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Cracking the Enterprise Social Media Nut
The document discusses the importance of modern communication strategies for companies, emphasizing employee advocacy and technology integration to enhance engagement and productivity. It outlines Softchoice's challenges in communication and their objectives to activate employees with effective tools, resulting in significant earned media and engagement growth. Additionally, it highlights key performance indicators and the impact of their new advocacy platform, Echo, showcasing impressive metrics since its launch.
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Cracking the Enterprise Social Media Nut
- 2. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch WhyCompany Communications And Employee Advocacy Matter Now More Than Ever
- 3. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch TheProblem Facing Today’s Global Enterprises Technology has changed the way we communicate, internally and externally When companies communicate with employees in a way that mirrors how we all interact in our everyday lives, employees will do the same when they engage with customers. MOBILE SOCIAL LOCAL VIDEO
- 4. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch WhyCompanies Must Evolve Companies that transform the way they communicate will have more connected and informed employees. Those that fail to adapt to a modern method of communications face a disconnected workforce, struggling to engage consumers. This costs the company time and money. 74% of employees feel that they're missing out on company information and news. (Gallup)
- 5. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Whatchallenges has Softchoice faced?
- 6. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch ChallengesSoftchoice Faced We had no single platform to: • Curate the best content from Softchoice and partners • Point employees to relevant content • Measure our employee’s efforts to generate leads We were not rewarding our best advocates to do more Marketing needs to make it easier for sales Sales needs to help Marketing do marketing!
- 7. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Howdid you get started with employee advocacy?
- 8. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Vision& Objectives Activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. SALES • One destination to find, read and share content • Bring to life how we unleash potential for customers • Delivers reward and recognition • Improves personal + team Social Selling Index (SSI) Key objective: Deliver Insights
- 9. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Vision& Objectives Activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. MARKETING • One destination to curate and publish content • Help sales connect to a larger purpose • Measure the impact of social media on driving awareness • Scale & amplify our thought-leadership efforts Key objective: Generate Leads
- 10. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Vision& Objectives Activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. CULTURE + TALENT • One destination to publish and share current openings • Set a tone of optimism as a destination workplace • Reinforce our status as great place to work • Empower all employees to help create a winning team Key objective: Recruitment + Retention
- 11. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Howdid you choose the right technology partner?
- 12. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch ChoosingThe Right Technology Available in multiple languages for global employees Single Sign-On for ease of access Mobile-First experience for employees CRM Integration
- 13. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Pointin Time Snapshot: Comparing The Available Solutions OPTION A OPTION B Professional Training ✅ ✅ ✅ Gamification ✅ Marketing dashboards ✅ ✅ ✅ Mobile app ✅ ✅ ✅ Desktop app via browser ✅ ✅ Audience Segmentation Limited ✅ Audience contributions ✅ ✅ Personalized content by Team ✅ Office 365 Integration ✅ Dynamics CRM integration Limited ✅ Native sharing ✅ Auto-scheduling based on best time ✅ Different share copy to improve clicks ✅ Google Analytics integration TBD ✅ ✅ Custom branding ✅ SSO/SAML ✅ French UI ✅ Push notification broadcasts ✅ main differentiator simplicity Most robust platform Siloed Ecosystem main weakness Mobile only for sales Another destination to manage No SSO
- 14. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Howdid you organize and set up the program for success?
- 15. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch MappingOut the Launch of the Program Pre Launch Branding Pre-Launch Member Planning Pre-Launch Content Planning Pre-Launch Engagement & Gamification Manager Training LAUNCH
- 16. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch BrandingThe Program Create a platform of your own that your employees feel comfortable with:
- 17. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Whatdata was important to track and what were the results?
- 18. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch KeyPerformance Indicators Platform Usage & Culture Integration How easy is the platform is to use Sharing & Internal Engagement How active are our ambassadors with the platform and content External Engagement How the platform drives external engagement with Softchoice content
- 19. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch TheData We Track (Weeks 0-2)
- 20. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch ResultsFrom the Launch of Echo Early results with 50 Employees over 4 week period: PLATFORM USAGE & CULTURE INTEGRATION SHARING & CONTENT EXTERNAL ENGAGEMENT 75% of ALL users were “active” 66% feel the value of Echo as part of social selling toolkit is very good to excellent 70% feel the value of Echo is very good to excellent 94% would continue using it if business invested 97% are now more aware of Softchoice-based reasons to share via social 925,000 impressions 2,075 clicks 822 reactions 23% indicated they created meaningful business engagement $12,000 Earned Media (CPM) $20,000 Earned Media (CPC) Average of 31 shares/person 41% growth in daily sharing 1,444 shares by initial launch group 2 point overall increase in team SSI 31,000 points awarded 86% felt an increase in perceived value around marketing content Top 5 best-performing posts was Softchoice-created content One day of activity drove over 1,100 video views
- 21. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Wheredid you succeed? And what are you wanting to improve?
- 22. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch RatingOurselves Done Well Do Better Program planning and launch (including branding) Canada vs US Softchoice content Softchoice content Submission guidelines and notifications Earned media value Getting all Managers engaged & involved Gamification Capping points Variations of status updates
- 23. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Howhas the program scaled?
- 24. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch WhatEmployee Advocacy at Softchoice looks like today Generated $1MM+ EARNED MEDIA since inception EVERY EMPLOYEE at Softchoice has access to Echo Quarterly USAGE CAMPAIGN to drive adoption Moving towards using it for INTERNAL COMMS INTEGRATING with all our marketing activities
- 25. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch OurTechnology Stack for Social Selling + Employee Advocacy
- 26. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch DynamicSignal Works With The World’s Leading Companies
- 27. #DySiWebinar @schnitzelboy @PHanleyTouch Learnmore at dynamicsignal.com Explore other webinars on demand, ebooks and videos THANKS!
Editor's Notes
- #7 Our problem statement was pretty simple – and likely shared with other organizations. We had a variety of different places for people to go to find – and share – content that mattered to our customers. We suffered from content sprawl. A little bit of internal blogs, a little bit of email, internal social networks, you name it – we tried it. We talk a lot at Softchoice about creating great content for our customers and employees, and curating great stuff too. We don’t always have to create something, if our vendor partners have done a good job already. The trick was curating all that content in a meaningful, easy way for our employees to browse it. We also had now way of knowing the impact our employees were having on demand and lead generation when they shared via social media. We knew people were sharing – we just didn’t have any meaningful way to report back to the business. More importantly – because we knew people were sharing (we saw their mentions, or were connected personally with them on social), we didn’t have any meaningful way to recognize these folks for helping us scale and amplify our marketing communications. In a nutshell – we knew in our hearts that marketing needed it to make it easier for sales to find the best content that will earn them the right to have more engaging and insightful conversations with customers and prospects – AND we needed sales to help us help them by using the great content marketing provided – and do some marketing!
- #9 We started by creating a vision for what employee advocacy looked like for Softchoice – which was easy, since it was an evolution of our vision for social media in the Enteprise. Our vision was to activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. We really wanted to figure out a way to leverage our network of networks – we figured that if everyone at Softchoice had access to a common tool and shared via social for work, we’d have regular access to over a million connections – people – via social media. When we started to further define what bringing that vision of Employee Advocacy to life looks like, we looked through three different and equally important lenses: Sales, Marketing and Culture/Talent. From a sales perspective, how do we create one single place to point people that’s easy to use? How do we bring to life our unique insights that help customers change their perspectives about the role technology plays in their organizations? How do we tap into the competitive nature of sales, and reward and recognize them for sharing via social? And lastly, Softchoice has invested heavily in providing our sales teams with the best social selling tools in the business. One of the things we looked at was how do we improve an individuals – and their teams – overall social selling index, a linkedin measurement that reports on how effectively the a person or team uses their LinkedIn Sales Navigator account to create engagement. From a marketing perspective, the same starting point. How do we create a single place to make it easy for sales to find interesting, timely, and perspective-changing marketing content? How do we help sales discover insights they can use to surprise and delight their customers or prospects with? How do we finally get sales to notice all the work marketing is doing on their behalf? How can we effectively and easily measure – and report – on the the impact all this social sharing is having on driving brand awareness and driving leads for the organization? And finally – from a culture and talent perspective, how do we once again create a simple, easy place to help all our employees share our consistent drumbeat of job openings? We know we’re in a war for talent – as the saying goes, great people know great people – so so how could we enable all our people to refer the best and the brightest in the industry? And just as importantly, how do we give our current employees a sense of pride in Softchoice, and showcase the fact that we are one of the best places to work on the planet? We believe in the power of technology as an enabling force, And so we began the process of finding the right technology platform to bring our vision to life!
- #10 We started by creating a vision for what employee advocacy looked like for Softchoice – which was easy, since it was an evolution of our vision for social media in the Enteprise. Our vision was to activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. We really wanted to figure out a way to leverage our network of networks – we figured that if everyone at Softchoice had access to a common tool and shared via social for work, we’d have regular access to over a million connections – people – via social media. When we started to further define what bringing that vision of Employee Advocacy to life looks like, we looked through three different and equally important lenses: Sales, Marketing and Culture/Talent. From a sales perspective, how do we create one single place to point people that’s easy to use? How do we bring to life our unique insights that help customers change their perspectives about the role technology plays in their organizations? How do we tap into the competitive nature of sales, and reward and recognize them for sharing via social? And lastly, Softchoice has invested heavily in providing our sales teams with the best social selling tools in the business. One of the things we looked at was how do we improve an individuals – and their teams – overall social selling index, a linkedin measurement that reports on how effectively the a person or team uses their LinkedIn Sales Navigator account to create engagement. From a marketing perspective, the same starting point. How do we create a single place to make it easy for sales to find interesting, timely, and perspective-changing marketing content? How do we help sales discover insights they can use to surprise and delight their customers or prospects with? How do we finally get sales to notice all the work marketing is doing on their behalf? How can we effectively and easily measure – and report – on the the impact all this social sharing is having on driving brand awareness and driving leads for the organization? And finally – from a culture and talent perspective, how do we once again create a simple, easy place to help all our employees share our consistent drumbeat of job openings? We know we’re in a war for talent – as the saying goes, great people know great people – so so how could we enable all our people to refer the best and the brightest in the industry? And just as importantly, how do we give our current employees a sense of pride in Softchoice, and showcase the fact that we are one of the best places to work on the planet? We believe in the power of technology as an enabling force, And so we began the process of finding the right technology platform to bring our vision to life!
- #11 We started by creating a vision for what employee advocacy looked like for Softchoice – which was easy, since it was an evolution of our vision for social media in the Enteprise. Our vision was to activate every employee with the right tools and incentives to scale and amplify the Softchoice brand. We really wanted to figure out a way to leverage our network of networks – we figured that if everyone at Softchoice had access to a common tool and shared via social for work, we’d have regular access to over a million connections – people – via social media. When we started to further define what bringing that vision of Employee Advocacy to life looks like, we looked through three different and equally important lenses: Sales, Marketing and Culture/Talent. From a sales perspective, how do we create one single place to point people that’s easy to use? How do we bring to life our unique insights that help customers change their perspectives about the role technology plays in their organizations? How do we tap into the competitive nature of sales, and reward and recognize them for sharing via social? And lastly, Softchoice has invested heavily in providing our sales teams with the best social selling tools in the business. One of the things we looked at was how do we improve an individuals – and their teams – overall social selling index, a linkedin measurement that reports on how effectively the a person or team uses their LinkedIn Sales Navigator account to create engagement. From a marketing perspective, the same starting point. How do we create a single place to make it easy for sales to find interesting, timely, and perspective-changing marketing content? How do we help sales discover insights they can use to surprise and delight their customers or prospects with? How do we finally get sales to notice all the work marketing is doing on their behalf? How can we effectively and easily measure – and report – on the the impact all this social sharing is having on driving brand awareness and driving leads for the organization? And finally – from a culture and talent perspective, how do we once again create a simple, easy place to help all our employees share our consistent drumbeat of job openings? We know we’re in a war for talent – as the saying goes, great people know great people – so so how could we enable all our people to refer the best and the brightest in the industry? And just as importantly, how do we give our current employees a sense of pride in Softchoice, and showcase the fact that we are one of the best places to work on the planet? We believe in the power of technology as an enabling force, And so we began the process of finding the right technology platform to bring our vision to life!
- #13 When I started my search, there were 43 various tools that claimed to do a lot of what I was looking for. As a wanna-be six sigma consultant, I created a short-list of features that were must-haves, and based on that, I picked what I felt were three of the best options for us to properly evaluate.
- #14 So while this is a bit of an eye chart, it gives you a sense of point-in-time view of some of the key attributes and functionality that we needed. I’ll draw your attention to a few notable examples. Gamification was a big deal for us – we knew if we were going to influence and change behavior, we needed to make reward and recognition real for people. While mobile is obviously key – for our organization, have the ability to access the platform via a big browser was crucial. Not everyone at Softchoice relies on their phones, and only have an mobile-based experience to offer our employees was not ideal. We wanted to create a unique and distinct experience for our employees – and the other two contenders seemed more interested in helping build their brand, than ours – so being able to create something that distinctly looks and feels like Softchoice was important. As a large organization, we needed to make sure we supported our employees with a simple way to access the tool – we wouldn’t look at a solution that we couldn’t manage through our single-sign-on platform. Lastly – we have a large presence in Quebec, where we have a commitment and requirement to provide our employees with a French-language experience is crucial. So having a technology partner that enabled this out of the box was important. Clearly – based on our requirements, one provider stood out from the rest. And that’s when we took our plan to the next stage, and crafted a 4-week pilot program to prove the power of employee advocacy at Softchoice.
- #16 The first thing we did was build a proper workback to keep my Softchoice team - and the Dynamic Signal team – accountable. We then began a couple of critical activities. The first thing we did was build out the plan for the pilot – and coming up with a uniquely softchoice brand that we would start socializing. We then started to figure out who would participate. It just so happened that we had a group of people perfectly suited for our program. Softchoice is growing aggressively, and big part of our growth strategy includes several geo-specific sales teams. So we looked to them as our guinea pigs. We then started to figure out the right type of content – and where it will come from – to populate our tool. Dynamic Signal’s platform makes it really easy to assign and reward points, so we spent a fair amount of time discussing the best way to value various activities. Lastly – we spent a lot of time getting the leaders of these specific teams fired up, and trained on both the benefit to the company, and the benefits to their team, if they use the platform successfully. We didn’t launch the pilot to the entire organization – we kept it small and manageable. It turns out there was another benefit to this approach – we created a lot of demand for access to the tool when the peers of our sales rep participants saw they had access to something that made their jobs easier. So by creating scarcity, we created demand.
- #17 As I mentioned, we really wanted to create something unique and distinctly ours. And so we white labelled – or branded - the platform Echo. This made it a lot easier to communicate and market internally. We refer to ourselves at Softchoice as Orange Nation. That, and the fact we knew we needed an easy, memorable way to pitch the idea, led us to the tagline “your daily source for orange nation news”. And so we launched our pilot to just over 50 people in 7 teams across North America!
- #19 In terms of how we wanted to measure our success with the pilot, and ultimately make a formal business case to our executive team to invest in a platform like this, we looked at three buckets of KPIs. Platform usage & culture Integration, so we understand how easy the platform is to use. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, if this thing isn’t easy, folks ain’t gonna use it. We assessed this via good ole fashioned pre- and post-usage surveys. Sharing & Engagement, so we can understand how active the ambassadors are with the platform. We looked at behaviour things– what was the frequency of posting/sharing content via echo? How did their SSI change – if at all? External Engagement, to understand how the platform drives external engagement with Softchoice content. What kind of engagement did they drive through clicks and reactions? What was our earned media estimation? What it would have cost to buy the reach instead of relying on employee shares? What percentage of social media referral traffic and clicks to Softchoice content?
- #20 This gives you a quick snapshot of what our scorecard looked like, how we tracked performance across our three KPI segments….
- #21 So as I talked about earlier, in addition to the baked in scorecarding features of the Dynamic Signal platforn, we used some basic survey functionality on our end to gauge the before and after perceptions of our pilot participants, and our overall performance. There’s a few highlights I’ll draw your attention to: Nearly 100% of our pilot participants were more aware of softchoice-based reasons to share via social media for work. This was huge for us. From a marketing perspective, we also saw a huge uptick in the percevied value of content of the content marketing provides. If you recall, one of our problem statements was how do we make it easier for sales to use our marketing content – so this was also very encouraging. If they were now aware of more softchoice-based reasons to share, and their perception of the value has improved, we’re well on the way to make a big difference. Lastly – some cold hard numbers. Based on the averages we were seeing in the paid media we were buying, using equivalent numbers, our pilot generated $12,000 in CPM, and $20,000 in CPC. This was also a big deal for us, and demonstrated the financial impact of employee advocacy.
- #23 Done well: Program planning and launch (including branding) – process went well – from beginning to end. We created something that is uniquely Softchoice, and has become baked into our culture. Pilot members felt informed and engaged, and we had accountability up and down the pilot team to drive the results we were after. Softchoice content – the top 5 most shared pieces of content were softchoice-created – which was just great to see. If you’re curious, the mix of softchoice created content versus curated content from external sources was about 1 to 4 – or 20% of our overall content. Earned media value – as mentioned, this was an unexpected and delightful thing to see, and made our business case that much easier Gamification – we spent a good deal of time celebrating – and had some fun with some light public shaming – for pilot participants through the built-in leaderboards Do better: Canada vs US Softchoice content – this might be unique to us, but is relevant for any organization with unique groups or divisions. We got a lot of requests during the pilot for more geo-specific material Submission guidelines and notifications – we definitely could have don a better job with socializing what makes for a good submission – something we’ve taken to heart as the program fully developed post-pilot Getting all Managers engaged & involved – while some managers were really fired up – some weren’t – and the results showed it. The top performing teams in the pilot had managers who were role-modelling, and using Echo. Capping points – this is something frankly we’re still working on – we’re still looking to strike the right balance of rewarding people for submitting content, and too much content. We have some users who submit lots and lots, which makes curating and approving all the content tricky at times. Variations of status updates – this was something we noticed early on – it looks like our team was using a tool for social sharing. So while we encourage employees to customize their messages, we do provide different flavors now to make it look a lot less automated.
- #25 I’m pleased to say that our pilot – and our business case – was successful, and actually scaled beyond the scope I originally envisioned. Today, every employee at Softchoice – over 1,600 of us – has access to Echo. We run quarterly campaign to drive adoption – this is particularly important as we bring new employees on board. Since we began using the platform last year, we’ve earned over $1MM+ in earned media. We’re in the early stagesa of using Echo for all internal communications too – replacing emails and internal blogs that fewer and fewer people are reading. Lastly, we’re also integrating with our marketing activities. We’ve recently transitioned to a new CRM platform, and we’re making sure that when our people generate leads via social media, we’re able to track that down to the platform and status update, in order to help us understand which program vehicles and tactics work best to drive demand and create leads.
- #26 I mentioned earlier that Softchoice invests heavily in the training and development of our staff to constantly improve our teams’ competencies. What you’re looking at here is the core of our (what we like to believe) best-of-breed social selling toolkit. Our reps are able to use tools like RainKing to discover hi-propensity prospects in their local markets. They then can use Sales Navigator to learn more about the various contacts at those accounts, and use the tools at their disposal to create highly-informed acquisition outreach strategies. Lastly – now with Echo, they’re able to create a regular drumbeat of content they know is relevant to their customers and prospects based on what they’ve uncovered in RainKing and LinkedIn.