Companies that use social media know that brand advocacy is one of the most valuable business drivers. Advocates, especially ones that discover products or services through organic methods—word of mouth, for example—are far more credible than traditional advertising methods, have an extensive social reach, and give useful feedback around product and service improvements. A great amount of effort goes into creating and nurturing relationships with customers in the hope that they will become brand evangelists. But companies often overlook the most obvious potential advocates: their own employees.
Download the white paper Putting Social to Work for Your Business: Organizational Models for Scaling Social and learn to recognize brand advocates through these signifiers:
- Investment in your brand’s success
- Willingness to defend your company
- Alignment with your core objectives
Once identified, how do enterprises empower those employees to become their strongest advocates? The white paper will lay out how organizations can adopt social media across teams, departments, and business units using two models:
- Empowerment: Encouraging employees to take initiative on social media backed by technical and procedural infrastructure, as well as standardized education and training.
- Containment: The surest path to social media success for regulated industries, emphasizing security and control.
These two different approaches to the same goal of bringing more employees onto social media on behalf of the company. Each model makes a set of trade-offs between freedom and safety, and initiative and supervision. By giving employees opportunities to use their own voices on multiple social media channels within the enterprise, you build the foundations for the most powerful brand advocates of all.
Find out how to create a secure, flexible, and unified environment for social communications that mitigates the risks of employee-driven brand advocacy. From there, you create trust within your organization as well as with your audience.