How to Onboard New Users To Your Advocacy Program [Podcast]

[Episode Eighteen of ‘The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast] 🎧👇

How to onboard new users to your advocacy program.

Organizations all over the world in every sector are driving strategic competitive advantage by scaling the impact of their employees’ voices… and now YOU can too! As we delve beyond the why and get straight to the how so that you can put employee-driven growth at the heart of your organization.

Hosted by employee advocacy practitioner and CEO of DSMN8, Bradley Keenan.

[Transcript]

Welcome to this episode of the Employee Advocacy and Influence podcast. My name is Bradley Keenan and I am the Founder and CEO of the Employee Advocacy Platform – DSMN8.

In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about probably the biggest piece of advice that I would give somebody who is launching an Employee Advocacy program or actually not just if they’re are launching one, but if they are managing one already and they’re onboarding new users – so what is the single piece of advice that I would give for onboarding new users?

I guess in the answer to this question, there are a couple of concepts that I think are worth talking about. And the first is something which was coined by an executive at Procter and Gamble, and it’s a concept called ‘Moments of Truth’.

Essentially what this means is when you buy a product and you walk into the store, there’s a moment of truth where you make a bond with a product.

So if we think about old-school retail, it’s going to be walking into a retail store and seeing something on the shelf, so the first moment of truth might be seeing how well the product is presented.

Then the second moment of truth might be when I pick the product up, and I guess the final moment of truth is when I use the product and I get a good experience.

So essentially, what it means is I make a bond with that product, and the other concept is something called wow moments.

This is what we use in software, and essentially what that means is the moment that someone says, wow, when they use the product, and for somebody like Uber, as a good example, is that when you get in a taxi for the first time or the Uber in this case and when it comes to paying the bill at the end then or the fare, you don’t have to reach into your pocket to pull out your credit card or cash. You simply step out and say, wow, that was really easy, and that is a wow moment.

So when you’re thinking about your Employee Advocacy program, whether you use technology or not, this is still valid. You must think about both of those things, your moments of truth.

So the first time somebody sees a piece of content, is it created nicely? Is the post caption presented in a way that somebody would want to share it? And so almost map out what are those moments of truth that my user or my employee co-worker is going to have?

Because one of the big mistakes people make when they launch an Employee Advocacy program is that they think about the value to them as the person running the program. What you have to do is see your users as essentially your customers. So those moments of truth your customer will experience as part of your Employee Advocacy program.

The final point, coming back to the idea of a wow moment, is think about what is your wow moment when it comes to Employee Advocacy.

Now, the core reason you create an Employee Advocacy program is to help people share more content. So the wow moment should be in sharing the content.

So you need to get people to that wow moment as quickly and as efficiently as you can.

The longer you leave it for them to get there, the more likely it is that they will disengage and will forget the purpose of the Employee Advocacy program because it’s very easy to confuse an Employee Advocacy program with an internal communications program.

So, why am I receiving this content?

Do you want me to read it or want me to share it, or both?

So, in this case of Employee Advocacy, we’re thinking about getting somebody to share it.

So the wow moment comes when somebody finds a piece of content that is good and is constructed in a good way, and it presents very nicely, and they share it with their professional social media connections, typically and the real wow moment comes when somebody interacts with it.

So somebody likes it, or they comment on it. Or even it might happen offline, so someone might say, hey, I saw that post you shared the other day and it was really interesting. So you want to think about how you’ll get someone to that wow moment as quickly as possible.

Now, just providing content to them is leaving that to chance a little bit, right?

Because they may be tech savvy, they may not be so tech savvy and leaving that wow moment to chance essentially leaves your Employee Advocacy program’s success to chance as well, which we want to reduce the probability that people will disengage.

So either you have an Employee Advocacy platform which should help guide somebody through getting them to that wow moment quicker and if you’re running training rather than building your training around every single feature and function within an Employee Advocacy platform, or if it’s a homegrown internal solution, showing somebody where they can find content in SharePoint folders or whatever you use. The training should be about getting somebody to that wow moment as quickly as possible.

A way to do that would be to set your training up from the start, as the core goal is to get somebody to share their first piece of content.

That crescendo moment is going to be at the end of this training. We’re all going to share a piece of content and assume that if somebody is in that training voluntarily, they would be happy to do it.

Of course, if everybody has been forced to go into this training, maybe the training is more of a sales pitch. So that’s something to think about because sometimes, if training and selling to someone that the reason they should participate in your program is confused. you do neither of them well.

So onboarding people and showing why they should participate should be done before training. But that’s maybe a podcast for another day.

So let’s assume that everybody is in this training session, then what we want to do is make sure that there’s enough content in our program that every single person in that room could select between 2 or 3 different pieces of content, and find something they’re happy with.

Because what you don’t want is somebody saying, yes, I’m willing to share something, but hey, all of this content is about a different department, and it’s of no consequence or interest to me.

So start that training program where you walk somebody through the process of perusing content, finding something relevant to them, taking the post caption content that the marketing team have created and then adding their own point of view to that content. Show them that they can use the post caption as a framework, but that they can add their own personality and their own point of view to it.

And then the final piece of that training is hitting that share button.

The more people in that training you can get it to get to that moment, the more likely it is that they’re going to reach that wow moment where somebody interacts with the content, and they say I understand this process end to end and that’s a process that I would like to do once or twice a week.

And that is how you get consistent performance with your Employee Advocacy program.

Now, if you’re happy to listen to this outro, I’ve got some bonus content coming at the end that any Social Media or Marketing Manager would consider being an absolute gift, so don’t go anywhere.

So firstly, I wanted to say thank you for taking the time to listen today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and you want to be notified of future episodes, please hit subscribe. And if you got value from today, I’d love it if you could even rate us or, even better, provide us with a review.

We started this podcast so we could help people who are looking to launch Employee Advocacy programs or already run programs at the moment. So the more feedback we get from our listeners, the better we can do this.

So here is the bonus content that I promised.

If you want to find out how active your employees are on social right now, if you click the link in the footnotes of the show, we will create a report for you that will show you not only how active your employees are on social, but also the competitors of your choosing. So you can see how you benchmark against your competitors.

And we will show you how this breaks down by seniority inside your organization and geography. So hit that link, and one of my team will be in contact. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this week’s episode, and we look forward to seeing you same time next week.

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More stuff you might enjoy!

• How To Be a Great Employee Advocacy Program Manager
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• The First 60 Days: Set Up for Employee Advocacy Success