Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Employee advocacy is taking corporate communications by stormr.

Encouraging employees to be your organization's champions could be the perfect answer to journalists increasingly seeking real stories on social media.

Companies like Cisco and Danske Bank are already experimenting with employee social-media takeovers. Don't sack your spokesperson, but it's definitely time to give your employees the forum they deserve....

Consider this statistic: employees are 2x as trusted as a CEO, senior executive, or activist consumer (Edelman). If that stat didn’t drive the importance of employee advocacy home for you, how about this: on average, brand messages are shared 24x more frequently when distributed by employees (MSL Group).

Employee advocacy is increasingly being seen as a key accompaniment when considering social media management solutions – and many established solution providers have adapted as such, whether as an add-on to their already existing services, or a tool that easily integrates across other CRM platforms.

The challenge for marketers, then, becomes choosing a solution that’s both scalable and that allows you to tie employee advocacy initiatives directly to ROI.

What investment can you make that maximizes your time while equipping your employees to be your most powerful brand advocates?

We’ve gathered 10 of the top employee advocacy tools available that combine a rich mix of features to suit a variety of company needs and goals....

Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork. You also need to talk about, particularly in the beginning of your agile transition.

Marketing the agile journey of product and engineering to the rest of the organization—and thus getting their buy-in—is a critical success factor to step up the game: You want to become agile, not doing “Agile”.

So, learn more about ten proven stakeholder communications tactics that contribute to making this happen....

Neill said that a number of trends “indicate a move to a more strategic role for internal communication and more dialogue with employees rather than one-way communication.” Those developments include:
• Organizational structural changes. For most companies and organizations that participated in the study, a communications or public relations department leads their internal communications, with human resources professionals collaborating closely.
• Generational shifts. The loss of baby boomers in the workplace means losing years of experience. Millennials have different communication expectations from their employers, such as mobile communication and short messages. Companies and organizations are learning to communicate with brevity and easy access through channels such as internal social media....

The infographic that we put together has some pretty shocking statistics in it, but there are a few common themes. Employees feel overworked, overwhelmed, and they don’t like what they do. Companies are noticing it, with 75% of them saying they can’t attract the right talent, and 83% of them feeling that their employer brand isn’t compelling. Companies that want to fix this need to be smart, and patient.

This doesn’t happen overnight, but like I mentioned, it’s easy to do. Being patient might be the hardest thing for companies, and I understand how frustrating it can be not to see results right away, but it’s important that you invest in this, because the ROI of employee engagement is huge.

Here are 4 simple (and free) things you can do to get that passion back into employees. These are all based on research from Deloitte....

Microsoft already had a public relations crisis on its hands with Thursday's news that it was laying off 18,000 employees. That's 14 percent of its workforce, and the biggest batch of job cuts in the company's nearly 40-year history.

How it's communicating those layoffs to employees doesn't seem to be helping matters. Microsoft published the email from Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's devices unit, to about 12,500 laid-off employees. The lion's share of the employees who are losing jobs come from his department.

The memo begins, "Hello there," ends with "Regards," and is loaded with business jargon. Terms such as "financial envelope," "business continuity," and "right-size our manufacturing operations" are peppered throughout. Worse, it barely makes clear that its recipients have been discharged. It's mostly about the company's new strategy to make and sell Windows phones, which wouldn't seem a primary concern for people who no longer work for Microsoft....

Email gaffes, verbosity, poor grammar, and the inability to read nonverbal cues are among the common plagues of workplace interaction.

Owned media, paid media and earned media have made up the content marketing tripod for a long time, but now the stool has a fourth leg: employed media. Find out how you can give your content effort...

...A while back, I wrote a post on the concept of a Center of Content Excellence — a new discipline and resource charged with propagating the power of content marketing, maintaining standards, and reducing duplication of effort.

Employed media is an important part of any Center of Content Excellence.

The idea is simple: If all sorts of folks in your company would and could use your great content in their interactions with the world, they’d amplify its impact many times over....

There’s a great quote from Confucius:

“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand."

People will more readily help bring to life the changes that they are involved with.

How are you involving your people in the changes that need to be implemented?...

Today, with all the internal communication tools available to a workforce, emailing seems almost primitive. Though many organizations still use email, most are trying to reduce the number of emails sent in favor of a simpler, more efficient form of internal communication. Employees are relying more on intranets or enterprise social networks.

Rio Rancho Public Schools has eliminated routine "all staff" emails, such as weekly school bulletin updates, by posting such important news on the intranet. (Here's the RRPS case study.)

Though you might not be ready to eliminate every "all staff" email and all one-on-one emails, you can improve internal communications with these powerful tools:

It's every manager's responsibility to provide meaningful feedback on a regular basis. And that doesn't mean waiting for the annual review to roll around: Employees that are highly engaged at work receive employee feedback at least once a week.

But giving feedback regularly isn't just beneficial for the employee -- it's beneficial for the team, too. Did you know that receiving feedback can actually inspire your employees to work harder and become more engaged? In fact, 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being better recognized. Employees who receive little or no feedback from their managers tend to disengage from their work more readily....

Though end-of-year bonuses once stood as the gold standard, today's reward programs are more varied and reflect an organization's unique culture and creativity.

From peer-to-peer rewards to gamification and front-row parking spots, reward programs are evolving with the speed of an Internet meme. Your own incentive program plays a key role in driving innovative behavior, so it must serve your business goals while offering an array of aspirational carrots....