Khoros on Khoros: How we harnessed employees’ power to transform our results

Our venture into employee advocacy began with a clear, focused vision: to empower employees to share our brand’s story genuinely and compellingly. As part of our initial planning and research, we tapped into the extensive resources provided by our partners at EveryoneSocial. This deep dive was crucial for understanding what makes content resonate with audiences.

To start with, we strongly emphasized thought leadership. We discovered that content showcasing expertise and insights from our teams enhanced our brand’s credibility and fostered a sense of employee pride and ownership. This approach helped turn our employees into active participants in our brand narrative.

During our initial launch, we learned the importance of diversifying our content and that it’s not just about promoting brand assets to drive downloads. The real goal is to enrich our audience’s experiences on social media. Sharing content that is accessible to everyone–without a gate or form fill–is ultimately a more authentic interaction. We leaned into blogs, case studies, and event invites to drive more meaningful engagement while sprinkling in gated content sparingly.

We also began incorporating customer stories and partner content, highlighting our collaborations and achievements and providing a well-rounded content experience. It’s not always about Khoros — and it shouldn’t be. While promoting our brand is important, it can quickly feel stagnant and forced. A blended mix of content enhances brands' overall value in the marketplace. 

Building an internal culture that supports social sharing became a key part of our strategy. We aimed to create an environment where sharing and engaging with content was encouraged and became a natural extension of our employee’s daily work life. EveryoneSocial provides many tools to make this a reality, such as their integration with Slack and the ability to mark certain posts as “Important,” which sends automatic emails from the platform to our employees' work emails. As we continue to evolve, the role of social sharing in building and sustaining our internal culture sets a solid foundation for future growth and success.

Share of voice

Share of voice (SOV) refers to the share of your advertising compared to all the competitors in your market. We needed to ensure our team’s voices were heard to increase our SOV.

With EveryoneSocial, admins upload content to the platform, enabling them to choose the type of content employees share and add suggested share-copy options. Users can select from the posts and copy admins have provided or adjust the copy to fit their needs and personal voice.

To increase our SOV amongst competitors, we learned that tagging our brand in the copy increases neutral and positive sentiment. Encouraging employees to tag Khoros in their industry-related posts amplifies our reach and helps position our team as thought leaders. This strategy leads to meaningful engagements and conversations beyond our owned social channels. 

Thought Leadership

We strive to connect with our audience through insightful articles representing our company well. To showcase our team's accomplishments and foster engagement and pride among our employees, we utilize EveryoneSocial. This approach has been successful for us.

Example: A Comprehensive Guide for the 2023 Holiday Season

During the holiday season, our Strategic Services team put together a collection of recommendations to increase organic social media reach on each social platform to enhance holiday campaigns.

To further promote the distribution of this content, we uploaded it to EveryoneSocial with the following share copy options:

• Looking for tips to land you on your finance team's nice list this holiday season while still crushing it on social? Our Strategic Services team at @Khoros created this platform-by-platform strategy guide to organically boost your social media channels this holiday season.

• From TikTok to Reddit to Instagram, the @Khoros Strategic Services team has you covered on clever insights and playful strategies to up your social media game organically this holiday season.

• Need help navigating the holiday social media landscape like a pro? Our @Khoros Strategic Services put together platform-specific strategies that will elevate your digital presence organically and watch the holiday engagement soar.

In each of these copy options, we tagged the Khoros brand LinkedIn account so that our share of voice would increase whenever employees shared these posts. While individual users can adjust the share copy to their liking, we found that more often than not, they stick with the provided share copy–Maybe switching up a word or two or adding their favorite emojis. It’s essential to provide a solid batch of share copy options to ensure that our brand standards are met when publishing content to each individual’s personal LinkedIn, but also so that content doesn’t feel stale and cookie-cutter on people’s feeds.

We found that it’s important to occasionally include content that isn’t Khoros branded and comes from other brands and organizations. Sprinkling in content from different websites allows for a larger variety of posts. However, these posts don’t typically perform as well for us, so careful consideration is needed when balancing the types of content.

Rewards and Gamification

Participation didn’t happen right away. There were a few early adopters, but we needed something to motivate employees to share posts with their networks, so we introduced a gamification layer to our advocacy program. Monthly leaderboards encouraged friendly competition to engage and share more frequently, and employees won reward points within our internal employee recognition program. Reward points carry real-world value; employees can spend them on merchandise, trips, and activities. These recognitions and rewards created an infectious buzz, and more and more employees adopted the platform.

EveryoneSocial enables admins to set up groups based on job function, location, team, and other options. We observed certain teams using the platform more often than others (shoutout to our sales and customer success teams!), so we asked for volunteers from those groups to contribute their content. This was another motivational force, as we allowed employees to share their ideas and experiences with a wider audience. If you can get one team lead on board and excited about the program, this enthusiasm will naturally spread to more teammates as they hear about it and see the posts from colleagues appearing on their feeds.

Reflecting on the first quarter following the launch of our employee advocacy program, our initial metrics underscore overall success while highlighting the vast potential of harnessing the power of employee networks. Here’s a closer look at our tangible results:

• Expanding our reach: A 973% increase in active users shows our employees' enthusiasm for the program, reflecting our engaging company culture.

• Content that resonates: Our content strategy led to a 333% increase in posts by focusing on relevant enterprise-level concerns, making our content appealing and valuable to our team.

• Amplification through sharing: Our shares have increased by 213%, showing that our employees are actively sharing our content, which expands our brand reach and enhances our credibility.

• Broadening the horizon: Our program's success is evident with a monthly reach of 258,000, which is a 312% QoQ increase. This has helped us reach a wider audience and establish our presence in the competitive B2B tech space.

These numbers reflect a vibrant, engaged workforce confidently sharing our brand’s story and a compelling narrative of alignment between our employee’s success and the company’s growth. The surge in reach and engagement through EveryoneSocial demonstrates that when employees are given the tools and content that echo their professional ethos, they become the most credible advocates for the brand.

The initial results of our efforts validate our strategic decision to adopt employee advocacy practices. Plus, it helped us set benchmarks for continuous improvement. As we carry this momentum into the new year, we are committed to refining our approach, exploring new content strategies, and further integrating employee feedback. This is just the beginning as we build upon this foundation to reach new heights of brand advocacy.

Our focus for the upcoming fiscal year is to scale our advocacy efforts by deepening employee adoption, expanding the team responsible for posting, and ensuring our executives are well-equipped to advocate for our brand across social channels.

Our sights are set on growth — of our program, reach, and impact. 

Deepen Employee Adoption

We aim to introduce new employee training programs, secure additional funding for our rewards program, and leverage advanced analytics to fine-tune our strategy. We also plan to empower more thought leaders from our team and increase training to ensure employees are up to speed on publishing best practices.

Content Leaderboards

Another goal we will work to achieve this year is increasing the number of people contributing content to the platform. We started with one content producer and invited our top users to contribute as well. We plan to increase content contribution by launching a content leaderboard that awards points for the amount of content submitted.

Executive Adoption

“Distribution is top of mind for CMOs and CCOs: I talked with as many marketing and comms execs as I could this year, and the topic that got the strongest reaction was DISTRIBUTION. Given all the challenges with traditional digital marketing, how do you efficiently, effectively and authentically reach your customers, people and other key audiences? This is THE billion dollar question.” 

- Cameron Brain, CEO of EveryoneSocial

There is a deep value in enabling your executive team to participate in brand advocacy. Launching an executive advocacy program is a top priority this year. We aim to create a consistent publishing cadence where executives and board members can publish content about Khoros directly to their networks. According to the Harvard Business Review, nearly half of a company’s reputation is attributed to the CEO’s reputation.

Unsurprisingly, a CEO's social media presence is increasingly scrutinized when forming opinions about a company. In our digital-first world, social presence matters. As we enter the new fiscal year, enabling our executive teams to work smarter (and certainly not harder) with social publishing is a top priority.

Integrating with Salesforce

Did you know that EveryoneSocial has a Salesforce integration? It’s one of the things we’re most excited about for 2024’s employee advocacy efforts. Internal adoption was steadily increasing but eventually reached a plateau. We had to ask ourselves, “How can we get sellers and CSMs more involved?”

Unsurprisingly, these groups have strong LinkedIn networks, so ensuring they join in on the advocacy efforts is key to reaching a wider audience. Introducing a new tool can sometimes be overwhelming and lead to less adoption. EveryoneSocial created an integration that lets teams use the platform directly in a Salesforce tab, allowing them to focus on work without having to access a new tool or navigate away from the tool they use most often.

The integration allows the convenience of staying in Salesforce while still being able to view, share, and engage with content across various social channels. Sellers are busy and hyper-focused, so by embedding the EveryoneSocial app into Salesforce, our sales team no longer needs to log in to EveryoneSocial as a standalone app. We’re letting our Sales team work from their platform of choice while providing as many options as possible to let them engage in employee advocacy without messing up their workflows.

Our journey with employee advocacy has been a transformative experience for our employees and brand. We've witnessed firsthand how empowering a company’s team to share its story can amplify a brand's reach and authenticity. The success we've seen — a remarkable increase in our social media metrics and the enthusiastic participation of our employees — is a testament to the untapped potential residing within our team.

This story of Khoros and EveryoneSocial is not just ours to tell; it's an open invitation to other social media managers and brands to consider the untapped potential of their teams in brand promotion. The employee advocacy strategy is a robust, cost-effective alternative to traditional marketing efforts, especially in an era where authenticity and personal connection hold immense value. By embracing this innovative approach, we believe any brand can transform its narrative and achieve a new level of engagement and visibility in the crowded digital marketplace.

Are you ready to take your brand advocacy to the next level? Learn how with our 90-day checklist.