The document discusses how some large companies are implementing employee advocacy programs to help their messaging be heard. It provides examples of how companies like Gap, Target, AT&T, and others have launched successful programs. Specifically, it discusses how AT&T trained thousands of employees to be advocates in just two minutes per day through an engaging video that covered the key points of the program in a simple way.

1. The Innovator’s Guide
to Employee Advocacy:
LESSONS FROM 5
FORTUNE 200 BRANDS

2. Innovative marketing and communications leaders are all dealing with the
same problem: how can their message get heard above all the other noise?
Top brands and hot start-ups that are succeeding in today’s always on world have discovered
a solution: Employee Advocacy. According to Forbes, the majority of Fortune 1000 companies
will implement an Employee Advocacy platform within the next one to two years. It stands to
reason, if a brand can engage their employees with brand content and even more — inspire
them to share that content — they grow their business too.
2Abstract
Real examples and results from
Fortune 200 brands, such as Gap,
Target, AT&T, and more!
Specific steps so you can execute
your Employee Advocacy goals
faster and better.
How to get in touch with experts to
gain Employee Advocacy strategy
and solutions specific to your brand
READ THIS
EBOOK
TO LEARN:
Abstract
Intro: Employee Engagement in
the Virtual Era
How the Corporate Communications
Leaders at Gap, Inc. Achieved Executive
Buy-in
Nestlé Purina’s Secrets for Recruiting the
Best Employee Advocacy Test Group
How AT&T Trained Thousands of
Employee Advocates in Just 2
Minutes a Day
Target’s Winning Strategy to
Launching and Scaling Employee
Advocacy to Thousands
What Makes Microsoft Dynamics’
Employee Advocates Engage Everyday
Conclusion: What Your Employees
Need to Know Today and Tomorrow
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What’s Inside

3. 3Intro
Intro: Employee Engagement in the Virtual Era
Innovative marketing and communications leaders are all dealing with the same
problem: how can their message get heard above all the other noise?
Top brands that are succeeding in today’s always-on world have discovered a solution: Employee Advocacy.
According to Forbes, the majority of Fortune 1000 companies will implement an Employee Advocacy platform
within the next one to two years. It stands to reason, if a brand can engage their employees with brand content
and even more — inspire them to share that content — they grow their business too.
To do this, innovative communications leaders at Fortune 200 brands, like Gap, Target, AT&T and more are rising
above the noise and engaging their employees with Employee Advocacy programs. In return, their employees
are report higher levels of engagement with the brand from consuming and sharing brand, while also becom-
ing thought leaders by sharing relevant third party industry information. By simply providing employees with a
one-stop shop to access relevant company and industry news and information, these brands engage their employees
wherever they are. Employee Advocacy is the next step in employee engagement for the virtual era.
This ebook won’t tell you why Employee Advocacy
is important — you already know that.
Instead, be prepared to learn how groundbreaking Employee Advocacy programs
were launched to thousands of employees at Fortune 200 brands and how Employee
Advocacy has forever changed the way these brands will engage employees.

4. Lesson 1: How to Secure Executive Buy-In
4Lesson 1
How the Corporate Communications Leaders at Gap, Inc. Achieved Executive Buy-in
Chances are, the employees at your company are already active online, seeking out relevant industry content
and sharing about their brand on social media. Research from Gallup shows, 50% of employees share about their
company on social media — without any encouragement or training. So, why not harness employees’ power to
share? This is exactly what Sonia Fiorenza, previously the Sr. Director of Digital Communications at Gap, Inc. asked
the executive team at Gap when she pitched the employee advocacy program to them and won the approval for
her team to launch the initiative to the entire company.
Said Fiorenza, “We found [at Gap] that all employees — not just marketing — were thrilled to
have the opportunity to help the company by advocating for the brand on social media.” But
first, the executive team needed to get onboard and set an example for employees.
Here are the two steps Fiorenza took to get all Employee Advocacy stakeholders
excited about the program:
Show them the data: Focus on research and data to achieve executive buy-in for the employee advocacy
program, advises Fiorenza. Information, such as how many employees are already sharing and what other
brands have been able to achieve, will win over leadership.
Partner with human resources and legal early: At Gap, Fiorenza brought human resources and legal into the
conversation early-on. She recognized that they were key stakeholders in the program and could advocate
for it’s launch once they had a full understanding of how it would modernize company policies (especially for
social media), and support employees. “At Gap, our legal team even became our program’s biggest advocates
internally because we involved them early,” said Fiorenza. achieve, will win over leadership.
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5. Gap was able to see early success in their Employee Advocacy program because of
leadership’s full support. Employees were motivated to share about their brand and felt
more connected to the company. Said Fiorenza, “Gap employees are excited to have their
social media posts recognized and retweeted by their brand! It’s the top way to thank
them for their engagement.”
5Lesson 1
To find out more, hear from Sonia Fiorenza herself in the webinar:
Proven Employee Advocacy Secrets from Global Fortune 2000 Social Media Directors
WATCH IT HERE

6. Lesson 2: How to Recruit the Best Test Group
6Lesson 2
Nestlé Purina’s Secrets for Recruiting the Best Employee Advocacy Test Group
Here are the 4 steps that Nestlé Purina took to
launch their Employee Advocacy test group.
Recruit test group participants: The best test group
participants for your Employee Advocacy program
should come from departments that are already
active on social media — like marketing and PR —
as well as key stakeholders such as legal and HR.
By including these key stakeholders, said Lee, she
was able to ensure their support for the program.
Train employees in-person: “We trained the small
test group in person,” said Lee, “This helped
employees feel safe and comfortable when sharing
about the brand on social media.”
Provide a variety of content to test: SocialChorus
and Purina partnered to strategize on the type of
content to provide employees for the program
test. Said Lee, “You have to provide brand content
that employees will feel comfortable sharing and
that is varied so they aren’t spamming their
social networks.”
Set test program goals and track results: Purina was
delighted to see the 40 employees in the socially-
active test group sharing at least two to three times
a week. This gave them enough data to test which
content was the most engaging, and which days had
the highest employee engagement. Said Lee, “I track
results in the platform every week.”
When Laura Lee, Social Media and Corporate Communications Manager at Nestlé Purina, decided to
launch an Employee Advocacy program at Purina, she decided to start out by testing the program with
the most social media-savvy employees. Says Lee, “At Purina, we are all about testing and learning. I
found about 40 people who I knew were either creating content for our brand or who were already
active on social media.”
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7. The Employee Advocacy test group
The Employee Advocacy test group enabled Lee to gather the
data and feedback she needed. Said Lee, “We were able to take
the learnings from the Employee Advocacy test group and get
the program ready to scale to all employees with much success.”
To find out more, listen to our webinar recording,
Unleash Your Advocates: Nestlé Purina Shares the Secrets to Training Emplyee Advocates
WATCH IT HERE

8. WATCH THE VIDEO AND
SEE FOR YOURSELF:
8Lesson 3
Lesson 3: How to Quickly Train Employees
How AT&T Trained Thousands of Employee Advocates in Just 2 Minutes a Day
AT&T has thousands of employees who are trained to speak on behalf of their brand online. They
make up AT&T’s Employee Advocacy program, the AT&T Social Circle. How did AT&T train thousands
without breaking the bank or taking up all of their employees’ time going over the ins and outs of so-
cial media? Believe it or not, they accomplished this feat by creating a fun, engaging and simple video
that only takes two minutes to watch.
Video: Join Our Social Circle!
Here are the seven important
points that AT&T covers that
every employee advocate will
need to know:
What is the program about? The narrator begins
by describing what AT&T Social Circle is and why it
matters to the employee.
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How can employees get started? Next, AT&T covers
the vital but simple step of telling employees how to
connect their social media accounts to the platform.
Very important, now the employees can share.
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WATCH IT HERE

9. What safety measures do employees need to know? AT&T makes sure to mention that employees
need to include the program’s hashtag (#ATTEmployees) so it’s clear to their social networks that
they are sharing on behalf of their brand.
Can employees customize their posts? Yes, AT&T makes sure to encourage employees to use
their own voice to share with on social media.
Can they say anything?! AT&T reminds employees very simply (to make it easy to remember)
exactly what information they can’t share (such as financial information). Most of this is common
sense and employees only want to share content from the platform. We call that “freedom within a
framework.”
How should employees handle negative social media posts? AT&T makes it very clear that their
employees should just ignore any negativity said about the brand on social media. They have pro-
fessionals who are trained specifically to respond to complaints.
Where can employees ask questions? AT&T provides employees resources where they can access
more information or even contact someone who can answer their question.
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Can you believe they cover all that in just two minutes? Consult your professional
Twitter-experts to come up with short and engaging training content that covers all the bases, but
doesn’t take up too much of your new Employee Advocacy members’ time.
READ IT HERE
Want to learn more about how to train employee advocate?
Take a look at our ebook, How to Train Employee Advocates, Your Guide
to Activating 100 Employees in Just 30 Days (or less).
(BTW — The SocialChorus platform can embed this hashtag so it’s included in every social
media share from the platform. We like make it easy for ya.)

10. Lesson 4: How to Scale to Thousands
10Lesson 4
Target’s Winning Strategy to Launching and Scaling Employee Advocacy to Thousands
SocialChorus data shows that it only takes 135 employee advocates to outreach a branded social media page with
one million followers — now imagine what thousands of employees could do. That’s exactly what Target Corporation
discovered when they launched their Employee Advocacy program, #TargetScoop, at the company’s annual summit
to 20,000 employees.
Nancy Brandt, Sr. Specialist in Communications at Target, wanted to empower employees at Target by giving them
access to company news and information before the public. There’s no shortage of content about Target — from
media coverage and marketing campaigns to its own online magazine and social media channels, there’s a lot of
discussion around the brand. But employees didn’t know what was safe to share publicly and needed an easy way to
access company news. Spearheading the change was Brandt, who said, “The Employee Advocacy program is about
empowering our team members — and making it very easy for them to consume and share content they find mean-
ingful.”
To launch the program to thousands, Brandt took these three steps:
Select an Employee Advocacy
platform: Says Brandt,
“SocialChorus allowed us to
aggregate content and provide a
one-stop shop where our team
members could easily share ‘safe’
and accurate content to their
social media channels from that
site.”
Launch and promote the program
at an event: Target launched the
program to 20,000 employees at
the company’s annual summit.
They provided employees training,
in-person guidance on how to get
started and content to share.
Give employees exclusive access
to content: At the Target annual
summit, the brand gave the
thousands of #TargetScoop early
adopters the opportunity to be
the first to announce the brand’s
new partnership with TOMS on
social media.
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11. Since launch, 1000 new employees have joined the program every month to view, read
and share company and relevant industry content. These employees also report feeling
more connected and engaged with the brand.
11Lesson 4
To find out more about the #TargetScoop Program, hear from Nancy Brandt herself
in the webinar: How Target Scaled Employee Advocacy to Thousands
WATCH IT HERE

12. Lesson 5: How to Continually Engage Employee Advocates
12Lesson 5
What Makes Microsoft Dynamics’ Employee Advocates Engage Everyday
The social media team at Microsoft Dynamics wanted to unite their network of employees and partners to con-
sume and share relevant industry and brand content — on one platform. Said Kelly Rigotti, Senior Marketing and
Communications Manager at Microsoft Dynamics, “Our employees and partners weren’t comfortable sharing on
social media, so we wanted to make it easy for them to access, read and share content.” What Microsoft Dynam-
ics ended up with was an extremely engaged community of employee and partner advocates.
Rigotti and her team at Microsoft Dynamics drove employee adoption and engagement —
creating a program that has 3X the usual engagement of any other SocialChorus program
— by uploading content into the platform every day. The content in their Employee
Advocacy program includes:
Third party industry content Business innovation
Company news and
product releases
Employee and partner-
submitted content
To find out more about the how Microsoft Dynamics engaged hundreds of employees, listen
to their webinar: How Microsoft Dynamics Helps Employees and Partners be Advocates
In just 90 days, hundreds of employees and partners joined Microsoft Dynamics’
employee advocacy program and drove thousands of social media engagements. “Our
employees and partners have access to social media communities that respect their point
of view,” says Rigotti, “Our goal was to give them access to content that they’d want to
share, not tell them what to share.”
WATCH IT HERE

13. Conclusion: What Your Employees Need to Know Today and Tomorrow
Engage thousands of employees — in just 2 minutes a day
The modern workforce needs a modern employee engagement solution. Which is why the majority of For-
tune 1000 companies will implement an Employee Advocacy platform within the next one to two years. Your
organization needs a solution that combines the best practices from the largest Employee Advocacy programs in
the world to drive adoption and engagement.
89% of your employees’ time spent on mobile is spent using
mobile apps, you should have a place on their home screen.
Our employee advocacy app earns you the right to be there.
The SocialChorus platform is a proven solution for brands to
leverage employee advocacy within their organization.
CALL US: 415.780.8812
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