Employee brand advocacy amongst SBC '14 attendees.

1. Summer Brand Camp 2014 Ghost Hunting Report

2. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Howdy, Brand Campers!
!
You know what’s scarier than a
campfire ghost story?
!
!
Finding out you’re the ghost.
🌲🌳🌲🌘🔥🍢👻
👻

3. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
1. What makes a 👻 ?
2. The anti-👻.
3. Please stop scaring me: Our 👻 hunting report
4. The Ajax Award: Camp’s Most Corporeal Camper!
5. 👻 busting tips for you and your company.
Are you a 👻?

4. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
In a sea of 1 billion social media users (including
650 million professionals), using résumé jargon
and focusing on you, you, you, can make you
functionally invisible.
Like a 👻.
What makes a 👻.

5. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
The anti-👻 leverages her team to make her
personal brand stand out.
Instead of saying, “I’m passionate about solving
problems,” or worrying about having a “great”
photo, the anti-👻 says, “I run marketing for X” and
uses a photo that will appeal to the people she
serves. She lets her employer’s brand speak for her.
It’s a little trick that can make a big difference.
The anti-👻.

6. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
We looked up and assessed the online profiles
of the 254 people who signed up for Brand
Camp at least two weeks early.
We looked at how this group self-identifies.
We ignored Tweets, status updates, and
ambiguous bumps in the night to ask to ask,
“Is this person more than just another
professional?”
👻’s at the conference?

7. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Our 👻 Report

8. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Employee brand advocacy
# of people with over
80% of available
advocacy points:
8FYI, that’s 3% of you.
total possible points 23
highest score 22
mean score 6.4
mode score
(most common) 0

9. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Few EVPs on our EVP recorder.
1 2
Employee value proposition
Electronic voice phenomenon
1
2
% profiles with
company messaging
in the summary
% profiles free of
résumé jargon (or
similar self-serving
language)
% profiles with
integrated
company /personal
branding
23.2% 10.2% 8.3%

10. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Marketing 19.5%
HR 27.1%
Both / Ambiguous 0.0%
Operations / Neither 25.2%
Restaurant 19.6%
Non-restaurant 27.9%
VP & Above 30.2%
Director, Manager, & Contributor 20.9%
Overall Combined 23.2%
Who had more substance?

11. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
This year’s biggest anti-👻?

12. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Jason Lauritsen,
Ajax Award Winner.
Congrats, Jason, you’re Camp’s
Most Corporeal Camper!
!
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎊🎉
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎊🎉
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎈🎊🎉
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎈🎈🎊🎉
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎉🎈🎊🎉

13. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
We know you’re curious, but there’s no way
we’d post your personal information like that.
So let’s just say this: if you’re worried about
your score, look at your profile and ask if you’d
want to work with yourself.
If no, then change.
“Hey, what was my score?!”

14. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
👻 busting back at work

15. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Your goal is to grow revenues and/or improve
margins.
Use social recruiting and marketing to bring
employees together into these processes.
This creates leverage and makes processes more
sustainable because it aligns with employees’
goals of creating better personal brands, better
relationships, more fun and rewarding work.
Know your goals.

16. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Find your resonance metric.
Workforce
Marketing
Impact
=
Resonance x Reach
Cost x Effort
Making the brand meaningful to
employees makes it easier for them to
share the brand with their networks.
Because employees are up to 6x
more trusted than company
spokespeople (2013 Edelman
Trust Barometer), getting heard
becomes easier.
Reach without resonance?
That’s spam.
Resonance gets employees to
self-identify with the message,
making branding programs
more sustainable and driving
down overall costs.

17. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
The scariest thing a field operator can hear isn’t a
story, it’s this:
“Hi, I’m from corporate, and I’m here to help.”
Assess executive and corporate leaders early.
Make sure they’re walking the walk before they
ask others to do so.
Be leaders, leaders.

18. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Have you taken your employer brand and turned
it into something conversational that employees
can use in real life and on social media?
No? Why not? Who are you, Fight Club?
How can employees engage as advocates if they
can’t easily talk about the brand?!
Make branding actionable.

19. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Marketing gets total strangers with no personal
stake in the brand to become customers, loyalists,
and advocates.
And how many memos does marketing send to
customers?
To create employee brand advocates, recalibrate
internal communications to more opt-in
marketing techniques, less memo.
Bury memos 6 feet under.

20. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Very few of your employees will need social media
training.
If they know why they’re there and believe it’ll
benefit them, they’ll figure it out. (We know,
we’ve been doing this for four years.)
Focus instead on why and how they can leverage
the company brand to their own benefit. Then
stand back.
Activate the right skills.

21. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Afraid that employees will leave to the
competition if you do this?
While this process may put sunlight on a turnover
issue, it won’t create one.
Remember, we’re having them take down online
résumés and replace them with brand statements.
Play through the fear.

22. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Trust the process: case study.
Why it works:
Our opt-in approach modeled exactly
how employees could use company
branding to solve a specific,
important challenge they had. By
solving their problem, the company
solved one of its own.
Ajax was approached by a major oil and gas
company to help it use social media to recruit
more efficiently. (These are not typically
employees who bleed company colors.) Ajax
assessed employee brand ambassadorship and
implemented a 3-step program to engage
employees. We achieved the following:
• Voluntary use of brand messaging up 907%
• Voluntary use of LinkedIn summaries/
current job descriptions up 268%
• Voluntary use of keywords up 85%
• Voluntary use of résumé jargon down 224%
0.0%$
10.0%$
20.0%$
30.0%$
40.0%$
50.0%$
60.0%$
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23. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Even the experts look to us.
The following feedback is from a Fall 2013 program with social-
savvy recruiters:
• 97% of participants reported learning something actionable from
Ajax’s brand advocacy assessment.
• 94% of participants reported better understanding how to use
social media as a business tool.
• 94% of participants reported having taken action or having a
strong intent to act on what they learned.
Our methodologies are rooted in decades of organizational science.
We have been refining them for social business since 2010.

24. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
In short:
we ain’t afraid of no 👻’s,
and you don’t need to be, either.

25. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Lisa Cervenka Jason Seiden
lisa@ajaxwm.com jason@ajaxwm.com
!
Ajax Workforce Marketing is an branding agency
focused on employee brand advocacy.
We get employees and companies working
together to tell a consistent story about what life
at the company is like.
Your 👻 busters:

26. Employees, Brands, & 👻 Stories
Thank you!
When people communicate well, amazing
things happen. We work with clients to help
them unleash the persuasive potential of all
their employees.
We identify the essence of what an enterprise
stands for, work to make everyone in the
company feel ownership of it, show
employees how advocacy benefits them as
individuals, and create a path for their
aggregated efforts to benefit the organization
upon whose profits they depend.
In the end, employees are empowered to do
more amazing things, and their efforts
become the foundation for a more
sustainable, effective, and strategic employer
brand.
Payroll is an investment you’ve already made.
Be sure the return is all it can be.
-Jason Seiden