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It’s All About the Tech: Employee Advocacy Tools

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Employee advocacy programs are like untapped marketing gold that can help build brand awareness and even drive revenue to your company. To ramp one up successfully, consider using one of the many tools that can put your employees to work for your brand, and measure the success of their efforts.

First, though, are you familiar with employee advocacy programs? Employee advocacy programs help humanize business by putting employees front and center to act as ambassadors for the solutions you offer, as well as to highlight—and boast about—your company’s culture.

And why should you consider using an employee advocacy program? Because it makes sense: It can significantly set your company apart from its competitors. According to LinkedIn research, only 3 percent of employees share content about their businesses, but those shares are responsible for driving a 30 percent increase in the total engagement a company sees!

Giving your employees the green light and the resources to speak on behalf of your brand can boost engagement and drive exposure about the company’s offerings. If your employees are already posting on social media or sharing thoughts for an employer brand video, that’s a great start. But you can really elevate your employee advocacy program by using the right technology.

Give Your Program a Tech Boost

Investing in employee advocacy software can have a positive effect on your overall marketing efforts. No matter which tool you choose, you should look for the following key features:

  • The ability to create your own content feeds so you can curate articles, company news and announcements, and other valuable industry insights, all in one place
  • Connectivity to the major social media platforms to make it straightforward and seamless for your employees to share content in just a couple of clicks
  • Integration with the other technology platforms your team is already using (i.e., Salesforce, Yammer)
  • A mobile-friendly site/app so that your staff can post and share on the go
  • A strong analytics component so you can track and measure results

Here are a few popular employee advocacy platforms designed to help you manage, monitor, and measure the brand messaging that your employees are sharing with the world:

Trapit

  • Description: “A social selling and employee advocacy platform.”
  • Cool feature: Marketing teams can provide pre-approved content and messaging, and detailed reports show which employees and what content items are producing results.

Sociabble

  • Description: “A content aggregator that boosts social media visibility, lead generation, and recruitment, while at the same time acting as a one-stop information hub.”
  • Cool feature: A gamification element gives users points for sharing and content creation, and allows staffers to compete in challenges.

EveryoneSocial

  • Description: “An employee enablement platform designed to help your employees become powerful brand ambassadors.”
  • Cool feature: Easily approve any content to add to the feed while browsing the internet, even from mobile devices.

Hootsuite Amplify

  • Description: “An employee advocacy solution that makes it safe and easy for your workforce to share approved social content with their friends and followers.”
  • Cool feature: Promote important campaigns by sending emails to staff asking them to share specific posts.

Post Beyond

  • Description: “Bridges the gaps in workforce communications systems to deliver a modern work experience and engage your employee advocates.”
  • Cool feature: They have a cool employee advocacy ROI calculator to help you determine the earned media value of the program.

As I’ve said before, the power of employee advocates is unlimited, and it dovetails beautifully into the new perception of work as an investment not only in hours but in engagement. And, analytics really crystallize the power of this synergy between employer and employee. In other words, employee advocacy software can help you energize your staff to become your company’s biggest cheerleaders, as well as fine- tune the messaging and distribution by measuring the results.

Photo Credit: fugenx_technology Flickr via Compfight cc

This article was first published on Converge.xyz

Shine Your HR Tech Talent Torch Even Brighter

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Lately there has been a lot of noise about the rapid rise of technology in HR, and its impact on the traditionally very human face of recruitment. Conjectures fill the webisphere on whether or not HR Tech will ever completely replace human-driven hiring and recruiting altogether, some are drawing such parallels between the relationship of HR to new tech as akin to that of the traditional job search to the emergence of the ole Internet itself.

But tech’s scope and speed should be no-brainers by now. Tools like automated outreach turn recruiting into a constant, global two-way street. The oft-cited LinkedIn and similar networking sites have mastered this kind of passive recruiting, enhancing a company’s visibility at the same time as they uncover possibly ideal candidates: company and brand X, meet candidate Y; candidate Y, meet company and brand X. It’s becoming enough of a norm in our world that we’ve stopped seeing this as a novel innovation, but about five minutes ago, it was.

Now, smartified candidate-tailored active recruiting is close on its heels, with new talent outreach and on boarding systems being developed that can locate prospects based on far more than a checklist of education and experience criteria. These methods are designed to be stratified and fluid, create a kind of built in “decision tree” that dovetails outreach, analytics and data with human input and decision making.

The point is: whether or not tech will ever take over HR entirely is, well, beside the point. Tech is a medium; a tool; and savvy companies need to take advantage of it to gain strategic position. A 2014 survey on HR Service Delivery and Technology. found that a third of companies plan to increase their investment in HR tech this year, which means that two-thirds of the companies surveyed may wind up in the dark.

Among the hottest areas of investment were:

  • Talent Management Services
  • Mobile Access Services
  • Cloud-based software-as-a-service systems

About That Survey

Another area of investment growth the Towers Watson study notes is in HR data and workforce analytics. With the far greater scope and reach of HR tech-generated campaigns, Old Hat has a new bang. Among the various data sources HR organizations are now mining, according to the study, are employee engagement surveys. Their effectiveness now upped exponentially with a dose of tech, those same little sleepy surveys that floated onto employees’ desk (and were tackled, unenthusiastically, during 4 pm lulls) are now powerful treasure troves of usable data.

Employee engagement surveys now provide invaluable insights that play a key role in corporate planning, according to half of the companies who surveyed their employees at least every two years. One third of respondents reported that the results of employee engagement surveys will have a substantial role in their organization’s direction and strategy. Tech has made the old new.

Dive In

There’s an endless race for talent going on in the world of work. And clearly, technology’s presence in HR and talent acquisition is not a question of when, or even if. Tech is here to facilitate HR, as we ask it to: We’d best be involved on the ground floor and making sure it facilitates our needs and goals.

HR’s role in tech, from the initial search to recruitment, from training to bringing new recruits up to speed, is what will turn the vast potential of a technology into a competitive advantage. Its effectiveness, in terms of functionality that supports an organization, is a matter of tailoring and customization. That means getting in the pool. To help shape tech to your best advantage, recruitment needs to make sure it’s involved in the process from the start.

Scott Klososky, founding partner of Future Point of View, a tech consulting firm in Edmond, Oklahoma, recently underscored this, saying that HR professionals should become more educated on technology to stay relevant and competitive. From upper management workshops on how to link up leadership and technology to frequent consults with IT and business and marketing analysts, the more closely HR can be involved, the better.

A version of this post was first published on Forbes.