employee advocacy
If you want to set up an ambassador program, you are working on a – sometimes big – behavioral change among employees. You also need a long breath to make it a success. How do you tackle that?
The most important condition for an ambassador program is a culture that radiates trust, in which people themselves retain freedom and responsibility for their online behavior and the consequences that this entails. Lam, on the other hand, does advise establishing a number of social media guidelines. These can provide employees with a framework and a foothold. As an organization, you should then leave the implementation of these guidelines to the employees themselves. This therefore also requires complete trust in your employees.
However, I would like to make a side note. Because in my view, not all employees need (and can) take on the role of brand ambassador. Not everyone is familiar with social media, and not everyone can learn it. There can also be too much noise from well-meaning colleagues who still do not know how to find the right tone (or content). So brazil whatsapp number list be very careful when selecting potential brand ambassadors!
Employee advocacy in practice: RVO.nl
In his book, Lam advises to give the ambassador program an attractive name, so that people will talk about the program internally. For example, at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO.nl) we use the program Smarp under the name 'RVOfan'. We have been doing this since May 2017, when we were the first Dutch government organization to successfully start an employee advocacy program with a select group of employees. The official launch followed in October 2017.
The program ultimately led to additional growth in reach and interaction with our target group. In less than a year, more than 29,000 messages were shared (own content and third-party content). This led to almost 47,000 unique clicks and more than 26,000 likes, retweets and reactions. Ultimately, the program yielded an estimated media value of almost 80,000 euros.
Learnings
What did we at RVO.nl encounter during the rollout of our employee advocacy program? I do have a few tips for all organizations that will soon be following the same path.