Employee advocacy examples: How 4 companies turned employees into brand ambassadors

Background

Dell has long been a social media marketing pioneer. It was one of the first companies to use sentiment analysis and monitoring technology for marketing purposes, and crucially, it has also set an example for running successful employee advocacy.

“We have some really dedicated, fantastic employees who love working for Dell. We wanted to harness that energy and that excitement and to help our employees share as much information as they wanted, as easily as possible.”

-Amy Heiss, Social Media Marketing Director at Dell

As early as 2013, Dell began to explore the potential of employee advocacy to drive employee and social media engagement. As is typical for many companies, Dell’s advocacy journey started with a manually run social media program that employees could opt to participate in.

However, the program ran exclusively on emails and spreadsheets, which proved inefficient for a large company like Dell. Instead, it needed an automated and scalable tool fit for its enterprise employee advocacy program.

Solution

Dell wanted a tool that would not just provide a space for corporate communications but also make it easy for employees to curate personally valuable content. Specifically, employees should post “80% about topics that are informative, helpful, and relevant to customers— or are personally interesting to our employees — and only 20% about the company.”

Khoros’ employee advocacy partner, EveryoneSocial, was the perfect fit for Dell’s needs. Using EveryoneSocial’s modern advocacy tool, over 10,000 Dell employees share content regularly.

Results

Dell’s employee advocacy program had a monumental impact on its marketing results and employee engagement.

Most recently, Dell drove more than 150,000 shares within EveryoneSocial in one year, yielding 45,000 clicks to Dell’s website. The reach amounted to an audience of over 1.2 million.

With EveryoneSocial’s analytics tool, Dell also finds that advocacy backs up the company’s social efforts, making people feel more connected to Dell’s strategy and customers.

Importantly for Dell, its employees get a return from participating in the program. It grows their following, encouraging them to keep posting fresh and exciting content relevant to them and their business. In Dell’s own words: “It’s a win-win!”

Read the full story here.

Background

When Andrew Wilson was appointed CEO of Electronic Arts (EA) in 2013, it became his strategic priority to have all employees work as one team. This was no easy feat, with 8,500 employees spread across 54+ locations in six different languages.

However, EA's Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition teams were up to the challenge. They spearheaded a program that aimed to publicly tell EA’s story while also helping to unite teams across studios and locations.

EA Insiders was born, a group sharing a diverse range of social media content, such as major product announcements and press releases, internal careers stories, and original content like blogs. Early program feedback revealed that it expanded employees’ view of the company, encouraging them to share their enthusiasm for EA with their network.

However, program engagement rates plateaued within just one year as its manual setup reached capacity. Leadership needed to change this if it wanted to continue expanding EA Insiders following its success. 

Solution

EA Insiders moved to EveryoneSocial’s employee advocacy tool, where the program could scale easily to accommodate its 1,000 active users and benefit from various features. For example, with EveryoneSocial’s competitive features, EA could encourage users to share key company news by rewarding behavior such as the quickest to post or highest engagement rates.

In addition to winning prizes, new advocates were sent official certificates thanking them for participating in the program.

EA also launched an internal blog called EA Insider of the Month to highlight top advocates and help employees get to know each other across locations. 

Results

With over 1,000 active users and a reach of almost 1.1 million followers, EA now gets more than 6,600 monthly social engagements from employees.

Internally, employees praised the program and described how it made them feel connected to employees with whom they would normally not interact.

The Talent Acquisition team also benefits greatly from the program, as employees regularly post about the benefits of working at EA and attract top talent to the business.

“Where once employees felt like they worked for EA, now they felt like they were EA.”

-Jenn Ribeiro, the Global Employer Brand Manager at EA

For EA, this is only the beginning. Next, it wants to help employees develop their brands by offering social media training on maximizing their social profile and online engagement. 

Read the full story here.

Background

Ahead of a brand refresh in 2020, the NI team sought support to streamline their channel and content strategy and drive engagement, including increasing awareness through an untapped group of advocates—their employees.

Khoros Strategic Services team was brought on board to help. For over six years, they have provided NI with strategic support for organic content strategy, paid campaign management, community engagement, live events support, and social listening.

On this occasion, they helped NI build a comprehensive employee advocacy program that would become crucial in driving awareness for their brand refresh.

Solution

The Khoros team partnered with NI and EveryoneSocial, to understand their joint value proposition for employees. This insight created a comprehensive employee advocacy playbook and toolkit that could be circulated to employees and new hires.

This playbook included a pitch to employees about the benefits of participating in the program, plus best practices and guidelines for engagement, in-platform workflows, and specific tips for new hires to get involved.

Additionally, Khoros collaborated with NI’s social team to build a unique label strategy to identify content that should be highlighted on EveryoneSocial.

Results

NI’s employee advocacy program exponentially increased engagement, contributing to success on social media channels in terms of brand awareness and positive engagement with its brand refresh, including the following:

• 33% increase in Instagram followers within two weeks

• 9.4K engagements on organic brand launch content, driven by employees and customers

• 1.1K uses of the new brand hashtags #EngineerAmbitiously and #LifeatNI during the brand refresh time frame on LinkedIn and Instagram, leading to 76 new followers of the brand hashtag on LinkedIn

Background

At Khoros, we don’t just say that we understand the value of employee advocacy—we also practice it. However, like the other businesses mentioned, Khoros’ employee advocacy started manually. Executives would highlight news via email or Slack, or employees would share their job and promotion announcements on social media with the #LifeatKhoros hashtag.

We soon discovered that manual advocacy programs have their drawbacks. For example, employees had to upload screenshots of their activity to receive recognition (which only a few did), and there was no clear way to track engagement or measure the program’s success.

Enter EveryoneSocial, Khoros’ very own employee advocacy partner. 

Solution

Thanks to Khoros’ partnership with EveryoneSocial, it has adopted an efficient and scalable strategy for enabling employee advocacy that includes:

• An interactive platform.

• Easy-to-follow, one-click instructions.

• ROI and engagement data visualization tools to track success.

Reflecting on the first quarter following the launch of the employee advocacy program, Khoros saw impressive metrics:

• 973% increase in active users.

• 333% increase in posts.

• 213% increase in shares.

• Monthly reach of 258,000, a 312% QoQ increase.

These results validated the strategic decision to adopt employee advocacy practices and set benchmarks for continuous improvement. As Khoros moves forward, refining the approach, exploring new content strategies, and integrating employee feedback will remain priorities.

Read the full story here.

Employee advocacy has been transformative for Dell, EA, NI, and Khoros, skyrocketing employee engagement, brand awareness, and much more.

These stories illustrate the often untapped potential of employees within any organization to drive external and internal business outcomes. By embracing advocacy, any brand can take ownership of its narrative and achieve new levels of visibility in a crowded digital marketplace. 

Khoros’ partnership with EveryoneSocial empowers organizations like yours to transform your workforce into passionate brand ambassadors. Learn the steps necessary today with our 90-day guide to building your employee advocacy platforms.