The Key To Community Building [Podcast]

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

The Key To Community Building

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.

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.

And this is the final installment of the 4 part episode.

That is a sneak peek into a book we are creating, which we plan to release in 2023. And the idea of this book, as I said in the previous episodes, apologies to have to listen to this again, is that it’s essentially 101 tips on how to run an Employee Advocacy program.

The book is in draft form, and we still got to go for the process of cover design and proofing and yes, producing the book, but it’s there.

So what we want to do is is essentially take a random tip from the book, and I’m just going to talk about it for a few minutes with a view that it’s great to get feedback from people what they thought about that tip.

And it also helps us expand on the ideas to essentially make the book better.

So as we did in the last 3 episodes, I’m going to ask Alexa to give me a number between 1 and 101.

Ok so Alexa has given me the number of 86, and I need to find that.

Ok, number 86: Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The key to community building is consistency.

So when we speak about consistency, it can sometimes be a little bit overused because, it’s almost like half of social posts on LinkedIn at the moment are about the power of consistency.

But there’s a reason behind it, in that it is true.

So when it comes to an Employee Advocacy program, it’s not about the volume that you put in on day one.

So it’s not like, load this thing up with 50 pieces of content and then a year later come back and do it.

It’s about consistently adding fresh perspectives and fresh content to your program.

So when users come in, they see fresh content and they essentially know that this thing is alive and it’s breathing.

So you have to be consistent with adding content to the platform is one part of it, but the other part of it is actually communicating with the community to build it.

So I know obviously some people will be familiar with things like Facebook groups is a good example.

You can get two Facebook groups on the same topic. And one will have thousands of users in it and it will have a high engagement right and the other will be 50 users and there’s no engagement rate yet.

The topic is fundamentally the same.

The difference in those programs is in those groups, is that the person running the group is consistent with either moderation or posting new topics in, to get perspectives of the community members, and liking community members posts.

All of those things which, essentially as I said before, I said make the program breathe and give it life, and that’s the thing that a program leader needs to do.

And needs to do consistently. There’s no point just doing it on day one.

So one of the big fears that people have when they launch an Advocacy program is am I going to have enough content?

So we like to think about content not just about it being time sensitive.

So you produce a blog post today.

It is valid today, of course.

But depending on what you’re speaking about would depend on how long that is valid for.

So having this concept of evergreen content, meaning that it can be re-shared in the program over and over again is another way of building consistency, because that piece of content you added this month essentially could be reserved to the user in 6 months time or 3 months time if they haven’t already shared it.

So it’s making sure that when people come into the program, they know what to expect and that is they expect fresh content.

That’s one part of it, one part of the consistency.

The other part of it is that they understand that somebody is there building this thing.

So one of our clients, she does an amazing job of interacting with the posts of the advocates.

So she will almost like every single post that’s shared through the Employee Advocacy program.

And that sounds like a lot, but in reality, for her, she’s running a relatively small program, about 300 or 400 people in it, not everyone shares every single day.

Most people are sharing twice a week.

So for her, she’s just going in and just looking at the logs and saying, yeah, I like all these things.

So the advocate is seeing the person who runs the program is giving them that positive affirmation that this thing exists and it’s still growing.

And again, that’s something that she does consistently.

So once you launch a program, build a set of rules or framework or process whatever you want to call it, that is what you do consistently that will make users know that their program is alive and breathing.

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