Collaborative market intelligence to serve the company’s branding.
Your employees are your best ambassadors.
Developing employee advocacy to convert employees into influencers and defenders of the company brand is now one of the major priorities for human resources and communications professionals.
As the Welcome to the Jungle article Social Media: Your Employees Are Your Best Ambassadors points out, employee advocacy is incredibly effective at promoting company messages: "Brand messages are shared 24 times more when employees post them, and their reach is 561% greater than corporate messages on social media."
The key for companies: greater visibility for the brand and the messages it wants to convey, greater credibility, and the ability to more easily achieve its recruitment goals. Indeed, by facilitating the sharing of the company's values, its purpose, and internal projects, employee advocacy efforts can also support HR efforts to promote the company. In the face of the war for talent, employee sharing on social media is invaluable for inspiring future candidates and making a difference.
So how can we encourage employees to spread the word about the company's messages? While the Welcome to the Jungle article already provides some very interesting insights, today we wanted to offer a complementary idea: leveraging a collaborative monitoring project to facilitate and encourage information sharing. Indeed, digital information management and communication/collaboration platforms now offer the opportunity to build and sustainably mobilize a community of internal influencers. Here's how.
Faciliter le relai des prises de parole de l’entreprise
Busy with their daily tasks, your employees probably can't devote hours to researching information to share with their community. By adopting a collaborative market intelligence platform, communications or HR teams can offer their employees easier access to information: What are the dynamics, projects, and actions that make me proud and that I want to share with my community? What does my company do that corresponds to my values? What content does my company produce that would be worth sharing?
To enable employees to relay company press releases, the first step is to facilitate their access to information, particularly in large structures where corporate information can be disseminated across dozens or even hundreds of reference sites and social media accounts.
A monitoring platform will allow Communication teams to automatically monitor their company's statements, content and communication actions, and bring them together in the same place.
The platform can thus enable:
- Follow the content relayed by managers on social networks;
- Collect articles that talk about the company or its managers in the press or on specialist sector websites;
- Monitor the company’s official websites and social networks;
- Submit studies that the company would like employees to promote;
- etc.
These information streams can then be made available to employees, either in their entirety or after an initial manual selection by the communications teams. There are several options for sharing them with employees:
Provide access to a dashboard that centralizes information that can be shared by employees. Using tabs and columns, it's possible to group news by topic or job, so that each employee can directly access the information that interests them.
Editorialization also helps facilitate and encourage sharing: for example, it is possible to indicate "best practices" in column headers to guide employees in publishing on social networks: how to use hashtags to make the publication more visible? why and how to engage experts? how to create engaging conversations? Communication teams can also comment on selected articles to help employees in their sharing, by giving them ideas for hooks or perspectives around the article. This helps inspire employees to generate engagement on social networks around the information.
Another possibility: publish an automatic newsletter, which will be sent daily to employees, to keep them informed of key company news, but also to encourage them to become ambassadors by re-sharing the information.
A bonus for employees is that they will feel better informed about the company's strategic areas, benefit from a cross-functional view of what directly or indirectly affects their business, and will therefore be more involved.
From a dashboard or newsletter, if your monitoring platform natively offers sharing buttons, employees will only have to click to distribute the article to their preferred social networks.
If the company uses social media publishing platforms, such as Hootsuite, Sociabble, or Amplify, it's also possible to set up interconnections between these tools and your monitoring platform. With Curebot, nothing could be simpler. You can generate RSS feeds from tagged information folders (smartfolders), which can then be integrated into your social media publishing platforms. This allows you to offer content that can be fearlessly distributed by employees directly on these platforms, or even automate the publication of content on social networks.
Support the professions to follow and promote the company’s values.
While a monitoring platform offers multiple possibilities to facilitate the relaying of the company's statements, it also allows for the dissemination of its values and positions. To this end, it is worth supporting the Human Resources, CSR or Innovation teams to set up monitoring in the monitoring platform on blogs or sites that deal with topics related to the values that the company wishes to convey. The members of these teams, as well as all of the company's employees, will be able to easily draw on these resources to disseminate these values internally and externally. The communications team can also engage employees from all business backgrounds to contribute to this content selection work, allowing them to suggest content that could be highlighted in communications and suggested to employees.
With Curebot, all it takes is an action tag + proposalLaVoixdesSalariés and a hashtag describing the content to easily implement a dashboard of themed content suggested by employees. The result: more engaged and motivated employees. And, externally, a better company image, which could make a difference when recruiting in sectors facing labor shortages.
Don't hesitate to also scan social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, internal social networks) to identify the most active employees who already share professional content. This mapping will give you a database of employees to contact and offer them the opportunity to benefit from your collaborative monitoring platform. By monitoring their topics of interest, they will contribute to the flow of information that can then be disseminated by employees involved in the employee advocacy process.
Collaborative monitoring approaches can therefore prove to be a valuable aid in encouraging employees to convey the company's messages.