The Agency Approach to Employee Advocacy with Jason White

06/15/16 • 23 min

Jason White is VP of SEO and SMM at DragonSearch. Along his journey, Jason has built a toolbox of experience in Pay Per Click, Email marketing, media buys, corporate events, and has worked both in-house and at an agency (he LOVES agency life) performing Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. He fell into his career as an SEO and appreciates how his role evolves as the field changes because it allows him to draw upon his core skill sets, creating holistic campaigns that deliver results. A constant learner, Jason is always seeking improvement and freely shares his knowledge. Jason recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss his view on employee advocacy and how it plays into overall SEO from an agency perspective. Marketing is owning the data and realizing the importance of connecting tools. Marketing is driving new tool adoption. Jason shared how he introduces clients to the concept of employee advocacy. Education - Start with content. Establish your bloggers and get started with a small group of advocates, preferably 20. Give a lot of feedback and coach. Start with a webinar to help them optimize their social profiles. Invest in the employees and they will invest in the program. Establishing your blog authors - Leverage your blog authors as part of your employee advocacy program. This will provide a jumpstart to get their content to the right people as organic reach on social media declines. Using these advocates as blog authors will build up their authority on search as more traffic is directed. As the employee gets more followers and posts you will see the brand website start to rank for employees branded terms. Trust - Win the trust of different groups through building out the blog and showing success. As people speak about the program excitement is built. People will start to come to you wanting to be part of the program.

Previous Episode

Bernie Borges on Making it Easy for Employees to Share & Promote Their Stories

Bernie Borges is CEO of Find and Convert, a B2B digital marketing agency. Borges is a consummate content producer. He blogs regularly on Find and Convert’s OptimizeThis blog, speaks at marketing conferences and educates his clients through private workshops and webinars. Borges is also the executive producer of the Social Business Engine, digital media property which showcases brands in action using social media strategically across the business. Bernie recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Gaudet to discuss his view on employee advocacy and how employees can be more involved in the content creation process. “Make it easy for the employee. Don't put the burden on the employee. Just capture the story from the employee and the marketing department then produces the story. They write it, they make it look good, they give it back to the employee and say "Here's the story from our interview" and the employee goes "Wow I told that story! It looks great! I said that?" and make it easy for them to share it.” Bernie shared a methodology he likes to call “The Ice Cream Sandwich Approach.”: Storytelling - Stories that are authentic and relevant are impactful when originating from the employee subject matter experts across the enterprise. Stories that are actionable take planning. Employees - Employees are the domain experts. Harness their storytelling potential by making extremely easy for them to share their stories and expertise. Marketing - It’s the job of marketing to convert captured conversations into stories and allow employees to easily share those stories. The most important responsibility of the marketing team is to make stories actionable – stories so meaningful that the consumer wants to take an action.

Next Episode

Michelle LeBlanc Discusses Employee Social Media Engagement

Michelle LeBlanc is a social media strategist focusing primarily on employee engagement for B2B within the transportation and logistics industry. She began her professional journey into social media marketing amid her day to day duties in a traditional marketing position. Ultimately, the use of social media strategies stems from connecting the stories of employees with the overarching company narrative – all with the aim of achieving brand success through increased positive engagement. Michelle recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss how companies can employ social media strategies more effectively as they strive to achieve their goals. "Engage with your employees. Empower them to engage with your customers. Build your brand through social media." Michelle discusses tips for using social media engagement with employees: 1.There is a need to tie current social media presence for a brand to company goals. 2.Build the human side of an organization through content creation. 3.Think beyond the standard for employee engagement. 4.Planning is the key to social media engagement success. 5.Recognize that employees are a content gold mine.