for the top spot on the leaderboard. It was a Win Win initiative. Employees won tickets to attend the conference and the company benefited from the additional visibility and leads that that brought. This almost doubled our results in engagement and reach as we'll show you in a minute. And sales themselves were very interested in arriving to the event and the conference. They can't get an invite unless they get enough people registered. And when they get enough people to register, then they receive an invite. So this was a really big incentive for them.
12:27
Sapir Segal
Yeah, and it definitely sounds like a real Win Win initiative because I would love to go to Las Vegas and attend the conference. So I think you definitely made them feel, you know, okay, I have to now share a lot of content and be super engaged, otherwise I won't get the ticket. So it's definitely a great incentive. Moving on from employee advocacy before the conference, next, we'll discuss the role of employee advocacy during the conference. Once you've arrived at the conference, there's obviously a lot of excitement in the air. Every booth has got its own swag. Companies try to stand out with cool freebies and flyers, and all of this is happening in the physical environment. But what a lot of B2B companies neglect or forget about is the online environment. Because you need to try and get just as much attention in the online environment by dominating the social media sphere. And this is exactly what NICE has done with employee advocacy. So during the conference, employee advocacy, as I said, can be used as a tool for creating more buzz around different aspects of the conference. This includes keynote speakers, sessions, special events, et cetera. And it's really about making your message more visible to attendees, but also to audiences who aren't in the crowd. Because even audiences who aren't in the crowd to you want to make sure that they feel just as much a part of the event itself. You want them to follow what is being said and of course you want them to be there next time to buy a ticket next time. So back to you, Zoe, how did you expand your Social presence and encourage employees to reach more people throughout the conference itself.
13:59
Zoe Bermant
Well, the first thing we did was we created a dedicated WhatsApp group and added, you know, quite, quite a lot of people to that group for dedicated live posting. That way the employees would send images and posts in real time, capturing the moment at the conference, and then these would be turned into social posts and added to the content board. We also created live polls asking people questions at the conference. We tweeted very regularly, almost every three minutes. We had dedicated graphics that we were putting out. So it wasn't just saying that somebody said this at the conference. We had a graphic showing the person saying heard ice 2017. We created GIFs, videos, moments and animations to share the highlights of each day and then encouraged through the WhatsApp group in education for people to reshare that. And we had hashtag following and retweeting going on the whole time so that if people were making an effort to share what was going on, we made sure that we were retweeting almost everything that was being used under those hashtags.
15:12
Sapir Segal
Wow. So those are some very interesting visual and very interactive pieces of content that our audience can take with them as an example of what they could do potentially at their next conference with employee advocacy. So thank you for sharing that with us, Zoe. Now let's move into the next step, which is step number six, which is about monitoring performance. So although employees are writing to the WhatsApp group, they're live tweeting, they're sharing those live moments. How can you be sure that their effort is having a significant impact? Or how can you try to maximize their potential as a group during the conference to drive the highest reach and engagement on social media? Zoe, can you maybe tell us what NICE has done in this respect?
15:54
Zoe Bermant
So we monitor, engage employee advocacy progress. Oktopost makes it very easy to do that. With the analytics built into the platform, we identify top performing advocates and then we motivate the employees through both acknowledgement and incentives and rewards to share more content.
16:17
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Zoe. And now we're going to jump into the next part of our webinar, which is about understanding the role of employee advocacy after the conference. So when it's over and once you have reached the final point of your event, you know, you're back in the office with all the team. This is really the perfect opportunity to look back and say, we did it, but here is how we can improve for next time. So ideally, the first step after the conference is to revisit the goals and KPIs that you established at the beginning of the event in step number one. And then analyze how employee advocacy helped to increase growth in reach, engagement and even conversions. And of course measured the ROI that employee advocacy contributed to the conference. Next, Zoe is going to share with us some interesting numbers and figures from employee advocacy and how they matched against their original KPIs for the conference.
17:10
Zoe Bermant
Thanks, Sapir. Okay, so we gathered these numbers over the course of five months that we were running this program and in that five month period we saw an increase in content shares by 46%. We saw an increase, it led to an increase in reach by 45%. We had 45% more reach and that brought us an increase in link clicks through to the landing page of the conference website of 25%. Great numbers.
17:45
Sapir Segal
Yeah, definitely. Great numbers. Impressive results and thank you for sharing them. And it goes to show that employee advocacy is not only a tool, but for content amplification, but also for engagement. And this brings me to the next step of the webinar, which is reporting key insights. Right? So this is where you ask yourself, what have we learned? Which content performed the best? Did images and videos generate the more the most clicks? Or was it post with text only? And maybe you can also ask yourself which employees were responsible for driving the most engagement? Were they employees from sales? From marketing? You know the numbers will speak for themselves. And of course, don't forget to report these insights to decision makers at your company, because not only do they love to see numbers, it's also a way for you to prove the value of employee advocacy of the program and then get buy in for the program to continue. Zoe, can you share with us what Nice has learned from these results or any key takeaways that you can have for future events for your next conference?
18:45
Zoe Bermant
I guess our biggest takeaway would be that employee advocacy really does work. You could spend loads of money boosting and paying for visibility in front of your target audience, but why would you spend money when you have a ready army of employees who live and breathe the industry that they are in and can help you create that same buzz? On a much more personal level, advocates can start a conversation or a relationship with a new potential customer or an event attendee months before the event even starts, making the experience at the event that much more enriched. We've even had a few people forming their own Twitter competitions to track and count how many steps they took during the conference. People tweeting us to ask where a particular session is or if somebody that they were looking for is at the conference. It's kind of really bringing social to life as part of your conference experience.
19:41
Sapir Segal
Yeah, and I agree. And I'll just add that it definitely makes that interaction between the company and the audience far more engaging and far more personal. And that's what you get out of employee advocacy. Now I just want to say that when the conference is over, right, you can still take advantage of the momentum to engage with your audience. So remain active on social and this is where you can get employees to ask for audience feedback, maybe even promote the next edition or dates for the conference if you have those dates. And then also take this opportunity to shed light on employees and partners who have helped make this event such a big success. Because at the end of the day, nothing beats great storytelling on social media.
20:24
Zoe Bermant
Agreed. I'd like to add that I've never really understood companies that say our employees just don't or won't share on social media. And I want to say to those companies that it needs to be part of your company culture embedded from day one when somebody is interviewed and accepts a position that part of the day to day involvement they have in the company's image and the part that they play in that is just as important to the success of the company as every sale and every lead that they bring.
20:59
Sapir Segal
Definitely, Zoe. And as you said, employee advocacy really should be a top priority for B2B companies. And that's not only because it helps to boost reach and engagement, but also because it creates a much more united company culture, I think where employees can take ownership and be proud of their company's success, they can share it with the company. This brings me to the end of our webinar. Let's go through some of the highlights from today. Besides running paid campaigns, NICE looked for another effective and scalable way to way to generate organic reach using existing platforms and networks. In this case social media. And Oktopost is as their primary employee advocacy platform. Now, as their biggest conference of the year, NICE wanted employee advocacy to play a significant role in increasing weekly reach, engagement and conversions before, during and after the conference. Now in the end, employee advocacy enabled NICE to expand their social footprint and increase content shares by 46% which ultimately boosted engagement by 25%. Overall, these are very tremendous results if you take into consideration just the amount of money, time and resources that NICE has invested towards their interactions Conference Employee advocacy is really seen as a force multiplier which enabled NICE to increase their conference roi. Now let's jump into our Q and A. We've had a lot of great questions come in. So we're just going to look at them now. All right, so the first question that I have here is from Jamie. Jamie would like to know what kind of content do you recommend employees should share for maximum impact? Do you want to take this one, Zoe?
22:48
Zoe Bermant
Sure. Hi, Jamie. So I guess highlights of what is being said and the important people attending is what you should be sharing. No one wants to know the minute details of which session is starting when, but people want to feel like they're part of the experience. So where possible, lots of images, lots of live sessions, really capturing the atmosphere at the conference. That's what I would tell you to share.
23:15
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Zoe. So our next question is from Scotty. He wants to know how did you get executive buy in support to support a social advocacy program? So, Zoe, this one's for you.
23:28
Zoe Bermant
So, yeah, so the way we did it was we ran a pilot, we stopped, we measured it, we analyzed it, and we saw the results. Numbers don't lie. So we were able to scale the results and then roll out a much wider program.
23:43
Sapir Segal
It's true. The numbers don't lie. I mean, even when you start with a small pilot program and you have you see that that impact on the reach and engagement and even leads, then showing that to executives is definitely what's going to make them more supportive for the program and to potentially expand it. So our next question is from Stuart. He asks how can, can you tell us about the analytics and how did you measure the number of leads from employee advocacy? So great question, Stuart. So really, it's all part of. It's built into the Oktopost platform. Essentially, anytime an employee shares a post from Oktopost, whether it's directly from the Oktopost app on the go or through the desktop app, the marketer who's in charge of the program can see these results. They can track every single click, every single conversion that the employee has generated through by sharing this content. For example, if someone clicked on a post shared by an employee and this brought them to fill out a web form, then everything is tracked within inside Oktopost. So I hope that answered your question. Moving on, I have Jen and she would like to know, do you think a company is ever too big or too small to have an employee advocacy program? Hi, Jen. And definitely not. I think the way I think of it, the way Oktopost thinks about it is that the more employees you have, the merrier. So obviously, the more employees you have sharing content, the greater the reach is going to be. But Even if you look at a small company with just, excuse me, 15 employees, they can also have a great influence in terms of expanding your reach. And that's going to be far greater than your company's limited pool of audiences. So I hope that answered. Yeah, we're going to take one last question because we are running out of time, but this one is from Laura. Laura wants to know how long did it take you to implement a program across the company and who did you onboard first?
25:50
Zoe Bermant
Thanks, Laura. Actually, as you can probably guess, it's always easier to start with the most social people, and they're normally your marketing people. What we did was we expanded then to product marketing and sales, and the entire program with hundreds of advocates has been ongoing and building up over several years. But we put a huge emphasis around interactions. Last year we added a separate advocacy board and more than 50 advocates just for the purpose of promoting the conference. And as you saw before, there were real results that came out from that.
26:28
Sapir Segal
Thank you, Zoe. And thank you for those questions. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. And I'd like to thank Zoe again for joining us and sharing all of those wonderful insights and numbers. It's been great planning and co hosting this webinar with you and to our audience. We hope that today's session offered you an illuminating discussion on just what employee advocacy can do for your company and how you can leverage it at your next event or conference. So I'm just going to leave the details up on the slide in case you want to hear more about the Oktopost employee advocacy solution. And thank you for joining us.
27:01
Zoe Bermant
Thanks for having me.
