The marketer asks, “How can we get customers, employees and fans to extend the reach of our content on social media?" The busy executive asks, “How can I build my social media presence if I don’t have much time to spend on it? Where can I find good content to post?" These common questions led us to a technology solution which would address both needs and make it easier for our stakeholders – internal and external – to share our company’s content with their own social networks. Since implementing an advocacy tool in January 2013, we have placed 310 messages which in turn have been shared over 19,000 times on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. This resulted in a total message reach of 16.8 million in addition to regular earned mentions. In a nutshell, this program has been a success as it: • keeps stakeholders informed, • motivates them (gamification), • extends the reach and increases credibility of the content, • and helps stakeholders build their social media presence. The social advocacy platform has created a win-win situation for marketing, employees and external stakeholders. By leveraging the technology, our social media team can curate relevant content for employees which relates to time savings for them. We call it "Content-as-a-Service". The result has been employees publishing high quality content more regularly, growing their own social authority and ultimately, extending the reach of CA Technologies content. A core feature of the platform is the ability to gamify social media activity. We can incentivize advocates, encourage them to share content and gain points in the system. Participants in the program can compare their performance in real time to that of their peers by visiting a leaderboard. Employees and customers that share more often have a chance to outrank their peers in the system. We can also see what kind of content resonates and get feedback from users. Through the tool, people can tell us why they didn't share a post thus giving the social team the ability to optimize the content mix along the way. This initiative is directly supported by our internal social media education program, SocialU. The program provides employees with the infrastructure and framework needed to understand how social works, and how to stay active on social using tools such as our advocacy platform. Another notable factor is that both of these programs are supported by executives and leadership. The need to mobilize internal advocates has long been recognized as an integral part of corporate social media strategy. Companies struggle with the methodology. Although partially successful, previous attempts at soliciting advocacy, e.g. “begging" via emails, had several limitations: they could only reach internal advocates, they couldn’t be measured, they weren’t centralized, and they relied on our advocates having time to copy and paste from emails. Our company has benefited from the advocacy technology. Our total estimated ad cost savings to date with this program is $238k (based on a CPM of $10 and cost-per-click of $2.50). Not only does the brand win; our employees, customers, and fans do too. By having a steady stream of fresh content to share, employees can more easily maintain their own social presence and build their personal brands. This is especially true for executives who are often too busy to post. Moving forward, we aim to scale the use of this technology as we tap in to the full potential of our 13,600 employees – and extended customer base – on social media.
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