4. Empowering Employees, Customers, and Partners to Feed the Content Engine

“Tweetable Moment: Smart marketers will enable employees, customers, and partners to feed the content engine and help tell the brand story.”

—#nextmediaco

But what if the employees were adding value to the conversation? What if they were transparent with the information they were sharing and it was actually helpful? Would people still feel the same? Jay Baer, author of New York Times bestseller Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype, makes the case that marketing, whether directly from a brand and/or its employees, must add value (or be helpful) when communicating directly with customers. It could be as easy as providing how-to videos that offer customer value. In 2013, Lowe’s released a series of amazingly simple Vine videos of home improvement tips and tricks—unscrewing a stripped screw, taking off a stubborn sticker, and cleaning a dirty cookie sheet. Or, it can be as simple as employees offering low-level support to customers who are seeking additional information about the brand’s products (such as customers looking for the latest software download).

In this case, the power lies with both the tone and context of the actual message and the person delivering it. Why? Because humans relate to humans more than they do to a brand message, assuming that the person sharing content isn’t copying and pasting scripted marketing material. It’s in our DNA to relate to others. When is the last time you had a conversation with a sign on a brick wall with a logo on it? Hopefully, never. But I am sure you remember receiving stellar service at a restaurant or from an airline flight attendant. You might even remember his or her first name. This happens all the time.

Do a search in Twitter for Zappos, and you will find customers and employees tweeting about how much they love the brand. And guess what? If you ever tweet about having an issue with an order being late or never arriving, those same customers and employees will respond in no time asking you how they can help.

It’s called brand advocacy and you can fuel your brand’s content engine by enabling employees and customers to help you tell your brand story. Media companies today are doing this but in a slightly different way.

Let’s take Forbes as an example. Forbes has always been known as a magazine that features original articles about finance, investing, and marketing topics. As of a few years ago, Forbes.com barely had an online presence worth talking about. Even though the site itself has been online since 1996, it wasn’t until 2008 that something shifted. It’s unclear when they started allowing for contributing authors, but since then the content has really started to make an impact. Today, several hundred contributing authors write topics daily about marketing, business, and social media. And all that content not only lives on Forbes.com, but it’s also indexed in Google and drives mass amounts of web traffic back to the site, which is definitely a good thing for Forbes.com’s advertisers.

You might ask, “What’s in it for the contributing authors if they aren’t staff?” Well, contributing authors do get paid based on the amount traffic they drive back to Forbes.com. It’s also advantageous to add “Forbes Columnist” on their LinkedIn profiles. Forbes blogs and articles reach quite far across the social web, giving contributing authors a wider range of visibility for their content. In fact, I see content daily from Forbes shared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn coupled with hundreds of comments, Likes, +1s, and retweets. You need to think of your employees as contributors (or brand journalists) that can help tell your brand story in a human and authentic way.

In a 2012, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes wrote a blog post in LinkedIn citing three reasons why you should hire employees specifically to use social media. According to the post, he said

• #1: It helps hire better people.

• #2: It breaks down hierarchies in the workplace.

• #3: It empowers employees to be brand advocates.

Although #1 and #2 are certainly important and can have a positive impact on your business culture, #3 illustrates this point of employee advocacy. In his post, Ryan says that there’s absolutely no requirement that his employees talk about HootSuite on social media channels, but he is fully supportive of them building their individual brands and social media following while cultivating the company brand at the same time.

Of course, any CEO can write a blog post and preach about employee empowerment, culture, or management issues. But in HootSuite’s case, it’s much more than just lip service. I have experienced his philosophy firsthand on several different levels over the last few years. Let me give you a few examples.

I first started using Twitter in 2007. Back then, there weren’t any apps to tweet from, so all functionality and usage had to be managed directly from Twitter.com. In 2008, TweetDeck was launched, and the application not only allowed you to manage Twitter accounts more effectively, but it also made content publishing and community management so much easier. It was the first app of its kind in the market and it was easy to use.

In 2012, one of my clients asked me to facilitate a training session for his global marketing team’s offsite. The topic was “How to use Twitter to Engage with Customers and Influencers.” It seemed easy and straightforward at first. After all, I do this type of training all the time. It got complicated after he told me that they had just signed an enterprise agreement with HootSuite and that he wanted a hands-on demo to be included in the training session—screenshots, how-tos, and step-by-step instructions on how to set up accounts and workflows. I had never used the platform before, so I had to learn it quickly. At first, I didn’t understand the platform at all. I was confused about how HootSuite managed various accounts, and the entire user interface seemed foreign to me. I was frustrated and anxious at the same time because I was on a strict timeline.

So I sent out a few public tweets asking for help. The responses were overwhelming, and they came flooding in not just from HootSuite employees, but from their customers as well. Several tweets directed me to an online library filled with white papers, videos, how-to guides, and blog posts. One employee even offered up a phone call and gave me a personal walk through of the platform. After a few short hours reading the material, watching the videos, and using the platform, I felt confident enough to create the training session.

Later in 2012, HootSuite’s University Director Kirsten Bailey demoed their platform via Skype for my social business strategy class that I teach at San Jose State University. She spent an hour and a half in the evening with my class answering questions about a variety of topics related to their software and also walked them step-by-step through the platform.

And for months thereafter, she spent valuable time with students answering additional questions, which isn’t even a part of her job.

Many other HootSuite employees have become my personal friends. I have written several guest posts on their blog, participated in speaking engagements with various team members, and been involved in a webinar series as a part of HootSuite University. Although they have become a recent client of Edelman, I have always been an advocate of their brand, even before I started working with them. I often tell others about my experiences and it’s not just because they have an excellent product. They have great employees, too. They are a textbook example of a company that has truly humanized its brand by empowering its employees to engage externally with customers and prospects. Oh, and I still use HootSuite today.

Though these personal stories are certainly inspiring, let’s examine some data to see if there is more to this story.

• 67% of those surveyed find a technical expert in the company as credible.

• 61% of those surveyed find a “a person like yourself” as credible.

• 51% of those surveyed find a regular employee in the company as credible.

Additionally, 2012 research by the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) titled the “Social Mind” surveyed 300 business professionals and found that by far the most frequent use of social media among business professionals was interacting with their peers within online communities like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, vertical-specific communities like Spiceworks, and even branded communities. Key findings of the study include:

• Professionals spend 40% of their time online interacting in peer-based communities, closely followed by online interactions with friends (31%) and family (13%).

• Sixty-five percent of users participate to engage with a professional community of colleagues and peers via social media networks.

• Eighty percent participate in groups online to help others by sharing information, ideas, and experiences.

• Eighty-two percent exchange information with professional networks, and 78% exchange information online with friends; 37% exchange information with “experts.”

• Nearly 80% of respondents participate in online groups to help others by sharing information and experiences; 66% participate in a professional community of colleagues and peers; 41% participate in groups to be seen as someone knowledgeable.

• Educational information was by far the most frequently shared at 61%.

• For seeking information about companies, nearly 50% of respondents said that visiting company websites was most meaningful, 45% read blogs; followed by micro blogging (41%), direct email (40%), and information exchange in online groups or forums (41%).

So what exactly does this research mean for you?

Well, we know from the Edelman Trust Barometer that employees (technical experts and “people like yourself”) are trusted and viewed as credible. We also know that business professionals spend a lot of time in social networks interacting with others, seeking advice, and looking for information. So by combining these two pieces of research, it makes sense to empower your employees to engage online with customers, especially if you work in a B2B (Business to Business) environment. It gives you the opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership, influence others through the buying cycle, and feed the content engine with relevant and trusted content. It also provides an opportunity to have employees become brand journalists.

This is why your brand must empower employees to become storytellers, or rather, brand journalists.

One of the earliest references of brand journalism came from Larry Light, McDonald’s CMO, at the 2004 AdWatch conference where he proclaimed that mass marketing no longer worked and no single approach told the whole story. Here is what he said:

Brand Journalism is a chronicle of the varied things that happen in our brand world, throughout our day, throughout the years. Our brand means different things to different people. It does not have one brand position. It is positioned differently in the minds of kids, teens, young adults, parents, and seniors. It is positioned differently at breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, weekday, weekend, with kids, or on a business trip.

Brand Journalism allows us to be a witness to the multi-faceted aspects of a brand story. No one communication alone tells the whole brand story. Each communication provides a different insight into our brand. It all adds up to a McDonald’s journalistic brand chronicle.

Light’s speech didn’t go well with everyone. Seth Godin, marketing genius and author of over 12 best-selling marketing books, responded in a blog post just a few days later:

The marketer doesn’t get to run the conversation. It’s not really brand journalism that’s happening, you see. It’s brand cocktail party! You get to set the table and invite the first batch of guests, but after that the conversation is going to happen with or without you. (sethgodin.typepad.com)

And Godin was absolutely right. Back in 2004, brands were still confused on how to use social media to actually have a conversation. Today, things are different.

The philosophy of brand journalism is simple. It’s about combining the core tenets of journalism with brand storytelling, thereby creating conversational value to all stakeholders, both customers and the media. Brand journalism is much more than employees tweeting or sharing company news on Facebook. It’s about finding good stories about the brand, its products, or employees and using long-form content to tell a story. There is no real difference between an employee brand advocate and a brand journalist. One just has superior writing skills and can tell better stories.

The idea of brand journalism is easy. The execution isn’t. But the good news is that this book will show you how to do it. But as you prepare to empower, train and mobilize your employees, you can’t forget the power of your customers either.

• Ninety-two percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family. (Nielsen)

• Eighty-two percent of U.S. consumers are influenced by friend’s social media posts, compared to 78% for brands’ posts. (WOMMA)

• There are a total of 500 billion word-of-mouth impressions every year. (Forrester)

But do we even need data to support these findings? Most of us intuitively know that we as customers trust each other. How many times have you been influenced to purchase a specific product or fly on a particular airline because someone told you about his or her personal experience? On the other hand, how many times have you changed your mind about purchasing a specific product because one of your friends shared their negative experience? It happens all the time. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In,” we are all influential, regardless of our Klout scores or how many friends, fans, and followers we have.

The good news today is that customer advocacy is becoming an increasingly important topic for marketers. But the opportunity is more than just building intimate relationships with those customers who have a strong affinity for your brand. The opportunity is enablement; that is, enabling those customers to help tell your brand story. According to a 2013 study facilitated by Brand Advocacy Platform Zuberance and UBM Tech, producers of the Online Marketing Summit found

• Eighty-nine percent of marketers said advocacy is important or very important in 2013.

• Seventy-nine percent of marketers said advocacy is more important in 2013 than it was in 2012.

• Seventy percent of marketers planned to increase spending on advocate marketing programs in 2013.

So we have established that empowering brand advocates (employees and customers) is important to help feed your brand’s content engine; and it’s great news that companies are now realizing the opportunity and making financial investments in this area. But the challenge with empowerment is that it’s not actionable. Any CEO or business leader can send out a corporate-wide email empowering the workforce to engage in social media. And at the same time, any community manager can ask friends, fans, and followers to upload photos to their Facebook timeline. But just because you ask doesn’t mean they will listen. For you to scale your content operations, you need to enable brand advocacy, and this means you have to have a plan.

There are three types of advocacy programs that you can leverage as a part of your media company transformation: employees, customers, and partners. Each of these groups can play a significant role in your content strategy with each one taking on the role of a contributor, writer, or brand journalist. However, there are certain fundamentals you must carefully think through before you launch your programs that will enable you to scale and plan accordingly.

• Selection Criteria: It’s important to document a process for selecting your advocates. This can be anything you choose, and it’s quite possible that your criteria will change as you learn and expand the program. You can randomly select advocates based on their individual levels of influence or how large their personal communities are. You can decide whom to include based on how often they engage with the brand. You can have advocates apply to be a part of the program. Or you can you use platforms such as Kred, SocMetrics, Appinions, or Flow140, which are tools that can help you identify your most influential advocates within specific areas of interest. For employees, you can pick and choose who you want to participate based on their interest and social proficiency. You can even open it up to your entire company. However, it’s a best practice to start small and hand select a few employees, establish a few small wins, learn some best practices, and then begin to open up the program to other employees gradually.

• Longevity of Program: In many cases, advocate programs have an infinite life span. Some companies rotate advocates in and out every 6 to 12 months or simply leave it open for anyone to join. This depends on your resources and/or budget constraints. The one thing to remember is that when you build a thriving community of advocates, you cannot abandon or forget about them—ever. The Microsoft MVP (Most Value Professional) program has been around well over a decade and still going strong today. Out of 100 million technical community members globally; roughly 4,000 of them are MVPs. MVPs are nominated into the program by their peers, Microsoft employees, and other MVPs who participate in the program. Each year a panel of Microsoft employees reviews the contributions of each nominee for quality, quantity, and level of impact of content created within the technical community. The MVP program has been cited in hundreds of blog posts, white papers, and several articles in the Harvard Business Review as “best in class” advocate programs.

• Customer/Employee Expectations: You must be completely clear when you communicate your expectations to your advocates and also outline what they can expect from you in return. For example, an advocate program might consist of you soliciting feedback from your advocates about new products or services. This should only be done if you are actually willing to implement their feedback (if it makes business sense of course). Bobbi Brown Cosmetics did this back in 2012. They ran a Facebook promotion to crowd source which new shade of lip color the company would put back into production. CEO Bobbi Brown posted a video on the company’s Facebook page, inviting its near 250,000 fans to vote for their favorite from a list of the 10 most-frequently requested colors. Bobbi Brown then made those products available to buy exclusively through Facebook—a good way to measure ROI as well. Other companies, such as Nissan, Volkswagen Canada, Levis, and Expedia, have done similar programs.

Or if you are enabling employees to write, tweet, or contribute to your brand’s Facebook page, Twitter account, or blog, you should ensure that their content is actually getting published and not sitting in your email inbox.

• Organizational Support: Regardless of which team is responsible for managing this program, there must be internal support from executives, product organizations, customer support, compliance, privacy/security, and legal before your program is launched. This requires collaboration across job functions and maybe geographies, which is always a good thing to do anyway.

• Contract or NDA: Not all advocate programs require a contract or NDA. If you are sharing product road maps or giving them confidential information, then yes, there should be controls in place that protect you and your company’s intellectual property. There should always, however, be documented terms and conditions that contain language explaining that advocates can leave the program at any time and for any reason or can be asked to leave the program at any time and for any reason.

• Social Media Policy: Specifically for employee advocacy programs, you must ensure that there is not only a social media policy in place, but that employees are familiar with it and trained accordingly.

• Upcoming events or industry tradeshows

• Upcoming product launches or new releases of an existing product

• Fun things like contests, polls, and research questions

• Asking for user generated content (such as uploading and sharing photos on Facebook orTwitter)

Smart and innovative companies take it one step further and co-create new products and services with the community. GiffGaff, a mobile virtual network operator based in the U.K., is a textbook example of a brand that has built their entire business with their community members. Using the software application, Lithium, they reward active community members for running various portions of the business including answering questions in the community, attracting new members, or using content to help promote the company.

As a thank you, community members are rewarded with virtual praise and an elevated personal reputation. These points are accumulated for referring people to the service, helping people by answering specific questions or solving technical issues in the community, or even creating promotional content for the company. The points can be applied against their monthly mobile services, taken as a cash reward, or donated to a charitable cause.

Whatever your measurement criteria, it should be used as a benchmark internally for all other (and future) advocate programs. More importantly, the KPIs need to be in alignment with business goals and should be shared internally with each of your stakeholders before you launch your program.

There are also several new players in this space that can help you communicate with advocates, manage and promote their content, reward them, and run various measurement reports and analytics:

• Dynamic Signal: A platform that manages and scales both employee and customer advocate programs with the ability to create private and/or public facing communities.

• Zuberance: A platform that finds advocates based on their Net Promoter Scores and then gives you the ability customize various flows depending on their scores.

• Fancorps: A platform that allows you to ask advocates to perform certain tasks and then get rewarded for completion; usually lives within a Facebook page.

• Influitive: A platform similar to Fancorps but more focused on the B2B audience and lives on a separate microsite. They also have built-in rewards and badging.

• Crowdtap: A platform that’s focused on collaborative marketing with customers with built-in rewards.

• Social Chorus: An influencer marketing platform that allows you to upload various forms of content that advocates can then use for their own blogs and social communities.

• Extole: A platform that allows you to tap into the power of your customer advocates to drive brand awareness, new sales, and acquisitions through word of mouth marketing.

• Addvocate: A platform mainly for employees that makes it easy for them to share content about the brand or any other topic.

Though many of these platforms offer similar capabilities, functionality, and pricing, you have to ensure that they can meet your internal requirements and business goals instead of the other way around. And as you begin transforming your brand into a media company, one requirement is how you can leverage these advocates to help create and distribute content. Remember, this is what media companies do.

Three vendors in this space do this really well: GaggleAMP focuses on enabling employees; Napkin Labs position themselves for customers; and Pure Channel Apps prides itself as being the only vendor in the market place that caters to channel partners in the supply chain.

GaggleAMP is best described as a social media amplification platform that enables employees to share branded content and also fuel the content engine with their own thoughts and ideas. They have two core products: Amplify and Distribute. Both products are cloud-based platforms that allow you to invite employees into what the platform calls Gaggles. Each employee of these Gaggles is notified via email whenever there is a new piece of content to be shared. The employee can then choose to share the content with the click of a button or click “No Thanks.” In some cases, you can use built-in controls to ensure that some content remains compliant and can’t be edited, which is good if you work in a regulated industry. Figure 4.2 shows you how employees can edit content and then share it to their personal social media accounts.

The difference between the two products Amplify and Distribute depends on who you are distributing content to, an individual or an entity. The Amplify product is solely for employees. The Distribute product is more for franchisees like Cold Stone, Subway, or insurance companies that may have several local retail outlets. Both products provide an amplification effect by having content, which previously would have been shared on one social media account to be shared on a large number of accounts over a period of time. The result extends both the reach and the shelf life of your content marketing initiatives.

Finally, GaggleAMPs products can be integrated into marketing automation platforms and web tracking tools such as Marketo, Google Analytics, and HubSpot.

As a primary step, their platform captures two years worth of social data about how each fan has interacted with your brand page in the past. Based on millions of comments, Likes, shares, photos, posts and polls, they give each fan a ranked score, helping you identify your top advocates. They offer a series of leaderboards and analytics that give you insight into which of your fans are most active and influential, as well as what they are talking about. They also provide tools to sort and segment top users geographically and provide rewards and badges for those who are most active in your Facebook community.

In the context of this book and as you think about content, Napkin Labs’ tools push beyond just the first phase of measuring consumer-to-brand interaction. Insights into top fans become the stepping stone to mobilizing advocates to create and share powerful content that influencers others. You can choose from over 15 activities to crowd source content from your top advocates. For example, they have a brainstorm tool to gather ideas around a topic you pose or a storytelling tool to capture relevant stories from customers. The tool then gives you the ability to reward a fan or easily repurpose content to be posted on your Facebook timeline. Figure 4.3 shows how easy it is for you to use the Fan Center almost as a content library to highlight customer stories.

Using this platform, advocacy, content creation, and even consumer insight gathering becomes intertwined and mutually reinforcing. You can form a richer community within a Facebook experience by giving your fans a greater voice and enabling them to help you tell your brand story. Meanwhile, you are capturing invaluable content and forming a deeper understanding of your most valuable customers.

Although tools like Napkin Labs work well for B2C brands, which sell products or services directly to consumers, you can’t forget the content opportunities of working with your channel partners in the supply chain, especially if you work in business-to-business (B2B).

Here is how it works.

The first step in the process is content creation—whether you work for a vendor, manufacturer, distributor, or retailer. The content can be in any form, such as a blog post, tweet, Facebook update, infographic, whitepaper, or video.

Then you enter that content into the SocialOnDemand platform and select a series of filters or tags that correlate to a specific territory, country, post category, and/or customer segment. This is done to ensure that your channel partners only receive the content that’s relevant to their customers. Figure 4.4 illustrates how to enter in a new piece of content.

After the content is in the system, your channel partners will receive an email informing them that there is content waiting to be approved. From there, they can decide if they want to publish it or not. If they decide to publish the content, they can log into the portal where they’ll be able to edit the post, assign it to one or more of their social media accounts, or publish directly from the SocialOnDemand platform. Figure 4.5 is a sample email that channel partners receive notifying them that there is content for them to approve or not.

At any time, you can log into the system and see how many of your partners are registered; how many social media accounts they have added; what social media accounts these are; and how many friends, fans, and followers each partner has within his or her community. You also have the ability to see which channel partners have generated the most engagement with your content, the potential reach and impressions, as well as the number of clicks.

As discussed throughout this entire chapter, empowering customers and employees to engage online on your behalf is a challenge to scale. These two groups of advocates need to be enabled to feed your content engine, and it has to be convenient for them to do so. Social Advocator solves this problem. This value-added feature can give you the opportunity to build on your employee and customer advocacy programs and enable them to share branded content online and within their own social networks very easily. As depicted in Figure 4.6, Social Advocator is a browser plugin compatible with Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Advocates are notified when there is new content that they can share, and they can simply click a browser icon to view the content.

As you can see from the figure, the plugin is visual, almost Pinterest-like, so that advocates can easily scroll through the content and share what they are most interested in sharing. Currently, Social Advocator can publish to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

On the back end, marketing, communication teams, brand teams, or just about anyone else who you give access to within your company can add content for each of the social networks and store it into this content library. Content can be scheduled or updated in real-time with push notifications, and each time you add new content, a notification appears in the browser plugin icon. Advocates can share this content if they wish.

What makes this platform even more robust is the integration with the Expion engagement dashboard. As you are executing your content strategy and engaging day to day with your customers, the content generated from your advocates can be integrated into the platform and be shared or amplified directly by the brand. The platform can also give you robust metrics to showcase the reach/impressions of your advocate’s communities, detail their level of engagement, and help you identify which advocates participate the most, as well as identify which ones are the most influential.