You might have noticed, our website and brand got a bit of a facelift! We hope you like it as much as we do (:
And that’s not all, for roughly two years our team at EveryoneSocial has been developing an updated version of our employee advocacy platform.
We are dubbing this “Employee Advocacy 2.0” and over the last few months, our team has begun showing customers what we’ve been up to.
The valuable feedback we received from customers has also helped us ensure we are building the best and most engaging platform possible.
While we still have some exciting product roadmap features coming in the next few weeks and months, the revamped EveryoneSocial is here for all current and future customers.
As the Head of Customer Success, I wanted to share how our updated platform can help your company find success whether used for specific solutions like marketing, sales, communications, and recruiting, or you want to roll-out company wide like a few customers have done.
EveryoneSocial 2.0 is designed to keep employees informed, productive, creating, and sharing — wherever they are working.
Below are a few of the fundamental changes that are either new features or opportunities that our v1 platform was not able to accommodate that are game changers.
The Timeline Gets the Right Content in Front of Users
Historically, users have landed on the “Company Stream” of content when logging into the tool — which allows them to see what content has been created by and curated about the company.
However, the issue is that users would not see the other topics of content in the instance unless they specifically clicked around into other content feeds; we saw very few users actually navigating around the interface to discover non-company content.
This isn’t ideal because we encourage users to not only share at least 50% of their content from 3rd party sources (to establish objectivity and SME-status) and to also read/learn about intel such as competitive and client news, productivity improvements, etc.
The Timeline creates an opportunity for us to truly combine content from all the topics presented in the platform and display them to users in a weighted “trending” manner (just like all social networks do).
This not only provides each user with a personal feed of what makes most sense for them based on the topics and people they follow, but to also make sure content that is being interacted with and shared successfully gets more limelight than content no one seems to care about.
It’s really all about getting the best, most relevant content in front of each individual user.
All Users Can Easily Contribute and Suggest Content
We have consistently seen the content suggested by users to their teams be the most shared and the highest performing content coming out of any given initiative. I mean, it makes sense, right?!
I’m only going to suggest something to the whole team unless it’s high quality information and relevant.
What’s even better is that this content displays the name, profile image and internal commentary from the submitter around why the content is valuable… it truly shows ownership and raises the flag of safety that someone is putting their stamp of approval on the content.
Where the past issue lied was that users historically needed to either download a browser extension or create a Personal Stream in order to suggest content; we saw less than 5% of all users perform either of these tasks.
This means that there was a huge barrier to entry for users to truly contribute to an initiative.
There is now a post-creation interface front and center for users to craft both posts (internal) and shares (external) so that there are no barriers for suggesting content and information to/with their teams.
Moreover, when users create content they’ll still have their name, profile image and an opportunity to provide internal context to the team around their thoughts on the content.
While review and approval is still a built-in function, Admin and Moderation teams can also choose to allow some content topics to be driven by users without any approvals in place.
Regardless, you can now truly allow your team(s) to drive most of the content creation process which will remove the burden on Admin/Moderator teams to always be the ones identifying content and driving engagement.
This is a win-win for everyone involved!
The quality of content is higher, the burden of admins is lower, the users feel more empowered to contribute and have better opportunities for recognition and visibility to leadership who are also involved in the initiative.
“Content” is No Longer Just Link-Based Article
The EveryoneSocial platform contains all types of information. Historically speaking, EveryoneSocial has been focused on “see content > read content > share content.”
But what we’ve always known is that we really want to help create the most informed and connected teams out there.
I think we can all agree that anyone who is…
- More educated around the verticals and projects they’re working on
- Understand the industry they work within and where it’s headed
- Know what their company is up to internally and externally and how it fits into the industry landscape
- And sees what their competitors and clients are up to
…would be able to be more articulate and helpful within their roles.
Ultimately, EveryoneSocial can now contain everything from traditional URL-based content to rich media that can be more engaging.
This entails blog posts and press releases, social posts you’d like to rally teams around or be aware of (Say linking to a social post you want more engagement too or telling colleagues to connect with some new hires), to native photos, GIFs and videos.
And the content can be either internal-only, shareable to employee networks, or strictly for internal communications and thoughts from team leaders down to individual contributors.
Think of all the “content” that really lives in the minds of our leaders and team members in the forms of ideas like:
- “As the head of sales, I wanted to let you know what I’m hearing and thinking at the highest level so everyone can be dialed into what we’re going for”
- “I just handled with question in a way that really resonated with a client”
- “I just heard from a client that our competitor is doing this”
- “I wanted to give a shout out to Bob for getting major kudos for a client for XYZ”
- or even asking questions to one another, such as “What are everyone’s thoughts around ABC?”
Employees Can Participate and Add Value, Even If They Aren’t A Social Rockstar
With the ability for all users to not only contribute content, but to also actively engage with the content their admins and peers put in place, EveryoneSocial is no longer a place where successful users are solely measured by their ability to create traction on external shares of content.
This is important as it relates to truly creating a community that provides value for more than the top 10% of our users.
Many have heard of the “90-9-1 rule” around the top 10% of any online community are creating and engaging while 90% are lurkers.
There needs to be an avenue for the 90% to participate, even if it’s only on a very light touchpoint and/or an internal basis.
EveryoneSocial now provides more opportunities to capture this segment of our team populations by creating more avenues for light notifications of what peers and team leads are up to.
This includes any engagement and success that materializes (internally and/or externally) around the content they do create, if they do decide to give active participation a shot.
A perfect example of this is a client of ours that we recently hosted a webinar/training for where when covering the leaderboard, I highlighted 2 of the top 3 users on the leaderboard.
One had a well-established network and shared very successfully, allowing them to generate lots of points from external shares and activity; the other user had shared only a couple of times, with much less success.
However they were discovering and creating content that their peers were engaging with internally and sharing externally.
The user who was all about driving valuable information to others on their team could benefit from, was given an avenue to create value for others.
And that value was/is actually recognized by leadership and by their peers as a top user on leaderboards and public shout-outs for high performers.
New Avenue to Create ROI from the Potential That Internal Communities Provide
We can all agree that there’s a ton of qualitative and quantitative value around internal communities and keeping employees engaged.
“85% of employees said they’re most motivated when management offers regular updates on company news.” (Trade Press Services)
The reality is though, that internal platforms like Yammer, the former Google+, etc. create engagement that gets bottled up with no outlet to provide value for the Marketing, Sales, and Recruiting efforts.
With EveryoneSocial, you’re able to create the internal community with regular communications, updates, team interaction, etc. but you’re also able to place shareable content for users to engage with and share.
The internal comms/community component that can be crafted within EveryoneSocial creates at-bats for our teams to also see and share externally appropriate content that we actually want our teams to help amplify.
This goes back to finding ways to tap into the 90% lurker stat from the one previous section earlier.
We’ll always have some portions of the sales, marketing, recruiting, and other client-facing teams that are eager to share, but we now can provide value to others who can then help provide value back to the initiative as a whole.
