GiftCard Partners Blog

Employee advocacy can be a powerful tool in building employee trust, investing in the company, and also helping to recruit talent and spread positive word-of-mouth about your organization and its products. However, employee advocacy needs to fit your staff, your company, and your objectives for a program to have the desired affects. Here are three components to help when deciding if employee advocacy is right for your organization:

Social media is rapidly becoming a prime element for businesses.  It's utilized to increase brand exposure, generate leads, and help create meaningful relationships with customers all with little to no budget.  While this is great for marketers and sales representatives, what about other employees?  Should any employee be allowed to tweet, post, or otherwise about your company? The common practice of many companies is to discourage employees from talking to the world about their company.  Many employees are even banned from using any form of social media to discuss their place of employment.  One communications company,
Mitel, has been in business for more than four decades but their name may not resonate with most because of their low profile.  The company’s chief marketing officer, Martyn Etherington, is going against the grain and using social media to change that.  In March 2014, the company had 30 employees actively engaged in social media, by November that number had grown to 1,600 people.  That's 1,600 brand ambassadors who are actively engaged and growing the Mitel brand. Your employees can be your biggest brand ambassadors and having that "social trust" in them can result in big payoffs.  Here are some ideas to help get your employees involved in social media while protecting your brand:

Employee activism is a new movement that goes beyond customer satisfaction and employee engagement, and is becoming an underlying foundation in successful companies.  Many employees are defending their employers from criticism and acting as brand ambassadors for their companies, both online and offline. It all begins with social media.  Many companies are intrigued about ways to enhance employee engagement, but highly concerned about an employee’s use of social media, especially during the work day.  But rather than limiting an employee’s media usage, companies should be promoting the benefits and encouraging their employees to become activists for the brand they represent. Many companies still remain somewhat skeptical, and not without reason. Reasons for caution include valid concerns about privacy, cybersecurity, productivity, and actions by rogue employees that could go viral. This behavior is the exception to the rule and most companies already take a lot of care in building their culture with people they can trust , so why not trust them to advocate as well? Here are some tips to successfully build employee activism:

Social media has made a big BOOM in the workforce. If you don’t believe it just ask any one of your employees using Facebook and LinkedIn, or, check their Tweets. As employees dive headfirst into the social media pool, it’s time for their employers to take the leap too. You can join the 40% of U.S. employers that have a social media at work policy, or you or you can join the
workplace socialization movement. This has led to the  development of a “Facebook for work” type of forum, where projects and goals can be shared and discussed publicly and workers are able to participate in the conversation by “liking” or “commenting”. Incentive Magazine’s, Jennifer Lumba, discusses some helpful tips on how to best use these popular social networks to leverage the most out of social recognition in the workplace:
Name names, and name them often- Leveraging social networks is a great way to praise and acknowledge those that go above and beyond on a company-wide scale.
Allow recognition to go beyond just employer to employee- By adding voting or ‘liking’ to status updates you can give the opportunity for peers and managers alike to acknowledge a job well done.
Make the goal clear- Defining and publishing goals that team members can then sign up for creates a public forum for praise and recognition when workers succeed in making progress towards those goal.
Check out more tips on how to take your recognition program social.

No matter if you gave your mom a gift in person this past Sunday, sent her flowers, or just called to let her know you were thinking of her, the most important thing was that you sent her a personal message. 1-800-Flowers teamed up with celebrities and professional athletes this Mother's Day to send personalized messages to both their moms, and potential 1-800-Flowers customers. The celebrity Facebook posts about sending mom flowers on Mother's Day served as ads on sponsored pages encouraging consumers to do as the celebrities did, and use 1-800-Flowers's services, but they are also using social media in a dynamic way. Using Facebook as an advertising forum, while still staying true to the traditional form of personalized social media messages is a new trend. Chris McCann, President of 1-800-Flowers noted“Getting customers to tell stories is better than us telling the story,” and went on to comment about how Facebook is used to facilitate relationships. Those relationships can be between a retailer and a consumer, or between a mother and child. How did you celebrate your mom this Sunday? Did you use social media to let your network know just how much Mom means to you? Leave us a comment and let us know!  
For more information on unique usage of social media for mother's day campaign check out this New York Times Media Decoder blog post.