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Since the beginning of employee advocacy programs, content creation and sharing has always been the pinnacle of the product needs.

And that certainly is not going away by any means, as employee social reach can truly provide positive value for any organization.

However, the concept that an advocacy program is solely a marketing and sales tool has shifted in recent years to be more universal for the entire organization.

And the need for program expansion or even enterprise-wide has been amplified with the Covid-19 pandemic, with many organizations forced to work remotely.

This created a new need, one that would keep employees informed but also more engaged with their colleagues, work, and culture — even when they are working from home. And this is exactly what Cloudera realized early on in 2020 and more so during the start of the pandemic.

How Cloudera Leverages Employee Advocacy

If you are unfamiliar with Cloudera, the company delivers an enterprise data cloud for any data, from the Edge to AI. They help support the advancements of digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises, powered by the innovation of the open-source community.

And the company has been using employee advocacy for some time, especially realizing the impact social media has on their sales, marketing, and recruiting.

Shelby Khan, Corporate Communications Manager & Digital Media at Cloudera stated:

“We are in the Tech B2B industry, and it is expected of the sales and field organizations to utilize social media to reach prospective customers and drive pipeline. Often, those members of our organization either aren’t comfortable with social media and don’t know what they should share or they don’t want to designate the time necessary to do it effectively. Using an employee advocacy tool helps us enable social selling, so it is easy enough our sales and field organization finds it worth their time. “

“Additionally, we tend to have employees with large social media networks. Our engineers and product developers are active with their networks during their personal time. By having an employee advocacy program, we can utilize them to help with brand awareness for both marketing purposes and hiring/recruiting purposes.”

Cloudera and the EveryoneSocial Partnership

Originally, Cloudera was using a different employee advocacy program but ran into some challenges. Mostly that their previous vendor was not very user-friendly, and the product was not built in a way that maximizes employee interest.

“We had an existing employee advocacy program, but the tool we were using wasn’t very user friendly. The functional parts for employees didn’t encourage them to be very active, and it was hard to manage the wide breadth of content we wanted to share with our employees,“ stated Shelby.

Why did the team choose to work with EveryoneSocial?

The Cloudera team had chosen to work with EveryoneSocial due to past experiences with the team and platform.

“I have worked with EveryoneSocial at past organizations. Through experience, I know they have great customer service and are true partners,” mentioned Shelby.

“And EveryoneSocial stood out as the best option for us because it has all the features we need without the extra frivolous bells and whistles. It is easy for us to train people, scale globally and across organizations, and still track and manage multiple programs to prove ROI.”

Most of the Cloudera platform users like how user-friendly the tool is, it is easy for them to on-board and they don’t need additional training. They appreciate the different ways to use the tool and that they can be more advanced or less, but still get benefits from it.

Some of the strengths of EveryoneSocial according to Shelby:

• The ability to track usage, engagement, and traffic. It is important to prove ROI.
• Segmenting and organizing content to help customize the experience for users. It enables Cloudera to manage multiple types of programs on the same tool, run by different teams.
• Ease of onboarding admins and content curators/ moderators. It makes it easier to scale the program broadly.

“Across our organization, EveryoneSocial is used as a verb. ‘Did you EveryoneSocial that?’”

The Main Use Cases of EveryoneSocial

Cloudera built their employee advocacy program for a few key areas of the business. Below are a few ways the teams are maximizing EveryoneSocial currently.

1. As Another Social Media Channel

Strategically, they use EveryoneSocial as another social media channel. It drives equal (or more) traffic to their owned properties compared to their organic corporate accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

The company also has more flexibility around the type of content they promote with it, so they are able to expand their thought leadership through the personal brands of employees.

2. For Better Sales Enablement

Additionally, Cloudera has started to use EveryoneSocial for more sales enablement, especially in their different regions.

“We can help build targeted content for our sales and field organizations to share to their networks during designated times, strategic to their campaigns. Now that our employees are trained and comfortable using the tool, it has helped add a new dimension to our programs.“

3. Recruiting and Employer Branding

Cloudera discovered that EveryoneSocial has proven to be a really great recruiting tool, as well. Some of the companies’ top-performing content on the platform are open job postings, which their employees have continued to share to their networks.

Cloudera’s Pivots During the Covid-19 Pandemic

When the COVID-19 Pandemic struck the world, this forced more businesses to pivot their strategies as many employees began working from home.

Cloudera and its executive leaders realized they needed a way to ramp up employee engagement and communications among their distributed teams.

“In a two week period, right as all COVID restrictions started taking place across the United States, we increased our users by 3X. We use EveryoneSocial as a way to get more up-to-date content and news to our employees, keep them feeling connected to others in the organization, and entertained through gamification on the platform. “

With executive support and encouragement, Shelby and the team changed their social program, from being “invite-only” and only high performing employees, to be open to everyone. The EveryoneSocial program went from primarily being a marketing tool before to an HR tool now.

“Instead of focusing on driving traffic to our owned properties, we are more concerned that the tool is being used regularly and by a wide range of employees. Employee adoption and engagement is more important than quality. “

With this pivot, it also changed how Cloudera engages with their EveryoneSocial platform users. The team utilizes monthly newsletters from the platform to help drive usage, and they also built internal training programs and tutorials instead of the in-person training sessions they used to do.

“To help with our super users, we also have started private training for them to help them use the tool in advanced ways, which aren’t necessarily tactics we want our standard users to use regularly. “

Employee Advocacy Plans for The Future

Although COVID has thrown a wrench in many organizations’ plans, Cloudera is seeing continued success with the help of employee advocacy.

“I’m excited to see this program grow from just a marketing tactic to part of the employee lifecycle. Our next phase is to use it to drive awareness about our diversity and inclusion efforts. Just like we use EveryoneSocial to share technical industry articles and updates and build thought leadership through employee’s personal brands, we will work on developing employee’s personal brands around Diversity & Inclusion.”

Additionally, the team is working on growing their executive team’s presence on social media, which they think that they will accomplish through EveryoneSocial.

And through the use of private groups in EveryoneSocial, the Cloudera team can customize programs and content to make it scalable across their leadership organization globally.

The Numbers

840,000+ social reach | 700+ employees using EveryoneSocial | In Q3 2020 alone, they saw via their platform users reach shares of 1.3k+, total additional Clicks reach 6.1k+, their overall engagements 4.7k+

Interested in growing your organization’s brand reach, driving more leads, better enable sales, and driving more authentic employee engagement? Schedule your demo with EveryoneSocial to learn more.