Employee Advocacy seems to be all the rage at the moment. One of the things I’m seeing with all of the information is a strong focus on social media and not enough focus on the logistics it takes to run a program; it’s more than teaching employees how to tweet.
I come from a perspective of someone who has served as an employee brand ambassador and also served to help revamp an ambassador program–focused on helping to creating the community management aspect.
Here are the questions you need to ask yourself before or while you are getting started with your program
- Why are we doing this?
- Do I have executive buy-in? How do I get it?
- Do we have manager buy-in or at least awareness?
- How will we align to our current and changing business objectives?
- What is our current brand messaging? (ask senior execs and ask employees; do the answers match?)
- What is the description of the ideal Ambassador?
- How will the Ambassador selection process work?
- What roles are needed to start and sustain our Ambassador program?
- What does success look like? short-term. long-term.
- What can get in the way of our Ambassador program vision?
- How will I measure progress?
- Do we have a social media policy?
- What kind of program do we want to run?
- What do you want your Employee Ambassadors to do?
- How will we reward them and for what?
- How do we find out and store what our individual Ambassadors are good at, like to do and align with a need?
- Are we going to have a big kick-off program?
- How will we provide content to our Employee Ambassadors?
- What’s our process for creating content?
- Where will content come from? (employees, PR, etc)
- How will we curate content?
- Do we want to build a community within the ambassadors? Who is going to manage it?
- How will we train our Ambassadors? (social media, story telling, etc.)
- How will we continuously train them and keep them updated.
- What will you use as a Internal communication platform?
- What will we use as a external communication platform?
This is list is not all inclusive and I expect it to grow. I also see if serving as a basis for creating future blog post that provide you answers and resources aligned to the questions above.
