No social worker without a social enterprise (The IBM case)

No social worker without a social enterprise. Thus concluded the article The rise of the social employee company that published a few days ago in Soymimarca And Linkedin Simultaneously.

Companies still distrust this figure of the social employee. Sometimes ignorance, sometimes out of fear. Maybe that's why I'd like to work with data and a case that helps gain confidence. Today I present one that more than justifies ROI and gives strength to the title: “No social worker without a social enterprise”.

Creating social culture: The IBM case

When looking at success stories around social employee concepts and social employee strategies, Employee Advocacy, IBM always appears among the first. Let's see why.

What exactly is Employee Advocacy

The definition that best fits what I think is Employee Advocacy is that of the specialist Susan Emerik: Brands that empower employees to support brand goals, using content and social networks of the employees themselves. In case I've translated it wrong, here's the original: brands empowering employees to support the goals of the brand, using content and employee-owned social.

Why should brands work with Employee Advocacy programs?

We already know that the Employee Advocacy is the fastest and most effective form of growth to drive engagement brand. I've talked many times about state of trust between businesses and consumers. Thanks to the annual study Edelman Trust, we know that markets trust their experts and employees more than anyone else in a company.

The same study reveals that employees score higher as influencers communication in 4 of the 5 Categories, including Engagement, Integrity, Products and Services and Operations. Not bad, Truth?

Measure or let it run

Any program Employee Advocacy should be measurable, you have to prove its value and results. Without that, the company will not have the necessary resources for the investment.

And here it is worth considering financial and non-financial indicators. Former ones seek to increase revenue or lower costs, and the latter refer to advantages such as increased productivity, improving operational efficiency or reducing the marketing cycle.

So, it is not enough to set goals, you also have to determine how to measure and report progress.

IBM is a leader as a social enterprise, a brand committed to the drive of transformation, facilitating open collaboration and employee engagement

Colleen Burns, director of the IBM's Influencer Engagement Team, shared IBM's conviction that employees are one of the greatest sources of influence. The IBMers (that's how employees call themselves), play a critical role in helping to set the agenda, as well as building and cultivating relationships.

The program IBM Redbooks Thought Leaders Social Media Residency is a great example. It was designed to create a network of leadership blogs to help motivate IBM technicians to establish their personal brand Social. Since its inception in 2011, The 200 participants in the programme have created about 2.000 blogs with 11 differentiated issues. In fact, Their 800 publications have amassed more than a million views and continue to rise.

IBM's Select program

It is a program designed to identify qualified experts to support social strategies aligned with market priorities. That allowed you to tag links and track personal blog post references. This program has quantitatively surpassed the traditional marketing and tactics of paid media, proving that experts who digitally support the brand can achieve a conversion rate of the 33%.

Incredible figures: Only 200 IBM professionals managed to share 146.000 Content. These contents generated 188 millions of impressions (views of the content). And these impressions got more than 600.000 clicks to the web, something that in paid advertising would have cost between 300.000 And 1.200.000 Dollars.

Still doubting the power of Employee Advocacy?

Extracted from the book “The Social Employee” (Cheryl & Mark Burguess, McGraw Hill 2014) This Infographic shows the results of a study that prompted IBM to understand the state of social technologies in. 1.16o companies and IT professionals were analyzed.

As a conclusion, despite the trust of companies, these programs succeed in boosting the social employee with a clear goal: boost the brand from a humanized source, Connector, and trusted transmitter.

Cover image by shutterstock.com