5 Essentials for Employee Advocacy Success with Elliot Elsley [Podcast]

[Episode Forty-Two of ‘The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast] 🎧

In this special episode of the Employee Advocacy & Influence Podcast, join Lewis Gray, Senior Marketing Manager at DSMN8, as he speaks with Elliot Elsley, Director of Customer Success at DSMN8.

Get ready to unlock the secrets to a thriving employee advocacy program as Elliot spills the beans on FIVE game-changing tips.

Discover why these tips are your golden ticket to success and turbocharge your employee advocacy efforts!

[Transcript]

LG: Hello and welcome to The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast. My name is Lewis Gray, and I am not the CEO and founder of DSMN8, and I have to mention that because, to be totally transparent, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to record this introduction.

If you’re a regular listener to the show, you’ll know that my colleague and frankly, my boss, Bradley Keenan is the CEO and founder of DSMN8 and he usually does the introductions. But because I’ve listened to the podcast so many times, my brain just snapped into podcast mode, and instinctively, I started saying his job title.

So this is about the third time that we’ve had to do this, and Bradley, I know you’re gonna be listening to this. So, I’m not gunning for your position or your status, though I wouldn’t mind the status. Again, if you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that Bradley is usually the one to accidentally dish out promotions live on the show.

So the reason Bradley couldn’t be with us today is because he’s slightly under the weather. He is making a swift recovery, but we were due to record a podcast episode today and we spoke about postponing.

The reason we haven’t is because there’s somebody that I’ve wanted to get on the podcast for the longest time, pretty much since we started the podcast. With the episode that we had lined up, I thought with Bradley not being able to make it, today might be the perfect chance to get this person onto the show. So, I messaged him this morning. So right off the bat, Elliot, I wanted to say you’re an absolute trooper for doing this last minute, because I messaged Elliot this morning, and he agreed to jump on the podcast.

So, with zero preparation and no experience of going onto podcasts, he’s agreed to do it. So, Elliot, I’ll hand over to you so that you can introduce yourself.

EE: Very kind. Pleased to be here. Big shoes to fill when it comes to replacing an ill Bradley on the podcast. But my name is Elliott. I’m the Director of Customer Success at DSMN8.

I’ve been with the business for about six years. I predate Lewis by about a year. Part of the reason that he joined the business was because I said it was a really casual place to work and he jumped straight in.

But with that, I’ve been in the customer success world of DSMN8 for six years and launched hundreds of advocacy programs over my time. I’ve seen the good. I’ve seen the not-so-good. I’ve seen all of the pitfalls that clients can fall into when launching programs, and I’ve seen all of the amazing things and results that people have got out of the back of all of this as well. So really pleased to be here and just to be able to kind of chat about all of this with Lewis, like I do normally.

LG: No, this is perfect, and you’ve summed it all up perfectly there.

Anytime I want an idea for a piece of content, or, you know, if I just want to have a chat about all things employee advocacy to get a bit of inspiration internally, I always refer to Elliot as a gold mine just because I can chat to him for 10 minutes and come away with ten content ideas or ten pain points that might be worth talking about.

So I’m super excited to have you on today, Elliot. Really do appreciate you jumping on last minute, and with the premise of the episode today, it couldn’t be more timely. So we’ll get into the episode in just a few moment’s time.

Okay, so the reason why this felt like a perfect time to ask Elliot to come on the show. Many of you may know if you listen to the podcast or if you follow us on social media. Bradley recently released a book, which, if you’re watching, I’ve got in my hands here. It’s called Employee Advocacy 101 Cheat Codes, and the premise of the book is that you can turn to absolutely any page in this and take value from it.

It’s packed with 101 tips that will help you improve your employee advocacy program no matter what stage it’s at. So when we were talking about the promotion of the book a few months back and how we were going to be talking about it, one of the things that we discussed was, now many of you may be familiar with apps like Headway, which summarize books for you so that rather than spending eight to nine hours reading the book, you can just get the key takeaways and you can digest that in five to 10 minutes or whatever it might be.

And we spoke about doing that for Bradley’s book, but then we decided against it because it goes against the premise of the book. There is no summary. There’s no real key takeaways. The key takeaway is every page. Like Brad’s promises, there’s value on every page in this book. So we decided against it.

But then, when we were talking about how we were gonna talk about it on the podcast, one of the things that I thought of was getting Brad’s top 10 was the original idea, tips from the book. So, if you could only do 10 of these things, what would he say would be the absolute essential?

And then I thought this morning, when Bradley said that he wasn’t going to be up to doing the podcast, who better to pick? Well, originally, I think we said top 10. I think last time we spoke, Elliot, you had it down to about 30. Who better to pick, you know, 10 to 30 tips that he considers to be absolutely essential than Elliot? Elliot, I’m going to put you on the spot here, and we’ll go for the first one in your list.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to cover them all today. But what would you consider to be an absolute essential tip for employee advocacy success?

EE: I think this is one that’s been spoken about on the podcast probably quite a few times, but my number one tip for pretty much anyone looking to get into the world of advocacy is get the fundamentals in place, the culture, and the content at the company that you’re working for. We’ve spoken about these, you and I, plenty of times.

It’s been mentioned on the podcast, but without a good company culture in which people are encouraged to share, want to share company content, it’s really, really hard to get advocacy moving. It’s an uphill battle, essentially. If people don’t like the company that they work for, they’re not bought into the idea or the company mission; it just gets so, so difficult to actually achieve anything.

And the same thing goes for the content. If you don’t have any content, You’ve got nothing for people to share. You’ve got nothing for people to really talk about. And that’s a ranging scale. There a, you know, dramatic examples of people not liking the company they work for or the company having no content.

But if you have a company culture where people are really, really unsure, your social media policy is 20 years old and says, don’t use social media. These are all things that you really need to get in place before you start advocacy.

It gets really, really difficult, too. Keep moving forward and keep progressing the idea of advocacy. You can’t just throw technology at it, and it solves the problem. You need to have those fundamentals in place.

From a culture perspective, I think the biggest challenge is often just identifying that, do you have a culture that will actually encourage employee advocacy. From our perspective, from our side of things, we look at Glassdoor reviews – a really easy way just from a sales process, just to understand what’s a company like, are people kind of bought into it.

If they have a half-star glass door review, it becomes really, really difficult to kind of justify advocacy. People aren’t bought in. What are you gonna get them to share? What are they gonna get off the back of it, essentially?

LG: So you mentioned the Glassdoor thing there, which I know you and I have spoken about in the past. Obviously, your company culture isn’t something that you’re gonna be able to change overnight if you want to leverage employee advocacy within your organization, but would it be Glassdoor, or do you have other tips that you offer organizations to get an assessment or just a reading of their company culture?

EE: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s hard to get a, and there’s not a pure, accurate metric. I think it would be unfair to claim there is, but you can get a really good sense just by who’s using social media at the business.

Just looking on LinkedIn and going and understanding is the CMO of this business posting on LinkedIn, is the head of sales active. Are they connected to lots of people on LinkedIn? Those are really obvious indicators from my perspective.

If somebody’s head of sales has five connections on LinkedIn and no profile picture, they’re probably not that bought into the idea of social selling, into the idea of kind of advocacy as a whole.

So it starts to become harder because, as we know, and it will be mentioned probably later on, but coming from a top-down perspective, leading from the front as a kind of senior leader, those things start to become really, really important.

If it’s not important to the people at the top of the business. How is it gonna be important to everybody else within the business? So those are really good sense checks, even just looking at how many people in the business have posted onto LinkedIn in the last 30 days.

You know this as well as I do, but things like that to understand what percentage of an employee base is actually posting regularly start to become really, really obvious indicators if less than 2% of a business hasn’t shared content onto LinkedIn.

The question starts to become, what is the reason for that? Is that a lack of content? Is that a lack of interest education? Are people scared? There’s so many elements that can kind of cause that, but that’s what you really need to get to the bottom of. What is stopping people from doing this?

LG: Yeah, it’s almost like is there when we think of company culture, we think of whether or not, you know, employees are engaged and happy working where they work. But then also, I suppose what you’ve described is almost like, is there a culture for sharing? Are people currently active on social? Would you say that the two are kind of intertwined, or do you think those are separate things?

EE: Yeah. I think the whole aspect of it is intertwined as a whole thing. So if you’re as a company creating lots of content and people are sharing it, you’re in a really great place. You’ve got that full kind of full circle. Essentially,that’s a big green flag from my perspective. If you have one or the other, doesn’t necessarily make it good or bad. It’s just about finding out what the kind of scope for this is in the business. Is there value for you as a business in doing it? But also, are people going to uptake on it? What challenges might you face going kind of down the road?

LG: Yeah, and I definitely think there’s, I know from our conversations, there’s obviously things that you can do if you’ve decided to launch an employee advocacy program and you realize there isn’t a social media / sharing culture within the business. There’s definitely things you can do to change it.

But like you said, it’s about identifying that before you get started and making those changes so that you can put the foundations in place before you launch your program. From a content perspective, I’m curious to know because we often say, and I think I said this on the most recent episode of the podcast, about utilizing third-party content. So you said about, do you have enough content for your employees to share. You know, if you’ve got hundreds of employees, is it enough to just produce one blog post per week?

Probably not, because there’s not enough content to go around, and I’m a big advocate of third-party content. I use it quite a lot myself. So, when I’m curating content for the rest of our team to share, I’ll often pull in third-party content that I think is going to be relevant to their audiences. That’s one way of doing it. But again, Elliot, that’s why I wanted to get you on today is to pick your brains about these things. So, what do you consider to be a fix for that? Or is there even a fix?

EE: If you’ve not got any content, it’s a difficult fix to find, but there is, there are solutions out there. I mean, this comes onto one of the other topics that I think is really important.

So this is potentially a nice segue into what I would consider topic two, and with that, it’s keeping content varied. So, we have three types of content that we generally consider getting added to an advocacy program.

You have employee-centric content. That’s your employer brand content, company culture content, it’s away days, it’s senior appointments, it’s all of that stuff that really develops the employer brand as a whole for the business, raises that brand awareness.

You’ve then got, and this probably forms the majority of content that you see in advocacy programs, company-centric content. This is the blog posts, this is the product announcements, this is all the stuff that’s generating kind of traffic for the business. We’re trying to create new leads, generate new business, commercialize everything that we’re actually doing. That’s what’s driving value to the business. Even at DSMN8, when we’re creating a blog post, we’re creating a blog post because we want people to come to our website, read our blog post, and explore other options that are available on the website, and then, exactly as you say, third-party educational content.

That’s about the thought leadership element of things. It’s industry expertise. How do we get our employees to stand out and be noted as experts in their field, what they’re kind of dealing with in a day-to-day? So that third-party content, it’s really, really valuable from that perspective. It’s integral, I would probably say, to an advocacy program.

What the question starts to become is if that’s the only content that you actually have, and you don’t have any employee-centric content, and you don’t have any company-centric content. What’s the value that you’re deriving from this as a business? It’s amazing if you can help your employees stand out as thought leaders as industry experts.

But if you don’t at some point convert that into a value for your business, you’re missing out on a really, really big opportunity essentially. And I think that’s where you need that company-centric content. You want somebody to be trusted in their network, built up an authority and a kind of name for themselves. And to also then be able to advocate for your business and say, hey, you should talk to us about products and surfaces that we’re actually offering.

LG: Yeah, I love that. That’s something that Bradley actually spoke about on a podcast he was on recently. He was on the Meaningful Work, Meaningful Life podcast talking about employee advocacy 2.0, and he was talking about how employee advocacy today has to be more centered around employee empowerment, personal branding, and thought leadership because it’s more about employees, exactly as you’ve just described.

It’s about employees building their personal brand so that when they do advocate for your company, it has a much greater impact. So I love that. And, you know, from the, I guess, from an employee side, the last thing that you want, and we said this before, is for your employees to feel like talking billboards, or as Bradley put it on a previous episode, Wi-Fi range extenders. And I mean, we practice what we preach here at DSMN8.

So, I run our employee advocacy program, and in the early days, I just created a survey. just to see how people were finding using the platform and what they thought of the content that was going in.

And actually, what they told me is they wanted to see more third-party content, more employee-centric content, as opposed to just pushing DSMN8’s content, which, you know, I’ll hold my hands up and say that I fell into felt temptation there because obviously I just wanted everybody sharing DSMN8’s content. But it wasn’t about that. This was years ago, but we know now that you know like we’ve just discussed, it has to be about personal branding and thought leadership and seeding in the company content.

But also there’s an employee perspective as well. What content do they want to be sharing? Is it just company content? You know, probably not. So that’s a really nice one. I’m a big fan of that because we’ve spoken about it recently, but what’s the second one you’ve got teed up, or did we kind of touch on that? Do we need to, do we need to go to number three?

EE: I feel like we’ve covered that with the keep content varied. That was my second topic. So I feel like we can, we can move all the way into number three, which is, again, a pretty simple one. It’s simple by nature.

It’s make it easy, and this really applies to people that are using technology, not using technology for employee advocacy. It’s very, very catch-all looking at making employee advocacy, making the idea of sharing content simple for employees and, we see this time and time again in all sorts of different industries and all sorts of different wheelhouses where employees don’t share content because it’s complicated for them to do so, and this is down to some very, very kind of basic fundamentals.

If you ask that question of why don’t your employees share content? One of the big answers that you’ll often get is employees just don’t know where to find it. Big companies these days, even DSMN8, we have loads of social channels. We have loads of places we’re creating content. We have a podcast. We have blog pages. We have social media pages. We have Twitter, we have TikTok, we have a book. We have all of these places that we’re creating content.

It’s hard to know which one should I be sharing. What is source of truth for me? And that’s our big advantages: we use our own platform. So, everything is aggregated. You, as an admin, are going ‘this is the piece of content that I think everybody would really benefit from sharing’, and that’s one of the biggest challenges.

If you take that and look at, you know, a global business that has hundreds of channels that they’re publishing to, it’s really, really overwhelming as an employee to know what you should or shouldn’t be sharing where the source of truth actually is.

So that’s one of the big reasons you find people don’t share content just across the board. It’s a very, very simple solve. No matter what you’re doing.

How you’re approaching advocacy, aggregate everything put it in one place. If that’s a Slack channel, if that’s a weekly email that you send, if that’s technology that you’re driving people to actually sign up to, like DSMN8, that’s what you need to do. You want to put all of this into one place because otherwise, people are lost, and they won’t know what to actually share and where to find it.

LG: 100%. And this is something that I’m producing a case study on at the moment. I won’t mention the company name just yet until it’s out there.

But one of the things that they said to me when they were originally thinking of seeking out technology to help them with their program was that one of the initial issues they had was that just employees didn’t know what they could say on social media or what they should say.

So it’s not so much the, I mean, it’s a combination of two things. It’s they were worried that they would say the wrong thing and potentially get themselves and the company in some hot water.

But then the other thing was just they don’t want to appear, and there’s no other way of saying it –  foolish – for just sharing a random piece of company content that isn’t relevant to them or their networks. They had this, I mean, this is just, you know, this is somebody’s interpretation of how other people felt, but there seemed to be this feeling that if they were to share something and it wasn’t right, there’d be almost this internal embarrassment of like, “Oh God, why have you shared that? That’s nothing to do with you.” I just find it so interesting.

Obviously, technology is a solve, but no matter how you leverage employee advocacy, whether it’s with technology or earlier like you’ve just mentioned, it could just be an emailer if you’re doing things manually, but no matter how you do it, absolutely you have to make it easy.

EE: And I think on top of that as well, what you find is there’s the other end of things where people make it too complicated, where you need to jump through loads and loads of hoops before you can share content.

You need to do a three-hour social media training course. You need to tick all the boxes. You need to do the quiz first. You need to make sure you’ve proofread the 19 hashtags that are used across the business.

That element of it as well can really not make it easy for people because you create lots of friction. And this is why technology makes this infinitely easier. It’s custom-built to make this process simple. It’s a few clicks to be able to share content.

The whole process is much easier, but there’s two ends of that spectrum. It’s not giving people any information whatsoever, but also giving people way too much information, way too much to kind of do before they can share content.

That, again, can just massively hamper employees because there’s only so much time in a day, and there’s only so much people are willing to do when it’s beyond their kind of normal job roles.

So finding something that makes it easy, it’s a five-minute task, they can come in, share content, that’s great. If it’s a four-hour webinar series that needs to be completed before you even get access to the content, you’re in a trickier situation.

LG: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’ve seen it from our conversations. I mean, you’re the best person to talk to about this because I know you’ve worked with, you know, plenty of companies in regulated industries, but that always seems to be the case.

They almost make it too difficult for employees to do anything. Like you said, you have to almost go on like the speed awareness course equivalent of social media before you can actually do anything. And it’s like, well, why would I do that? That you know.

EE: Yes.

LG: The employee doesn’t necessarily know that it’s going to benefit them at that point. So why would they go out of their way to do that? So yeah, it’s, I don’t know, maybe you can build on that, Elliot, but I think regulated industries, especially, have been notorious, or companies in those industries have been notorious for making it difficult because they feel they have to.

EE: Yeah, and I appreciate that for some of the regulated industries that we work in, in pharmaceuticals, financial services, there are certain things that need to be said in a certain way. Otherwise, trouble can be caused. But with that, it scares employees. I think that’s the other element to this and sort of comes into that make it easy concept. If you scare the living daylights out of your employees from using social media-

LG: I’m out of here.

EE: You can’t blame them for not wanting to use it because they just don’t want to make that mistake.

So you really do need to put some kind of trust in employees, give them that opportunity to kind of use it.

And with that, just make it a simple process for them to get value from doing so, not making it incredibly complicated and full of friction because you’re just not gonna get people to sign up. You’re not gonna get people to engage on a regular basis.

LG: Yeah, I love it. And I’d encourage anybody listening to check out our episode that we did on employee advocacy on regulated industries. We’ll link to it in the show notes.

Definitely check that one out, but I think you’ve explained that brilliantly earlier. That’s three. Obviously, like I said, I know we can probably go through 101 being the most important, but what have you got lined up for number four?

EE: It’s still on time. Number four, so focus on professional social media channels. That is just such an obvious element, but something I still have quite regular conversations about with clients.

One of the things that I often have as a conversation is how do we share to Instagram? How do we share to TikTok? And not discounting those social media channels, they’re phenomenal.

If you have an influence on that, you’re in an unbelievable place, if you have lots of following and you have that visibility.

But if we are looking at the overarching element of employee advocacy and a B2B business with 2000 employees, the expectations probably shouldn’t be that they’re going to be posting onto their personal Instagram page.

And this is more or almost a bugbear than anything else that these conversations happen where people think I’m going to get 500 of my employees to share content onto their Instagram pages.

That’s a really, really personal social network for most people. I personally struggle to post anything onto my Instagram without proofing it 15 times and checking if it’s going to look good on the feed.

Getting people to post workplace content and particularly, you know, marketing content by nature, it’s just not reasonable to expect that. And I think the easiest way to surmise this is: ‘if you wouldn’t post it on your own Instagram, on your own personal Instagram, where just your friends and less of your business network actually exists, then you shouldn’t expect other people to do the same thing’.

From my perspective, the goal of advocacy is really your business network. It’s LinkedIn. That’s where you’re gonna derive all of your value from. And it really just comes down to where does your ICP sit.

The people that you’re actually trying to converse with, you’re trying to communicate with, are they spending hours and hours on TikTok looking for B2B consultants or anything along those lines? Probably not.

They’re gonna be spending their time on LinkedIn. That’s where your business network is. That’s where the value is gonna really be coming from, and that’s just something that I think is really, really important for people to understand from the outset. This isn’t just another marketing channel. Another kind of place that you get to tack on and say, “hey, we’ll just get a thousand employees to post onto Instagram today”.

It’s not gonna happen, and you can’t expect it to happen. You’re giving people an opportunity to post and build a professional brand more than anything else.

LG: Yeah, definitely. I mean, something else to consider, and you’ve kind of explained this.

This might just be a rephrasing of it, but consider where your target audiences are. Obviously, this is going to vary depending on what industry you work in. But even for us, let’s say social media managers and marketers are some people that might seek out a tool like DSMN8.

They’re going to be on Instagram, and they will be on TikTok, but are our employees connected to them on, or do they follow them? Do they follow each other? I’m so in the world of LinkedIn. I’m saying connected all the time, but do they follow each other on those platforms? Probably not.

Where are they most likely to be connected to each other? It’s on LinkedIn. So if your target audience isn’t there, even if you were able to get them to post to those channels, who’s gonna see it? Is it relevant to the people that are seeing the content? But I think what you’ve described should be the mantra for any content that you’re curating.

If you wouldn’t share it yourself, don’t ask your employees to share it, because I think in the back of your mind, you always know what the result’s gonna be. So it’s a very, very nice one. I’d say, Elliot, I mean, I could talk to you for an hour on all of these topics because your time to me, not that it’s not to you, but to me is immensely valuable because I get so many ideas off the back of it, but I think we’ve got time for one more.

So. I don’t know if you want to look at your list again or whether you’ve got one that you absolutely want to get in, but it’s the floor is all yours.

EE: I would say the next one is probably, again, one of the most valuable ones from my perspective, and it’s everyone influences someone. And this, again, just from a customer success standpoint, from a perspective of I’m launching a lot of advocacy programs at companies, big and small.

I think the worst thing you can do is shoot too low for the number of people you’re trying to onboard into an advocacy program. I often have these conversations with program leaders people that are going to be running this kind of advocacy initiative within the business.

And they can just be incredibly hyper-focused on 50 people that they are aware of that are active on LinkedIn that they want to be a part of the platform. And I think that’s immensely valuable to have those kind of key people, those champions that you’re really going to target. But actually, when you’re scaling employee advocacy and, something I personally am a big advocate of is pushing employee advocacy at a large, large scale in businesses.

Don’t be so selective over who you invite. Try and invite as many people as you physically can. Obviously, there’s certain areas of the business that are going to derive more value: the commercial facing, the sales teams, marketing, HR, senior leadership. They’re incredibly obvious areas. But don’t just cherry-pick people out of those areas of the business.

Try and invite an entire team, try and invite a whole business unit, try and invite a whole region is what quite a lot of our clients do. It’s so, so impactful when you can get more and more advocates on board, and I say the biggest reason for that, and this is for businesses big and small again, once that flywheel starts spinning, once you get 10, 20% of your workforce, on a piece of software that is enabling employee advocacy, more and more people will start to join.

And that’s the general process because people will see each other, and they say, hey, the person I sit next to in the office, I’ve noticed they’re really active on LinkedIn recently. Where are they getting all of this from?

It starts that kind of snowball effect throughout the business, and some of my most successful clients that I’ve worked with over the years they’ve reached that kind of saturation point where they’ve got the majority of the business on board.

Because they aimed for the stars, essentially, they onboarded loads of people at the beginning, and it kept that rolling. And I think it’s so easy to hamper progress if you just pick and choose 50 people. You’re happy with the results of those 50 people, but you just don’t know what else is out there. There’s so many people at the business that can have an influence on within their network, even if they only have 50 connections on LinkedIn.

Three of those people might be the next buyer for your business from a product or a service standpoint. You just don’t know who people know. And it’s really, really easy to cherry-pick because you know who those people are, and you can identify them. But I’ve seen interns pull in thousands of LinkedIn reactions that nobody saw coming across kind of big global businesses. And I think it tells a really, really big story that you shouldn’t. Shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, I guess, seeing as we’re on a book-related podcast today.

LG: Bang on the money. Love the book reference. But also, I mean, just to add a case study to that, obviously, we practice what we preach. We’ve spoken about that already, but one example that we had of a lead coming inbound was a, so our dev team will use our platform, and they’ll share our content.

Every employee within DSMN8 uses our platform. We had a lead come in, and there’s a section on the form that they filled out just to say, how did you hear about us? And people can write whatever they want. We don’t offer preselected options.

You can say whatever you want to say. And it was somebody who used to work with this particular developer at their past company, but they were in the marketing team, and they, you know, when I spoke to this particular person within DSMN8, they said, oh yeah, I know this person. We used to work together at this company. They were friends. They just worked in different departments, but it’s not. Just because that person’s a developer, it doesn’t mean they’re just going to be connected to other developers. Their network is their network. Granted, it might mostly be developers, but like you said, everybody influences someone, even if it’s two people that piece of content is relevant to, that might just be one of your next buyers.

So 100%, if you shoot for the stars and land on the moon, that’s really not bad going, so go broad with it. Would you say the, just one other thing I did want to ask? Obviously, you mentioned about communications and marketing teams being the obvious choice. We’ve spoken about this before, but do you think that’s like a nice place to start, at least to build that momentum and get that flywheel turning?

EE: I would say the senior leadership team is the perfect starting point. They are always more challenging to onboard. In the nicest way, they tend to be busier, less active on social, not so digitally inclined, I guess would be the polite way to put it. But senior leadership, sales, marketing they are the areas of the business that have a real vested interest in advocacy, whether they know it or not.

If you’re part of a sales team, you want to be having conversations online, you want to be standing out from the 15 other people that are trying to sell the same product, whatever it might be. If you’re in marketing, the value is pretty clear. If you’re in marketing, it’s that amplification, and if you’re a senior leader, well, you want to stand out as a business. You want to be a thought leader for the business. You want to push the entire brand, the entire business, into kind of wider visibility and notoriety, essentially. So those are the areas that I would always focus on that commercial-facing element just because there’s an immediate value.

HR, everywhere else within the business, operations, however it might be, there are so many people that will still be really keen to advocate for the business. I know you’ve spoken about it before, but those kind of personas of champions that you get across the business, they’re gonna be all over the business. They’re not gonna be in a particular area or a particular role. You’re gonna find people across the board that are super-bought into this idea, really keen to share content and get a huge amount of traction off the back of it as well.

LG: That’s perfect. Yeah, I feel like I could expand on that and pick your brains for hours, as I’ve already said, but at some point, I will have to put a pin in this.

We’re just gonna cut to a very quick break, but do stick around because we’ve got a very exciting bit of news to share with you all. Okay, so at this stage in the podcast, we would usually summarize, but frankly, I don’t think this episode can be summarized because I’d say the best way to do that is to go and grab yourself a copy of Bradley’s book.

I’m holding it up on screen for those of you who are watching on YouTube, but if you’re just listening to the podcast, it’s called Employee Advocacy 101 Cheat Codes, and we’ll drop a link in the show notes for you to grab yourself a free copy.

So make sure you get yourself this if you’ve found what Elliot said today to be of value. There are 96. We went through five tips today, right?

EE: I think we went through five.

LG: Five, let’s say five for the sake of my math, but there are 96 other tips just like it in the book. So go grab yourself a copy.

Bradley did want to say a huge thank you to everybody who has requested a copy of the book and received the book and, shared their stories on LinkedIn and giving us their initial feedback.

I know he wanted to do that on today’s episode, so I’ll do that for him, but huge thanks from the man himself, and the big piece of news that I teased, this is the first time we’ve spoken about this.

We’ve produced a course on employee advocacy, which we are currently accepting our first admissions for. So we’re granting early access to podcast listeners, and the course will be released towards the back end of this year.

I won’t say any more at this point. I will let you click that link in the show notes to learn everything that you need to know about the course, but get yourself excited because if you’ve got yourself a copy of Employee Advocacy 101 Cheat Codes, consider this the course book because there is plenty more to come in the course.

That said, Elliot, thank you so much for joining us today. You’ve been an absolute lifesaver and an infinite source of wisdom. And if you, if you would be up for it, we’d love to have you back on at some point.

EE: I’m more than happy to come back. We will see what the feedback is like in the YouTube comments up until that point first. But yes, big boots to fill for Bradley. It’s always hard to do things after him, but pleased to have been here.

LG: You’ve done an amazing job, mate. And as always, if you wanted to connect with myself or Elliot, the best place to do that is on LinkedIn. But otherwise, thank you very much for listening, and we will catch you in two weeks’ time.

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