From there, the most common objectives are:
- Employer branding to showcase the company’s culture, reinforce pride in belonging, and improve talent attraction and retention. In this case, the HR department takes the lead.
- Generation of business opportunities: when driven by sales and business line departments to increase expert visibility, support competitive advantage processes in B2B, and generate leads.
- Brand image: when the focus is on corporate communication to reinforce brand positioning by humanizing it with greater credibility through company employees, executives, and ambassadors.
Ultimately, people buy from people, and if they are well-known or are in the LinkedIn networking circle, they will have a better chance of being chosen.
How are ambassadors chosen?
From my experience, I would recommend two approaches:
- Targeted selection: a group is chosen, for example, of experts who are already active on LinkedIn and want to grow.
- Voluntary selection: the project is opened up so that there is self-motivation and, through natural “elimination,” the ambassadors who are most interested and committed remain.
What are the benefits for employees who are part of this project?
The first and most important is that the company invests directly in the development of its professionals’ personal brands. This takes three forms: support and coaching for their profiles, practical training so they can master the tool, and expansion of internal and external networking.
But the most interesting benefit is spreading their personal value, increasing their influence, reputation, visibility, and external projection…
For us, it is a real success if our ambassadors are invited as speakers at events, talks, or podcasts, or as university professors.
Do gamification systems work?
Motivation must be maintained over time, and rankings, medals, or badges are always popular. There are tools and platforms that make it very easy, because you can already extract the ranking with the best in activity, number of views, interactions, etc., and if you share a monthly report, they get “hooked” and it works as an incentive.
How is content managed to ensure consistency with corporate strategy?
There is a wide range of options. Depending on the maturity of the project, you can start with corporate content and news published in the media or by the company (blog, YouTube channels) and focus it on a platform so that ambassadors can go there, take the content, add their own touch, and “repost” it.
Then there is expert content, or content specific to each ambassador, for example, in a sector or technology. In this case, you can help create ad-hoc pieces such as videos, carousels, or specific interviews and articles.
And finally, there is inspirational and free content in which ambassadors generate their own reflections on their daily lives, sharing their topics of interest and addressing their audience or kindred spirits on LinkedIn.
To ensure consistency, important guidelines and rules for brand use are provided during initial training.
What roles are necessary to organize and launch a project of this type?
There are several roles:
- The content curation platform administrator, who is responsible for the technical management of the content.
- The expert in content creation and communication piece development.
- The facilitator, who accompanies, motivates, and trains the teams and builds community among everyone, encouraging tagging, personalizing the project, motivating with gamification, etc.
In many cases, all three roles are performed by the same person.
What would you say is an important key to success?
Management involvement is essential. Spokespersons not only exert active influence in the digital environment, but also help the rest of the organization to “let loose” in sharing content. Profiles such as Ana Patricia Botín or Valero Marín are not anecdotal, but set the pace for the rest.
According to the Good Rebels report on “The state of the culture of connection in large Spanish companies,” work must be done on three levels: senior management, directors-middle managers-influential experts without hierarchy, and the broad base of other ambassadors. Each level can be worked on with a greater or lesser degree of “support” depending on the number of resources.
How long does it take for an employee advocacy plan to get off the ground?
From my point of view, the maturation time of an employee advocacy program depends mainly on two variables: the number of ambassadors and the strategic objectives (reputation, culture, employer branding, or business).
Realistically, the most solid and long-lasting programs start with a pilot involving a small number of ambassadors (maximum 25) and can take anywhere from four months to a year to gain commitment and become an automatic habit.
From there, momentum and credibility are gained. Practical experience in large organizations can lead to having 5,000 ambassadors, as in the case of BBVA, or maintaining 350, as in the case of Repsol.
To see tangible results, it is necessary to measure what is happening in the ambassador community from the outset. Some metrics would be: the rate of other ambassadors joining, average activity per ambassador of at least one post per week, ambassador retention for at least one year, impressions-views-reach of content, engagement rate, total follower growth, greater pride of belonging, greater internal mobility, greater networking, participation in events, and number of leads attributable to posts.
This is a long-term revitalization project, so if you expect quick results, you will be frustrated. It should be seen as an internal and external organizational “asset” that needs to be nurtured.
