Welcome to Employee Advocacy 2.0!

Today is a BIG day for us here at EveryoneSocial! We’re taking the wrapping off our brand new platform: EveryoneSocial 2.0. We’ve been working on this new platform for the last two years; clients have been using EveryoneSocial 2.0 since the spring of 2019 however today we’re sharing it with the world and we couldn’t be more excited!

So Why EveryoneSocial 2.0 And Why Now?

We launched EveryoneSocial 1.0 in 2013 with our very first client, Dell who we’re proud to say is still with us today. Back then, employee advocacy, employee social, whatever you want to call it was a nascent concept; to be blunt, very few companies saw it as a priority. Fast forward to today and it has steadily become something that the top organizations in the world all recognize as being critical to their success.

The world of 1.0 employee advocacy was simple: it was about a company pushing content to their people for them to share to their social networks.

During those early years we were able to prove (thanks to our amazing, trail-blazing clients) that employees were not only willing, but excited to share brand and other professional content to their networks.  EveryoneSocial and its clients have always had bigger goals in mind that weren’t possible until now.

So What’s Changed And What Is Employee Advocacy 2.0?

There’s a simple rule when it comes to employee advocacy programs: the more people you include in your program, the more (and better) results you’ll achieve. It’s a numbers game: if you have 50 people, each with a network of 1,000 people, you’re reaching 50,000+ people every time they share. Well if that’s the case, why not make that number 100 people, or 500 people, or 1,000 people with a combined reach of over a million? You get the picture.

In a word, employee advocacy 2.0 is about scale: ensuring that everyone in your organization has the opportunity to participate, to benefit, and to drive value.  

Of course that means different things for different companies: for Dell, that means activating 100,000+ employees, for Qualtrics (also one of our clients here in UT) that means activating 3,000+ employees. Regardless of the size of the organization, the fundamentals of how you activate at scale are the same.

First and foremost, employee advocacy success comes down to employee engagement and participation: it’s no one’s job to use a platform like EveryoneSocial, they have to want to do so. As such, our clients’ top priority is driving engagement: ensuring that their people are interacting (sharing, engaging, contributing, etc.) with the right content at the right time on a sustained basis (employee advocacy programs don’t have end dates ;-)

So what drives engagement, especially when you’re talking about the majority/everyone in an organization? Ah ha! This is where we step from the world of employee advocacy 1.0 into employee advocacy 2.0 and this is WHY we’ve made the investment in building EveryoneSocial 2.0. Here are some of the chief drivers of engagement which we’ve validated from over 7+ years of data spanning hundreds of programs:

• For your users, the experience needs to be read and write: Yes, your people want to consume and share the content you push them, but they also want to CONTRIBUTE content they find and create themselves!  And (spoiler alert) you should want them to! User-submitted and user-generated content is a cornerstone of employee advocacy 2.0. From a data perspective, looking across our clients over the last 7+ years the content that has been a) shared the most and b) received the most clicks and engagement is content that was submitted by users.  Full stop.

• Make it personalized and get personal: If the key to success is engagement, we need to make the experience for your users as enticing and as sticky as possible, on their first visit and their 1,000th.  This means personalization. We recently surveyed a client and found they had employees on EveryoneSocial in over 60 countries! Do you think a small, US-based admin team of two people can provide all the content these people want and are likely to share?  Of course not. Personalization is about EveryoneSocial the platform understanding and serving up what each of your users is likely to engage with, share, etc. and also giving THEM the controls to source content themselves. After all, each of us know what we need and want better than anyone else.

• Create opportunities for people to interact and connect: Every advocacy program needs to be positioned to benefit from network effects (the idea that networks increase in value with the increase in participants) and the only way to do that is to highlight those (your people) who are in the platform, sharing, engaging, contributing. Within EveryoneSocial 2.0 we want to highlight a face and name wherever we can: content someone submitted, shared, engaged with, on a leaderboard, in an email, etc. Simply put, people engage when we see other people engaging. 

• Support languages other than English: If you have/work with people internationally, chances are English isn’t their first language. Ensuring that they both have content in their native language AND that the platform you’re providing them with is localized in their native language is critical for two reasons: 1) giving them a tool that is translated in their native language will increase their use of the tool and 2) providing them with content in their native language will lead to improved sharing, clicks, and engagements. English may be the international language of business, but it’s not how the majority of people across the globe communicate and interact with each other as people.  

• Reduce admin overhead/bottlenecks: Most of our clients, no matter how big they or their programs are (and we work with the biggest in the world) have an admin team of between 1 and 3 people. Not only is being an admin not a full time job for any of those people, the size of their team hasn’t changed as their programs have grown. In a recent instance we had a client with an admin team of 3 activate 12,000 employees in a single day on EveryoneSocial 2.0, and they’re planning on adding another 30,000 in the next 90 days. Point being, the platform HAS to enable your admin team to do a lot with a little. This includes everything from providing your admins with tools in the EveryoneSocial native apps to the ability to shift some of the content review and approval burden to the edges of the network, to empower users and other people you trust or have certified.  

• Leave no one behind: Fact, every single person in your organization–from interns to the CEO – has a network and that network contains all sorts of people that the business wants to be talking to: customers, prospects, partners, prospective hires, alumni, etc. Advocacy is about giving your people the tools to leverage those relationships for their benefit and the benefit of the business. Some of these people may not be ready to share content with their networks and that’s OK! They can still contribute to the success of your program by driving engagement of other users, submitting content, etc. and we want to be in the business of cultivating these people so that they can become some of your best advocates. There’s value for all, and supporting everyone is another priority for the EveryoneSocial 2.0 platform.

For us, the launch of EveryoneSocial 2.0 is the beginning, not the end. This launch marks the commencement of the 2.0 era and we couldn’t be more excited.  We have a TON more features and functionality coming over the next few months that we think are going to allow our clients to take their programs to new heights, including beyond the four walls of their own organizations (more on that later).

In closing, I want to thank every single member of our team and our wonderful, amazing, trail-blazing clients. We’ve been at this for a while and NONE of it would have happened if it weren’t for everyone’s commitment, support, and stubborn belief that what we’re all working on is the way of the future. Again, this is just the beginning and we can’t wait to continue this journey with everyone who is onboard, and many more to come!

If you have a question about anything I’ve outlined in this post don’t hesitate to ping me cbrain@everyonesocial.com or our team hello@everyonesocial.com.